Do you want to get inhumanly strong?

You want to get stronger, so you start in earnest, you research strength training and start with a plan that has you lifting max weights on a weekly basis. That works initially, but pretty soon, you stall out, possibly get hurt or just hit numbers that you can’t break through. In your mind, the solution is to just keep hammering at it, because eventually, it has to go, right?

Unfortunately, for the majority of people, that’s not the case.  And I am going to tell you why.

First up, here is how I define strength.

“Strength is the combination of a coordinated effort between muscle groups along with neural adaptation to a load placed on them, giving us the ability to signal more muscle fibres to work together at the same time to move a heavier weight.”

The initial responses to strength training are simply a result of better muscular coordination, once we learn the technique of a lift, how to coordinate our muscles to move something heavy, the pattern gets locked in and the weights get easier. This doesn’t mean you are stronger per se, just that you are able to get multiple muscle groups working together with greater efficiency than before.

Now comes the difficult part, understanding how to progressively load the muscles, without losing the coordination you have developed.

This is where I see a lot of lifters fail, they add weight, get a new 1 rep max, add weight again, then again, then again, until the point where the load is so heavy, that the technique of the lift is compromised and the coordination is gone. The lift looks absolutely nothing like it did on the first rep, but hey, it’s a new max and next week, you can add 10kg for another pb. Well, no, you can’t. You’ll just get shittier and shittier in terms of technique and end up hurting yourself.

Instead, here is what you should focus on.

1, The first and most obvious point, learn how to do the lift correctly, for how you are built, not how someone else is. By that I mean, if you have certain proportions, (hip to knee, knee to ankle, torso and arm length, and or mobility restrictions) then you will need to lift differently to how someone else is built, this is where individual mechanics and leverages come in to play. Once you have figured that out, you then need,

2, Technical consistency. Your aim should be to make every single rep look the same, from the first warm up, to the last working set. If the final rep looks completely different to the first, then the coordination isn’t the same anymore and you are asking the body to do something it hasn’t done in the previous sets. When I talk about this with clients, I quote Bruce Lee.

“I do not fear the man who practices 10,000 kicks. I fear the man who practices 1 kick, 10,000 times”

This should be at the forefront of your mind when training, and it goes for accessory work too.

3, Spend more time practicing multiple sets at weights in the 80-90% range of your maximum. If a client comes to me and can deadlift 250kg for 1 rep, but the lift falls apart at 260kg, Initially, I might bring them down to 200kg for 3 sets of 5 reps, with a focus on each rep being as close to identical as possible. Then as we add weight, at 225kg, the rep range drops to 3 sets of 3 reps.

 It is this exposure to a higher volume at a heavier load that will create a greater neurological response than constantly doing 1 or 2 shitty reps at 255kg.

I might even have to break the lift down completely and start them again from the ground up, making changes to the way they lift based on how they are built (see point 1).

They will only add weight when they can complete all the sets and reps at the given load, with a high degree of technical consistency.

4, Focus on the eccentric part of the lift.

There are 2 parts to every lift, the concentric, which is the lifting of the weight, where the target muscle shortens, and the eccentric part is the lowering of the weight, where the target muscle lengthens.

It is in the eccentric part that we can realise more strength gains, as this where we can really increase the recruitment of additional muscle fibres.

The mechanism by which this happens is fairly complex, but put simply, a muscle fibre can only switch on and off, it cannot change the force it applies like a dimmer switch, so in order to move a heavier weight, we need more muscle fibres working together. When you lift a weight, specific feedback happens that tells your brain how heavy the load is, and therefore how many muscle fibres need to be switched on in order to move it. If you just dump the weight down, you are effectively switching the fibres on and off in quick succession, which doesn’t lead to much fatigue.

The crucial part here is the fatigue, we want to keep those fibres switched on longer, in order to create a level of fatigue that forces the brain to signal additional fibres to pick up where the existing ones have, for want of a better term, switched off.

Lowering the weight slower, taking 2 to 3 seconds instead of just dumping it down, creates the fatigue we are after as you are asking your muscles to stay switched on for longer.

5, With lighter weights, weaknesses are rarely exposed, and it isn’t until you get really heavy where you’ll find something that is holding you back.

Understand where the lift breaks down and add an exercise that specifically addresses that weakness. You will probably need help from someone with more experience than you for this, because you might not see where the breakdown happens, or know what you need to bring in to help fix it.

6, Accessory work must be treated with the same respect as the lift you are trying to improve. Too often I see people just smashing through accessory lifts, with no attention paid to how they complete the work or the tempo at which they lift. By treating these exercises as just something you have to do because you were told to, you are leaving kilos on the platform that you could otherwise be lifting.

Remember, the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts.

7, Recover, recover, recover.

Lifting heavy places a big strain on your nervous system and if you can’t recover properly, you’ll struggle to progress.

To this end, volume and load need to be managed for the individual lifter. Giving a 45 year old with a hectic work schedule and a family to look after, the same volume and loading as a 20 year old student with plenty of down time and no work/ family related stress, is misguided at best.

You need to understand that you might not be able to get away with training heavy every week, and that a better strategy is to train heavy every 3rd week, with lower stress training sessions in between to facilitate recovery. But then if you can recover quickly, you might be better suited to a more frequent exposure to heavy loads. It all comes down to the individual.

Having said all that, there are 3 things that everyone has to do in order to recover properly.

1.      Get enough sleep,

2.      Eat enough calories, especially protein

3.      Plan recovery days into your week, where you don’t do any exercise. There is no such thing as active rest. Being active isn’t resting, rest is rest.

As a lifter with decades of experience, I have made all of these mistakes at one point or another and I also implemented all of this advice in the lead up to the 2019 season, where I was at my all-time strongest, winning London’s strongest masters in January, later in the year I placed 5th at the OSG European championships and 16th at the OSG World championships.

Below is the culmination of several months work, resulting in this 322.5kg deadlift to win the max deadlift event at London’s strongest man. In the time leading up to this, I never lifted anything heavier than 270kg for sets of 6, which I combined with targeted lifts to address weaknesses and build my best ever deadlift.

I have also used these strategies with clients who have gone on to place top 3 at national powerlifting competitions, win world titles or break national records.

If you are looking to become the strongest you’ve ever been, contact me for a no obligation consultation.