The Complete Strength Training Guide • Stronger by Scienceby Greg Nuckols. What does it take to reach your strength potential? And what do the steps to do so look like? I couldn’t find a complete, accessible overview anywhere, so I decided to make it myself. This article will be the anchor for the website. It’s a comprehensive framework, meant to get you caught up and ready to absorb the rest of the information on this site. Be aware that a more nuts- and- bolts guide is coming (how to actually plan out your sets/reps/exercises) as well. This guide is just meant to give you an overview of the important factors and principles in play. If you have any questions, if you think something is incomplete or confusing, or if you just plain think I messed something up, don’t hesitate to let me know how I can make this guide better. The Benefits of Strength Training An effective program can benefit your body in the following areas: In general, resistance training lowers mortality rates at all. ![]()
This is something I’ve been wanting to write for a while, but I’ve been putting it off because, honestly, it’s a monster. I could split it into a series, but I don’t want people to stumble across just the second or third installment and miss the context. However, be aware up front that it’s probably not one you’ll want to chug through in one sitting. Because of that, you can download it below as a PDF so you can read through it at your leisure, along with spreadsheets laying out multiple example programs showing how you can apply the principles in this article. ![]() ![]() This article will cover what it takes for you to reach your strength potential, and how to do it in the most efficient way possible. It’s not going to dwell on specific topics in a ton of depth; its purpose is to give you an overview of the key factors in your journey from wherever you are now, to your ultimate potential. Resources addressing more specific topics will be linked, but the purpose of this article is simply to provide you with a comprehensive framework. What does it take to be as strong as you can be? Big muscles (duh). For anyone who needs more reassuring, this guide goes into way more depth on this subject later. Mastery of the lifts you’ll be using to demonstrate strength. Who was the strongest athlete of all time? Anatoly Pisarenko? Zydrunas Savickas? Andrey Malanichev? The fact is, there’s not a definitive way to answer that question because they competed in different sports, and strength is defined by the lifts you use to measure it. There is a very large skill component to mastering a lift: You have to get your muscles to work in a very powerful yet precise manner to lift heavy stuff as effectively and efficiently as possible. This comes with practice – the more specific, the better. Because of this, practice aimed at mastering the lifts you want to use to express your strength is incredibly important. This guide will mainly be talking about the squat, bench press, and deadlift since I’m a powerlifter, and that’s what I know the most about, though these principles are applicable to any strength sport. Healthy Joints/Connective tissue. The less wear and tear you have on your body, the more you’ll be able to lift, all other things being equal. Your tendons have to be strong enough to transfer force from your muscles to the bones they’re trying to move. They have a built- in “strain gauge” called the golgi tendon organ that sends a signal to your spinal cord, back to your muscles, telling them to stop contracting as hard, in an effort to prevent a tendon rupture. Nerves called mechanoreceptors in your ligaments function similarly. And as you damage or wear away your joint cartilage, it generally heals slowly or not at all (depending on the joint), and once you’ve worn it away, you’re not getting any more. Over time, this can lead to osteoarthritis. Acute injuries to these tissues generally take a long time to heal (serious ones, at least), and excessive stress to your tendons over time can lead to inflammation (tendonitis), which can progress to degeneration (tendinosis) if left unchecked. Both of these generally require quite a bit of time to recover from. What’s more, it’s not uncommon for a soft tissue injury to turn into a long- term headache and impact your training for a long, long time after the initial injury, as collagen generally repairs itself very slowly and often incompletely. For these reasons, maximizing results while minimizing injury risk is of utmost importance. Worth noting here: pain and injury don’t always go hand in hand. That issue is beyond the scope of this guide, but if you’d like to read more, I’d suggest you start here to learn more about the biopsychosocial model of pain. Age. There are three key advantages to being young: Your nervous system is a bit more excitable and works a bit faster, meaning you can reach maximal muscular contraction faster. This is more important for power- dependent sports (like weightlifting) than maximal force dependent sports (like powerlifting), but it plays a role in all of them. Also, your nervous system is more plastic when you’re young, meaning you’ll be able to learn and master movements faster (and possibly to a greater absolute degree). You have a bit more of the protein elastin in your tendons, so they’ll be able to store a bit more elastic energy (giving you a more powerful “bounce” out of the hole at the bottom of a squat). You simply recover from hard training faster. You have higher testosterone levels, you sleep better and release more total growth hormone at night, and a multitude of other factors that help you be better able to handle high training volumes, recover faster, and progress quicker. None of these are tremendously huge factors by themselves, but they all play a role. They all peak in your late teens, but don’t start dropping off in a big way until your 3. If you can hit your competitive peak by your mid- twenties (some people peak sooner, but generally it takes quite a few years of hard training to build the requisite muscle mass), it helps take advantage of these factors. This is not to say that you can’t get very, very strong if you start later, but there are advantages to getting to your competitive peak as soon as possible. What constitutes appropriate training? This is an entirely context- dependent question. There are certain factors that are more or less universal (the training must be specific to your goals, there must be some type of overload applied, etc.), but once you get into the nuts and bolts of program design, there are several factors that determine whether or not a training program will be a good fit for someone. Some of those factors are specific to the individual. Their background, strengths and weaknesses, specific leverages, preferences, their current diet, lifestyle, and sleep habits, etc. However, there are some factors that will apply to most individuals in larger groups of people, based on their experience level, assuming their goal is to reach their strength potential (and be as competitive as possible, if that’s your aim) as fast as possible. I want you to keep two things in mind when reading the rest of this article: I’m assuming your primary goal is to get as strong as possible, as fast as possible. If that doesn’t apply to you, then the rest of what I’m about to say isn’t too relevant for you because it’s not in line with your goals. BY NO MEANS am I saying this is the only possible way to get strong. That would be foolhardy. Simple observation is enough to tell you that there are many roads leading to Rome. So, if you’re tempted to retort, “so- and- so got so strong and they did it another way,” just know that you’re not going to get any arguments from me. Also, this means that if you are currently in a certain position and the way you got there differs from the one I recommend, that doesn’t mean you’ve screwed up. It just means you took a different path to get there, and that’s 1. With that out of the way, it’s time to really dive into the meat of this article. Remember, the four things we need to accomplish to get super strong: Big muscles. Mastery of the lifts. Healthy joints. Age/minimizing the time it takes to get there. Based on your experience level, you can use those four characteristics as your focal points to guide your training. A (wherever you are now) to point B (the strongest you can possibly be) as fast as possible, as safely as possible. Of course, safety and speed go hand in hand; nothing derails your progress faster than an injury. Each phase of your training will be governed by a simple question: What obstacles standing between me and my end goal are hindering me the most right now?
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