To recap, in order to get stronger you need to have a plan of action. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is a great physique. Progressive resistance is the key to any strength program. There are plenty of variables that can be manipulated, but adding weight to the bar should be your #1 goal if you are new to the iron game.

If you want to get really strong, you need to lift free weights. Stick with barbells and dumbbells and stay away from machines. I can’t be more emphatic about this. The problem with machines is that they force your body to move in an unnatural path. Every trainee has a different physiology and machines cannot adjust for this. They force your body to move in a fixed plane. So when performing a seated chest press on a hammer strength machine, trainee A’s arms and shoulders will be forced to move in the exact same path as trainee B. This is an injury waiting to happen because trainee A has much longer arms than trainee B. Barbells and dumbbells allow your body to move more freely because you are not just moving the weight in a specific direction, but you are also required to balance it. The need for balancing forces the stabilizer muscles to activate and do their job. When training with machines, the stabilizer muscles are rarely required to participate because the weight is already balanced for you, and this leads to injury.

When it comes to getting strong, nothing works like squats and deadlifts for the lower body, and pressing and pushing variations like chin ups, rows, bench presses and overhead presses for the upper body. A variety of compound exercises will hit all the major muscle groups. A compound exercise operates at more than one joint, as opposed to an isolation exercise that operates at one joint. A biceps curl is an isolation movement (flexes at the elbow joint) whereas a chin up is a compound movement (extends the shoulder and flexes at the elbow). So a chin up will give you the most bang for your buck because it works the most muscle. The basis of your training should be composed of compound movements. Isolation exercises can be used sparingly to bring up a lagging body part or used to strengthen smaller muscles to protect your body from injury at the end of your training session. When training any exercise, my approach doesn’t change. I treat it as practice because I am continually attempting to perfect a movement. It can take years to master an exercise such as a squat or deadlift. The more efficient you become at a particular movement, the more you will be able to lift.

I cannot stress enough the importance of getting stronger in different rep ranges. Your body is composed of different muscle fibres (fast and slow twitch) and different fibres respond to different loads and rep ranges. Fast twitch fibres have a greater capacity for strength and explosive power, but are highly fatigable. They are activated with lower repetition ranges and heavier loads (1-6 repetitions or 85-100% of your one-rep maximum), whereas slow twitch muscle fibres have a minimal capacity for strength and explosive power, but have high endurance capabilities (8 to 15 repetitions or 60-80% of your one-rep maximum). So it’s strongly advisable to practice getting stronger in your lifts by alternating rep ranges each week. As an example, in week 1 start with 5 sets of 5 repetitions at 85-90% of your 1 repetition maximum. Then in week 2, try 4 sets of 8 repetitions at 75-80% of your 1 repetition maximum. For week 3 you would start with 3 sets of 12 repetitions at 65-70% of your 1 repetition maximum. Once you get to the point where you can complete all your sets and reps at the load you have started with, it is time add weight to the bar. Five pounds for smaller muscles and ten pounds for larger muscles is a good rule of thumb. Try alternating this pattern from week to week between the 3 rep schemes and you should see gains in both size and strength.

In next week’s blog I will discuss training splits. The pros and cons of full body workouts vs. lower/upper body splits and how to figure out which one is right for you.