How to Get Stronger At Any Movement
If you’re like most people, the initial attraction to the gym and lifting weights is probably either one of two things: building muscle to look good or because you want to be stronger for a sport or competition. Both are admiral goals and your desire to continue to lift weights over time may change however, at some point during most people's iron journey, the amount that you lift becomes important. Initially, making progress in both physique and strength appears easy. Beginners or newbie gains take place over the first 6-12 months of weight training and basically allows an individual to do whatever as long as he or she shows up and trains on a regular basis, progress will be made. However, at a certain point, your training needs to become more focused and specific if you want to continue to make more progress in certain areas. Meaning, if you want to get strong at a certain movement for competition or you want to improve specific body parts, your programming and training will need to be a little smarter than the newbie weight lifter. Here’s a few tips to help you continue to make progress in the weight room:
Tip #1: Practice the Movement
Technique is especially crucial when it comes to strength training and in order to achieve efficient and flawless movement patterns, it is important to spend time practicing those exercises. It may seem obvious, but when it comes to weight training, it’s not a common thought process to practice a movement. Most gym goers would rather “crush it” every session. However, if you want to get better specific exercises it is important to occasionally take time to practice those movements by using lighter weights and maybe new or different techniques or cues to perfect the movement pattern.
I like to make parallels to other sports to make my point. When I was younger, I used to teach swimming courses to college students for a 1 credit activity class. Occasionally I would get very strong football players in my class who would need to learn how to swim. Beside them in class were many scrawny pencil neck young men and your average strength college female as well. Those who learned technique, learned to swim. Those who thought they could muscle their way through it, sank. No matter how strong you are, the technique of the movement matters most. When it comes to lifting weights, this is especially true.
You may be able to get away with poor technique for a long time and still put up big numbers but eventually, poor technique will be the limiting factor because it puts an artificial cap on your strength potential. Take the time necessary to maximize your movement patterns and exercise technique because in the long run you will reap the rewards both in strength and injury prevention.
Tip #2: Increase Strength of Primary and Secondary Muscles
In order to build strength in a specific movement, you will need to do more than just that exercise. Understanding biomechanics and anatomy will go a long way towards your strength development. Let’s use the bench press as our example. The primary muscle involved in the bench press is the pectoralis major muscle aka, the chest. At some point, you’ll need to do something other than just bench press every workout to make improvements at the bench press. There is something many highly trained weight lifters adhere to called “The Law of Accommodation” which basically means your body will adapt to a specific movement if you perform it too often without changing the stimulus. Overuse injuries and mental fatigue can become a factor if you perform the exact same movement in the exact same way week after week. Understanding anatomy and biomechanics to a certain degree and movement specific exercises will allow you to continue to work towards increasing the strength of an exercise, like bench press, without having to train it. You can do this by training secondary muscles involved in an exercise that assist the primary muscles. The secondary muscles involved in bench press are the triceps and deltoid muscles. Using supplemental exercises that prioritize the triceps muscle while still incorporating the chest, like floor presses or dips, is one way to increase the strength of the bench press without actually training it.
Tip #3: Adjust the Variables
The primary variables of training are: intensity, sets, reps, rest periods, frequency, and tempo. You must use these variables to create progressive overload over time which is the primary factor for increasing strength and muscularity. Progressive overload is simply doing more than you’ve done previously in some way, shape, or form. This could mean adding 5 lbs to the bar and performing the same sets and reps or completing one additional rep with the same weight from the previous week. As time goes on, it will be difficult or near impossible to continue to add 5 lbs to an exercise every week while still performing the same reps and sets. So you’ll adjust the variables to continue to achieve a stimulus that triggers muscle growth and strength improvements. You could reduce the rest time of the exercise while using the same weight, reps, and sets parameters or maybe you decrease the reps and increase the weight to build more pure strength. Maybe you notice that you’re not as recovered as you need to be so you decrease the frequency of your training and increase your rest days per week. There are endless possibilities that you could and will encounter over time that will require appropriate adjustments of these variables to continue making progress. There is much science involved in weight training but there is also a very large “art” aspect to training as well. Paying attention to your training and manipulating the training to fit your needs is the art of weight training.
Tip #4: Journal and Stick to a Program
The final and potentially most important tip is to have a plan and follow it long enough for it to be effective. Good training programs will not make you stronger overnight or even in a week. Good training programs will properly progress an individual over the course of many weeks or even a few months to systematically make you stronger over time. The problem is that many individuals become program happy and hop from one program to another without ever even finishing a single program. As you go through multiple training programs, pay attention to how your body reacts to different exercises, set and rep schemes, different combinations of training styles, and rest time. If you pay attention and journal your results for you to review, you will learn what works best for you and your body. Over time you will be able to tweak your program to fit you as an individual based on results and personal preferences.
This is why you must use a journal to log your training. It is impossible... Let me repeat IMPOSSIBLE to remember everything important about your training from week to week let alone months later. You need to journal your training and review it weekly and monthly to see what worked and didn’t work for you and use that information to make the changes necessary for continual improvements.
Keep in mind that learning and applying all of this as well as making significant progress is not something you can accomplish overnight. True strength is built over the long haul. A common saying is those who train the longest, get the strongest. Take the time to learn your body. Make the proper adjustments to your training and you will reap the long term benefits. I hope this was helpful and you are able to use this information to make you a stronger person.
