This is an article about strength training, and how to work it into you training schedule. If you are having a hard time increasing your strength, then here are a few of the tips that helped me.
To start off strength training is defined as the ability to move maximal load.
As I've said before when I started out, I was working every muscle group every day thinking it would be helpfull to me. Totally wrong! First of all I just want to say that you should never do the same thing day after day after day, and you should not always do the same number of reps and sets. Each week you should try to increase the weight, this is the only way to increase overall strength. If you keep it the same, after a while you will plateau, which will not help you progress at all. There are two types of strenght: absolute strength and relative strength. Absolute strength is how much one can lift all together. Relative strength is how much one can lift according to his size. For example a 180 lb man with a 390lb Deadlift is relatively stronger than a 200 lb man with a 400lb Deadlift.
The human bodys fitness potential will almost never surely be reached. Lifting more weights that are heavy is a very good thing, but if you do not balance it out with endurance (running, swimming, biking) you will lose some of that endurance, and vice versa. Lifting light weight at high reps and in a circuit is also good for muscular endurance and it also can provide a little bit of cardio as well.
Depending on what you are training for is also how you should set your training schedule like. For example; if you are some bodybuilder and all you are wanting to do is build muscle mass or if you are training for the worlds strongest man competition, you might not have a lot of running or swimming in your training plan. It would be mostly all weight training. However, a person training to be in NSW or just in shape should be trying to improve in all areas of fitness(weights,calisthenics, gymnastics, run, swim).
Here's how to improve strength in my opinion.
To increase strength you need to move very heavy weight or work from a disadvantaged position. For example: benching a weight 20-25 times will not increase strength but muscular endurance. So instead of doing 3 sets of 10-12 try doing 3 sets of 3-5 with a heavier weight to increase your strength.
How often:
Like I've said before I used to do the same thing 5 days a week for the exact same number of sets and reps. This is incredibly wrong. To improve strength I would suggest training a muscular group 2 times per week. You could go 3 times, but I recommend two.
Recovery:
Recovery is just as important as the training itself. You should be weaker after a workout, so if you tried the same thing later in the day it should be a lot harder. You get stronger when you sleep, so you should shoot to get around 8 hours of sleep per night. I personally like to have 2 days off between strength routines, it seems like the perfect amount of recovery time. For example; you could strength train upper body on Monday and Thursday and lower body on Tuesday and friday.
Between sets you should also have recovery time. Lower reps the bigger you break should be and the higher reps the lower your breaks. 5 or less reps I take a 2:30 or 3:00 minute break, 6-10 reps 2 minute break, anything higher 1 minute or less break. Also if you are doing circuit training there should be as little rest as possible, move from one exercise to the next.
Scheme:
To see the most improvement in your strength I suggest focussing on one exercise at a time. This means do 1 exercise and finish all the work in that area then move on to the next exercise. Make sure you are changing your rep and set scheme frequently to see maximal improvements.
Exercises:
These are just a few exercises that will help with your overall strength. Later on I will post about exercises and include a list with that.
Lower body: squats, deadlifts, lunges, pistols
Always practice good form with these, and it will also help strengthen your core.
Upper Body: bench, shoulder(military) press, lat pull down, dips, weighted pull ups.
Hope all of this helps you with your strength training. If you have any questions leave it below.
Remember the more variation you can make, the better.
HOOYAH
Drew
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