No matter what your fitness goals are, by improving your strength you’re more likely to hit them. There’s so much more to strength than vanity - in fact being strong doesn’t always mean big muscles, as we’ll discover later in the article. One of the best things you can do for your health, your fitness, your physique and your longevity is to build strength.
In this article we’ll show you how to increase strength properly, and tell you how you can come and work with our personal trainers in Bow, East London to help you build impressive strength!
Strength is a fundamental pillar of health and fitness.
All other things being equal, a strong muscle is more robust than a weak muscle - it’s less likely to get injured, less likely to degenerate, it burns more calories and is helps you to perform physical tasks significantly easier. There’s a knock-on effect from increasing strength too, because as we know from Woolf’s Law, bone strength and density increases under load as well, so it’s not just muscles that benefit.
Connective tissues benefit from strength training too, as long as the training is done carefully with slower, appropriately resisted exercises that allow for gentle loading and adaption in the tissues. In examples of repeated connective tissue injuries, an effective strengthening protocol could be followed to help reduce/remove injuries in the future.
How to Improve Strength - the Overview
There’s a lot of ways to improve strength and a lot of different types of strength, but today we’re going to focus on the main one most of us understand when it comes to strength training - generalised muscular strength, where the body is able to move large loads using muscle power as opposed to momentum or technique advantages.
The two main ways people approach strength training is by tweaking the load and volume. In case you’re unsure as to what these are, this will explain them…
Load: The weight lifted in an exercise.
Volume: The amount of lifting a person does. This can be adjusted in terms of reps or sets.
Traditionally it was seen that the only way to increase strength was to lift a very heavy weight with mutiple short sets (high load, low volume) but conflicting research has challenged this thinking over time. As understanding of muscle tissue, the role of muscle mass in strength and the actual understanding of how muscles contract has changes, coaches are now employing a variety of methods in their training schedules for athletes.
Muscle contracts by ‘dragging’ contractile filaments within the muscle across each other. Typically the more contractile filaments there are within a muscle, the stronger we are. The first goal of strength training then is to increase the amount of contractile filaments we have at our disposal. The way to increase these is to add muscle mass, usually with a higher-volume approach.
The actin and myosin are the contractile filaments - to increase strength, we have to increase the amount of them we have.
Here’s how to increase the amount of muscle mass on our frame…
How to Increase Muscle Mass
Where German Volume Training (10 sets of specific exercises) was popular once, searchers have since shown that 4-6 sets of an exercise is more effective for developing strength and mass in a shorter period of time, plus (anecdotally) the recovery time is significantly quicker, meaning you’re likely to feel better through the training programme.
There are nuances to consider here though because muscle tissue differs. We have fast and slow twitch muscle fibres - fast twitch generate a lot of strength and power, but fatigue quickly. Slow twitch don’t generate as much strength and power, but have better endurance capabilities.
When it comes to building muscle, different body parts will adapt to training protocols relative to their muscle tissue type.
What researchers are finding is that there is a sweet spot when it comes to muscle mass gain, suggesting that muscle development follows a dose-response relationship. More volume tends to mean more more muscle, but only up to a point. Typically for lower body, higher volume works better - you’re better off performing lots of high rep sets of squats if you want to build big legs for example, but the same doesn't translate in the upper body, so huge sets of bench press won’t build as big a chest. For upper body, you’ll be better off sticking to the 4-6 sets of 8-12 reps, but still pushing to near failure on each set.
Translating Muscle Mass into Strength
Having a lot of muscle doesn’t automatically make you strong - strength and size are two very different things. As we discussed earlier in the article, we add muscle to increase the amount of contractile filaments we have at our disposal. The trick to turning those into actual functional strength requires training and technique (the technique element comes with executing lifts with good form).
What we know about strength training is that we have to lift heavy. The research on this is clear, with evidence showing the closer to our maximum strengths we train, the greater the improvement of strength we experience.
What is still unclear (in the sense that the overwhelming majority of studies return no statistically significant difference between study groups) is frequency of training. Some argue that twice per week per lift is sufficient, others say that 3-4 sessions per lift is better. What the evidence shows is that there’s no clear consensus, so experiment and do what you need to do.
If you find twice per week works best, go with that. If you find four times per week is best for you, go with that. There are no rules here!
In terms of sets, anywhere from 4-8 seems to be most effective, but the rest periods appear to be important, with 2-4 minutes between sets allowing sufficient recovery to perform your next max-effort set.
Increasing Strength - Conclusion
If you’re brand new to strength training, you should focus on building muscle mass first. Approach this with a volume method at first…
4-6 sets of 8-12 reps (to failure) on upper body
4-8 sets of 12-20 reps (to failure) on lower body
Once you’ve built significant amounts of muscle to your frame, turn this into usable strength by changing your training up and lift closer to your one rep maximums.
2-4 days per week
5-10 sets per exercise
1-3 reps each set
2-4 minutes break between max-effort working sets
Follow this advice and you’ll be a much stronger person, which if done correctly will translate to all kinds of other aspects of your life - your mood, your health, your fitness, your injury susceptibility and your general feelings of wellbeing.
At AdMac Fitness we’re not about fads, fashions and short term fixes. We want you to succeed properly over the long term, so with our help and advice you can get your fitness back on track! If you’d like us to help you, contact us on 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!
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