I love helping clients get stronger. I especially love working with lifters who are just entering the intermediate phase of their training career.
This is the point where your beginner gains phase – that magical period where everything you do in the gym works and you can set PRs every week – is coming to a close and you need to take a more intelligent approach to training if you want to continue progressing and avoid burnout or injuries.
Just because you’ve been working out for a while doesn’t mean your workouts are optimally designed. The biggest mistake I see intermediate lifters make is violating one or more of the three most important principles of strength training, which are discussed below.
1. Specificity
Specificity is the most important principle governing all physical activity. It essentially means that if you want to get good at a certain activity or if you want to see a specific training response (such as getting stronger), your training needs to be geared as specifically as possible toward that outcome.
Makes sense, right? You wouldn’t expect to get better at shooting free throws by tossing a football around with your buddies. You wouldn’t expect to become a better swimmer by riding your bike.
The same idea applies if you want to get stronger. Certain types of training are very specific to building strength, others less so. Some types of training are so nonspecific that they can actually prevent you from getting stronger.
Things that are highly specific to getting stronger:
- Lifting weights, especially compound movements that use lots of muscles and joints like squats, deadlifts, lunges, pressing, and rows
- Training in the 3-8 rep range and trying to lift heavier loads over time
- Occasionally testing 1, 2, and 3 rep maxes on a few key lifts (I only do this with a select few of my clients since most of them won’t ever need to do true max loads to reach their training goals.)
Things that are less specific to getting stronger, but can still help:
- Performing isolation or assistance movements, especially to build muscle
- Training in the 8-15 rep range
- Moderate amounts of steady state or high intensity cardio to maintain a basic level of cardio fitness
- Moderate amounts of flexibility training to address specific problem areas
Things that are not specific to getting stronger, and may actually prevent you from getting stronger:
- Doing hours and hours of endurance training or steady state cardio
- Doing lots of high intensity group exercise classes that use a ton of training volume and low loads
- Unstable surface training like using Bosu balls
- Doing tons of flexibility training, way beyond what you need to simply perform basic lifts with good technique (This includes doing a lot of yoga.)
If strength is your biggest training goal, you should do lots of stuff from the first list, a moderate amount of stuff from the second list, and avoid stuff from the third list as much as possible. If you love doing less specific stuff and don’t want to cut it out, you need to concede that you won’t be able to get as strong as you otherwise could have.
2. Overload
You must continue to present greater and greater challenges to your body over time if you want to get stronger. Overloading training occurs when you do a little more than you did last time, after which your body repairs itself and adapts so you are better equipped to meet that challenge in the future.
Put simply, if your training isn’t progressing over time, you’re not going to get stronger (or achieve any other goal other than basic consistency.) Not every session needs to be overloading, but on average you need to be moving in that direction over time.
Here are a few ways to progress your workouts for strength:
- Add weight
- Do more reps at the same weight
- Do more sets
- Progress to a more advanced exercise, like moving from goblet squats to barbell front squats
- Change the tempo, like adding pauses or slowing down the eccentric portion of the lift
If you aren’t lifting more weight gradually over time, you’re probably not getting stronger. And the stronger you get, the harder you will have to work to achieve an overload.
3. Fatigue management
Training that is hard enough to stimulate strength gains is inherently taxing. Nobody can crush it all the time and see continuous progress without repercussions (like burnout or injury.)
You need to take steps to manage accumulation of various types of fatigue. On the flip side, if you never need to take a break, you’re definitely not training hard enough to get stronger.
Here are a few ways to manage fatigue from training:
- Rest days. I suggest taking at least 2 rest days per week. Many of my clients take more due to scheduling and external obligations. Don’t make the mistake of filling your rest days with taxing activities like long bike rides or pick up games in the park.
- Light sessions.If you train more than 3x per week, some of your training sessions may need to be lighter than others. Try doing your heaviest sessions closer to the start of the week.
- Deloads. Every 3-5 weeks, consider taking a lighter week of training known as a deload to help you prepare for another month of training. The most important consideration of a deload is that you should do fewer sets than you did in your normal workouts.
- Active rest periods. Extremely consistent trainees who work hard all year long can benefit from 1-3 weeks per year where they intentionally perform exclusively easy workouts and primarily focus on rest and recovery.
- Prioritize recovery. If you’re not sleeping much, eating poorly, and are really stressed out, your recovery is going to suffer and your workouts are going to suck.
To summarize, if you want to get stronger without banging up your body or spinning your wheels:
- Make sure most of your exercise is geared at least partially toward getting stronger, and isn’t actively getting in the way.
- Make sure you are challenging yourself intelligently and actually working hard enough to elicit strength gains.
- Make sure you are managing fatigue on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.
If you want some help figuring all this out so you can get stronger without all the hassle and headache of writing your own programs, you can apply for my online coaching program here.