What is strength training?

Strength training is also called “resistance training”. It’s basically anything where you are making your muscles contract in reaction to an external force. This causes your muscles to adapt and be better at doing it. This can mean anything from lifting weights to doing bodyweight exercises. 

In addition to there being many different types of it, there’s also many different training methods that can be applied depending on your goals. For instance, say you’re lifting weights- you don’t go about it the same way if you want to train for endurance vs if you want to bodybuild. 

This is a huge topic that a lot of people have a lot of opinions about. I’m going to do my best to resist digressing into that and just give a rundown of the most important basic stuff. 

What are the benefits of strength training? 

No matter who you are, strength training will noticeably improve your life if done properly. It will improve your cardio, your hormone and lipid levels, and is one of the few ways in which it’s actually possible to “speed up your metabolism” without direct medical intervention. (By increasing your muscle/fat ratio). 

Strength training improves your bone density. This is the biggest one that a lot of people don’t know. If you’ve wondered why doctors have relatively recently begun recommending that post menopausal women start lifting weights- this is why. 

-Strength training will make you more capable of doing physical tasks in your everyday life. The older you get, the more valuable this is. (Even extremely elderly and frail people are able to improve their quality of life and independence by doing an appropriate amount of strength training). 

Strength training will make you better at pretty much any sport. Of course, you must align the method to the sport- you probably don’t want to get into powerlifting if you’re a sprinter, for instance. 

Strength training can make you hotter pretty much no matter what your aesthetic is. (Once again, it is of course necessary to pick the right type of strength training for what you want to look like.) 

Types/Phases of Strength Training

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This post would be a doorstopper sized book if I attempted to describe in detail all the different methods of strength training, from classic free weights, to bodyweight training, to direct functional sport related training, to just getting the right construction job. So I’m going to talk about basic strategy instead. 

No matter what you’re doing, the foundational principle of strength training is Progressive Overload- that is, the gradual increase of stress on the body, in manageable enough increments that the body adapts instead of breaking down. 

If you’re intermediate/advanced, your body does this by increasing the density and/or size of your muscles. If you’re a beginner, your body mostly does this by improving the rate at which your neurons make your muscles contract. 

Fun fact: the first documentation of progressive overload was the training plan of Ancient Greek Olympic wrestler Milo of Croton, who (so the story goes) would carry a newborn calf on his back every day between Olympic games. By the time the games rolled around, he’d be carrying a four year old bull on his back- apparently directly into the stadium, where he’d kill and cook it on the spot. This would also go down in history as the first documented instance of auramaxxing in sport. 

An additional foundational principle of strength training is the Principle of Specificity, or the SAID (specific adaptation to imposed demands). It’s what it sounds like- the body adapts to the specific demands you make of it. 

So, if you lift relatively light weights a whole bunch of times, you get good at lifting a relatively light weight a whole bunch of times, aka you build endurance. If you lift heavier weights consistently, your level of maximal strength will increase. And so on. 

Different types of muscle fibers need to be built up and worked on in different ways before they can handle more intense training. This is why you hear about people doing different specs- different numbers of sets, reps, weights, and so on. Changing up these things causes different physical and neurological adaptations. (If you don’t know what I’m on about, you can [click here] or wait until a bit later in the post, where I’ll explain further.) 

Training program design is highly specific to the individual’s needs, and by all accounts is as much an art as a science. But most people who know what they’re doing will follow something along the lines of the tables you see below.  

These specific guidelines are taken directly from one of my college textbooks (Heyward 183; see bottom of article). This is not absolute dogma, but you won’t go wrong using it.