Strength Training Plan

There is an adage in business that states that: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.  This is especially true when it comes to strength training.  It is pointless rocking up to the gym and lifting weights aimlessly, you have to have a plan.

At first glance, nothing could seem simpler than lifting weights.  Up, down, up, down it is basic, almost to the point of ridiculous in its apparent simplicity, right?  Wrong!  There are an enormous number of variables that come into play and build a level of complexity that requires specialist training to understand completely.

The variables include position, speed of movement, frequency, intensity, your gender, even the length of your arms (remember the section on levers and fulcrums?).  Strength training, also referred to as resistance training, in which muscles are called upon to work against a resisting force, is not difficult but there are some subtleties to be aware of if you are going to be successful at it.

The benefits of being successful are plain to see and quick to make themselves known.  When you have been lifting, you can actually feel the muscles are more pumped up by the time you walk out of the gym.  This is a temporary effect caused by the working muscles becoming engorged with blood.  The sensation lasts about 30 minutes but in a matter of weeks, this pumped up feeling becomes more permanent and more visible.

Unfortunately, muscle cells are pretty stupid and must be regularly shocked to not only keep them improving but to remind them of what they have become.

The Muscle Menu

To shock muscles, they need to be subjected to stresses they are not accustomed to.  What kind of stresses you put them under depends on what you are trying to achieve.  There are three basic goals to strive for with resistance training, and each has a unique approach. (Laliberte & George, 1997)

Strength. 

Physiologists define strength as a measure of how much weight you can lift one time, known as your “One Lift Max” or 1RM.  If you aim for strength, you generally won’t be able to sustain muscular movements for extended lengths of time, and your muscles won’t be as big as they could be had you followed a program designed to maximise size. 

• Program principle: lifting very heavy weights a low number of times.

Size. 

Muscles get bigger when you lift, thanks to a phenomenon called hypertrophy, a process in which existing muscle fibres increase in size.  If you build mass, you will also build strength, but the two don’t correlate exactly.  In fact, bodybuilders, despite their size, may not be as strong as power lifters who train purely for strength. 

• Program principle: lifting moderately heavy weights a moderate number of times.

Tone. 

When people talk of ‘toning’, three concepts often become interchanged: muscle tone, muscular endurance and cardiovascular endurance. 

Toned muscles are muscles that are firm, lean and well-trained.  The usual path to muscle tone is training for muscular endurance, defined as a muscle’s ability to sustain movement for a relatively long period of time. 

To achieve cardiovascular endurance, you need muscular endurance but the two are not necessarily the same.  As described earlier, cardiovascular endurance refers to the heart and lungs’ ability to efficiently move oxygen-rich blood to the muscles, and oxygen-deficient blood from the exercised muscles back to the heart and lungs.

In contrast, muscular endurance is about keeping any muscle working for extended periods of time without undue fatigue, whether the work challenges the heart or not.  Toned muscle is not bulky, it is what a Karate-ka needs to maintain his speed, but not what a Rugby Prop strives for when building a brick wall like defence or strength for contesting the scrum.

• Program principle: lifting light weights a high number of times.

Maximising Your Workout

Whatever it is you are trying to achieve, there are a number of essential elements to any weight lifting program, and manipulating these elements helps train muscles to do what you want them to do.  The following are the imperatives.

Up the Ante. 

To challenge your muscles adequately, you have to lift enough weight. One benchmark for establishing the right resistance is based on the one rep max (1RM), the heaviest weight you can lift in a single repetition, or effort.  The ideal resistance for a beginning strength development program, in terms of safety and effectiveness, is 75% of your one rep max.  For example, if you could bench press 100 kilograms once, the best weight for this exercise would be 75 kilograms.  Few exercise scientists actually recommend putting everything you have into one lift, especially if you are just starting a new program with untrained muscles.  It’s a good way to sustain a serious injury.

An alternative to the one rep max is to aim for a weight that makes targeted muscles fatigue, or fail, within 40 to 70 seconds.  Assuming each repetition takes approximately four to six seconds that gives you about 8 to 12 lifts.  This isn’t just guesswork: studies have found that most people working at 75% of their maximum resistance will fatigue within this range of repetitions, with the average being about 10 lifts.

Count the Numbers. 

How much weight you use is directly related to how many times you plan to lift it.  The idea is simple: You can’t lift heavy weights as many times as light ones.  If a safe and effective resistance is something you can lift in 8 to 12 repetitions, it’s fair to wonder: Which is best, 8 or 12?  The answer depends on your goals and your progress, and it may not be limited to this range.  Experience has shown that the 8 to 12 repetition range is actually most ideal for building size.  Studies confirm that if you are building strength, you will need heavier loads and fewer lifts, in the range of 3 to 8 repetitions.  For muscular endurance, you will need to lighten the load enough to do 12 to 20 repetitions.  As for where in those ranges you should be, the rule of thumb is to start with lighter loads and try to perform more repetitions in each subsequent workout.

Work to Fatigue.  

To tap your muscles’ full potential for development, doing one set of lifts is never going to be enough.  The best approach to resistance training is to complete one set of light weight with a high number of repetitions, 15 to 20 for example, as a warm up set.  Follow the warm up set with two set of your target weight, working to genuine fatigue in each set.  Again, the number of repetitions you complete will depend on what your goals are (see discussion above).

Rest. 

As covered earlier, it is important to allow muscles to recover not only between workouts but between sets.  What you do depends on what you are trying to achieve.  The longer you rest between sets, the more your muscles recover and the harder you will be able to push them on the next set.  That’s why long rests of two to five minutes are ideal for building strength.  To build size, which involves the use of moderate weight and repetitions, you also want moderate rest between sets, between 30 and 90 seconds.  If it is endurance you are after, the idea is to keep muscles working with little rest, and you should aim to take as little as a 20 to 30 seconds break between sets.

Think big. 

I’m talking about the major areas of the body here, not the size of the individual muscles.  That is, chest, back, legs and arms, which are not individual muscles but muscle groups.  An effective workout will exercise big groups of muscles first, leaving smaller muscles like the biceps and triceps for last.  There are a couple of very good reasons for this.

First, it is efficient, since a single compound exercise such as a leg press works many different muscles at once, including the quadriceps, hamstrings, gluteals (buttocks) and calves.  Other big muscle, or compound, exercises are the bench press and seated row.

Slow Down. 

Lifting heavy objects is never something you should rush, since rapid movements put tremendous pressure on both muscles and tendons, making you vulnerable to injury.  Slow and steady movements are important for other reasons as well. 

Slow, controlled lifting stresses muscles more thoroughly and ensures that momentum is not taking work away from you.

It’s especially important to be smooth and slow when you are lowering the weight.  You might assume that muscle development comes mostly from lifting up, since that’s the part that seems hardest.  Research shows, that the lowering or negative phase may actually be more crucial.

Change it up.

By the time you get bored with a routine, your muscles are probably way ahead of you.  Giving your muscles an occasional wake up-call or change of pace is known as periodisation.  You do it by tinkering with the elements we have just discussed.  Do more sets, use different exercises add or subtract repetitions, rest less or more, lift faster or slower.  Change the order of the exercises in your workout.  Exercise your upper body one workout and your lower body the next.  The options are almost limitless.

Next time, we begin looking at specifics and our first port of call are the arms.