Strength is your ability to generate force. In practical terms, it means being able to push, pull, lift, carry and move things without your body falling apart. Having a useful level of raw strength is, in my opinion, one of the foundations of an athletic body.
There are hundreds of perfectly good strength exercises, so I don’t believe there is one magical list that everybody HAS to do. That said, I’m a big fan of getting very good at the basics. Squat something, hinge something, push something, pull something and carry things. For most people, exercises such as Romanian Deadlifts, Front Squats, Bench Presses, Pull-Ups and Bent-Over Rows are excellent ways of doing that.
A caveat. If you are training for a very specific aesthetic, sport, injury history or physical requirement, then of course the programme needs to change. This is where intelligent coaching becomes more interesting than simply doing the same five exercises forever. You can also become very strong without looking like a bodybuilder. I’ve had several catwalk model clients comfortably perform multiple reps of 100kg+ Romanian Deadlifts as part of their training. Strength and aesthetics are not enemies.
Later in this course there are more detailed lessons and resources on aesthetics, body composition and programming. For now, the important thing is to understand that strength is a skill as well as a physical quality — and like most skills, you get better at it by practising it properly.
How many sets & reps?
This is one of those areas of fitness where people love very precise rules. Five reps builds strength. Eight to twelve builds muscle. Fifteen reps “tones”. Twenty apparently turns you into an endurance athlete. Sadly, the human body hasn’t read the textbooks.
The reality is much more flexible. You can get stronger and build muscle using a surprisingly wide range of repetitions, provided the sets are challenging enough and the programme progresses over time. Heavier loads and lower-to-moderate rep ranges generally have an advantage when maximal strength is the goal, but muscle can be built using much wider rep ranges.
I still like the 5–10 rep range for a lot of the work I prescribe because it sits in a very useful middle ground. The weights are heavy enough to develop strength, you can accumulate enough work to build muscle and most people can maintain decent technique without the set turning into some sort of near-death experience.
But it is a guideline, not a law. Some exercises work beautifully for three reps. Others feel much better for 12, 15 or even 20. A heavy deadlift and a lateral raise probably shouldn’t have identical rep prescriptions simply because somebody once printed “3 sets of 10” in a fitness manual.
For general strength training, I will often use around 2–4 hard working sets per exercise and choose the repetitions according to the exercise, the person and the goal. Weekly training volume matters, but I no longer think in terms of arbitrary rules such as “300–500 repetitions per muscle group”. That sounds wonderfully scientific, but isn’t actually a very useful way of programming.
Do enough good-quality work to create an adaptation, then recover from it.
More work can help up to a point. Beyond that, you’re often just getting better at being tired.
How hard do you go?
Muscles need to be challenged, but hard training and stupid training are not the same thing.
For the first decade or so of my career I spent a lot of time in elite Strength & Conditioning, working with athletes from different sports. One thing became obvious very quickly: two people can follow exactly the same programme and get very different results. Part of that is genetics, recovery, nutrition and training history. Part of it is attitude.
The athletes who learned how to concentrate, tolerate discomfort, stay technically disciplined under pressure and keep going when a set became unpleasant usually got more from their training.
That does NOT mean every set should end with somebody screaming while a trainer shouts motivational nonsense at them. It means learning what genuine effort feels like. There is a difference between stopping because your body has reached its limit and stopping because your brain has become mildly inconvenienced.
That distinction is interesting.
My take on High-Performance Living requires you to think a little like an athlete. When you train with intent, you are not only developing muscles. You practise patience, attention, humility, resilience and the ability to stay calm when things become uncomfortable. And yes, I think some of that spills over into the rest of life. Lesson 18 explores this side of training in more detail.
A challenge for you
A hard strength set can be strangely revealing. There is something I have done in initial assessment sessions with private clients for years. New clients often think I am testing their upper-body strength.
I’m not.
I’m watching how they behave.
Do as many good press-ups as you can.
That’s it. One set. Don’t rush. Don’t count the reps if you can avoid it. Keep the technique honest and continue until you genuinely cannot complete another good repetition. If a full press-up isn’t appropriate for you, raise your hands onto a bench, sofa or other stable surface. There is no honour in doing a terrible floor press-up when a good elevated one would be more useful.
Now rest for a minute.
Ask yourself honestly: could you have done one more? If your family’s life depended on it, could you somehow have found another rep?
If the answer is yes, then you have just learned something about where you normally choose to stop.
Do another set. This time, pay attention to what happens when it gets difficult. Notice the sensations in your arms and chest. Notice the urge to stop. Notice your breathing. Stay with the movement rather than beginning an internal negotiation about whether you fancy continuing.
In that sense, hard physical training can become a form of mindfulness. You cannot think about next Tuesday when you’re genuinely fighting for the final press-up. You are rather wonderfully stuck in the present.
Physiologically, you do not need to take every strength set to absolute failure to make progress — and constantly doing so can create more fatigue than benefit. What matters is that your working sets are sufficiently challenging. Those final repetitions of a hard set often feel disproportionately difficult, but you can build strength and muscle without turning every session into Armageddon.
Psychologically, though, occasionally discovering that your perceived limit wasn’t actually your limit is incredibly useful.
You learn something about yourself.
The principle of progressive overload
If you want your body to keep adapting, the training stimulus has to progress somehow. This is progressive overload.
People usually think this simply means adding more weight to the bar, but there are loads of ways of progressing. You might lift more weight, do more repetitions with the same weight, improve your range of motion, add another set, improve your technique, control the eccentric phase better, reduce assistance or simply perform the same work with less effort than before.
The important thing is that, over time, your body is being asked to do something it couldn’t previously do quite as well.
The famous story used to explain this is Milo of Croton, the ancient Greek wrestler. According to legend, Milo began carrying a newborn calf every day. As the calf gradually grew into a cow, Milo gradually became stronger because the load increased with it.
Did he actually spend several years wandering around Greece carrying an increasingly irritated cow?
Who knows.
But it is a brilliant illustration of progressive overload.
For the existentialists and Greek mythology fans reading this, strength training can also feel slightly Sisyphean. You get stronger so you can lift a heavier weight… which eventually becomes normal… so you add more weight… which becomes normal… and apparently this continues until you die.
Excellent.
Fortunately, like most things in life, getting better at it makes it considerably more fun. Competence breeds confidence.
How to hire a Strength Coach
If you want one-to-one help getting stronger, plenty of good Personal Trainers can help you. But if strength, athletic development or sports performance is a serious priority, I would generally look for someone with a proper Strength & Conditioning background.
The letters CSCS after somebody’s name are still a useful signal. CSCS stands for Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist and is awarded by the NSCA in America. I’ve done it myself and, compared with the standard Personal Training qualifications I originally took, it is considerably more demanding.
That doesn’t automatically mean everybody with CSCS after their name is a brilliant coach, of course. Qualifications tell you somebody has studied something. They don’t tell you whether they can communicate, observe, adapt, inspire confidence or actually coach another human being.
Experience matters. Personality matters. Judgement matters.
Having a coach isn’t essential, but a good one can make learning much quicker. Personally, whenever I become interested in something new, I would rather spend some money learning from somebody excellent than waste months trying to reinvent whatever wheel they have already spent twenty years understanding.
This applies well beyond fitness. If you ever stumble across a truly great coach or teacher in ANY discipline, hire them if you can. Good teachers are rare.
p.s. Some of these early lessons have to be a bit technical. Stay with me! This course gets considerably weirder as we go on.