Three Tips for Beginning Strength Training

It’s the time of year where people make New Year’s Resolutions and flood gyms. This lasts for a couple of months and then most of these people drop off. which is unfortunate even if it is a relief to those of us who are gym regulars. One of the biggest reasons that they end up quitting the gym is because of lack of results. Sometimes this happens because their expectations are unrealistic (shockingly enough, you won’t look like Terrell Owens or Jennifer Garner in a month or two), but often it’s just because of a lack of knowledge.

So in honor of you new gym rats-in-training, I’m going to give you some tips that I use with almost all of my brand new clients. Strength training is going to be the cornerstone of your body transformation and performance enhancing program, and it’s also where people tend to get hung up. For you more advanced readers, this might be a good reminder.

1. Learn to control your body before you try to control the weights. This is the first thing I focus on. So many people today live sedentary lifestyles and don’t do anything athletic throughout their day that they are just not physically prepared for real weight training.

When I start training people, after an evaluation, I usually focus primarily on conditioning and bodyweight until I’m confident that they can control their bodies. Then I introduce more direct weight training, often with movements that are similar to those they’ve been doing with their bodyweight (squatting, pressing, lunging, pulling, etc). Since they’re already conditioned and have developed a good sense of athleticism they can hit the ground running with the weights.

2. New trainees respond best to high volume but low fatigue training. As a newbie to strength training, your ability to recruit muscle fibers is not going to be nearly as efficient as someone who has been training for a while. You’re just not as good at whatever movements you’re doing because you haven’t done them as much and your body hasn’t figured out the best way to go about them. Make sense? Good.

How do you get better at something? Practice! However, not just any practice will do. After all, you wouldn’t just set up on the free throw line and start heaving basketballs at the net hoping to improve your shot, would you? No, you’d practice with as perfect technique as you were able to do and always strive for higher levels of perfection.

Strength training is the same way. Since you’re not as good at these movements you won’t be able to engage as much muscle as someone who’s more practiced. Therefore, you won’t cause as much muscle damage per rep (not as many muscle fibers are being exposed to stimulus) and can tolerate a higher number of reps (albeit with lighter weight) than a skilled trainee.

These higher rep totals are important, as that’s where you develop that neurological efficiency and start to get strong. However, what happens when you do too many reps? You get fatigued, and then you get sloppy. Before long you’re practicing poor technique because you’re too tired to do it right. That’s stupid.

So what’s the solution? More sets but fewer reps per set. This should also allow you to use a slightly higher weight which will provide more overall work and make you stronger. The “standard” of strength training seems to be three sets of ten reps. I have all sorts of issues with that, but we’ll forget about that for now and roll with it. To apply the more sets/less reps per set approach to that scheme you’d be better off learning with ten sets of three reps or six sets of five reps (or some combination there of) with each rep being perfect and just shy of fatigue.

3. Aim for total rep goals rather than strict set rep targets. This is somewhat in line with tip number two. Rather than focus on hitting three sets of ten, five sets of five, or whatever your target number is, instead focus on hitting a certain number of quality reps. So you might come into a workout with the goal of performing twenty pull-ups in the whole workout, rather than a mandatory two sets of ten. Instead of having a couple of crappy reps in there at the end of the sets when you were too fatigued, you could focus on performing 20 perfect reps spread over however many sets you needed. This is an easy way to make progress as well as you have a target to hit and your goal every session could be to increase that target (either in total reps or weight).

Implement these tips in your strength training, be diligent, and always look to improve. Before long you’ll be well on your way to the physique and performance you’re looking for.