Strength training is training to increase your strength – but you didn’t need me to tell you that, now, did you? Once upon a time, it was believed that strength training was only useful for those who wanted to build muscle mass: i.e., the sole province of bodybuilders. Nowadays, however, it’s well-known that athletes of any stripe can reap benefits from strength training as well.
If you want to obtain these benefits for yourself, try these helpful hints.
Training Frequency
However intense your workout is, you won’t get any benefit from it unless you rest sufficiently afterward. You can improve your results with high-intensity, short-duration exercise sessions, followed up with adequate time for recuperation.
Train to exhaustion – that’s the trick to improving the effectiveness of your workout. It’s been shown that you can see improvement within a week with just a single intense workout and sufficient time to rest. Muscle building is what happens when the body repairs stress damage from exercise: the more time your body has to repair itself, the better your results will be. It doesn’t matter how often you train so much as the intensity of your workouts are and how much time you give your body to recover.
Exercise Per Session
You are not the Energizer Bunny. This should be obvious, but hear me out. You have only a limited amount of energy to work with for any given exercise session: blood sugar levels have been found to crash after only a half-hour workout.
However fit you may think you are already, the clock is ticking every time you exercise, and so you need to plan your workouts wisely. For maximum energy efficiency, focus on using compound movements – i.e., ones that use more than one joint at a time – in your workouts.
Most people can perform 3 to 4 high-intensity exercises during a single strength training session. Remember to get plenty of rest between sessions (1 to 2 days) so that your body can actually benefit.
Sets
If you finish one set of exercises and feel like you could do another, then you’re doing it wrong, as far as strength training goes. If you still have energy after your first set, then your workout needs to be more intense: “train to exhaustion” isn’t just a suggestion, it’s how you build a better body from the perspective of strength training.
If you train to exhaustion on the first set, then you’ve done everything you can. {Continue on to the next exercise, and do a full set of it as well}. You can train every day for weeks on end and never see any benefit from it: the key to success lies in the intensity of your workouts, not the frequency.
Your workout shouldn’t be static or stagnant, either: improve your results by alternating between high-repetition and low-repetition ranges in your exercise routine.
Did you get all that? Good. Now, get to work. You can use these strategies to make your strength training sessions even more effective.
Are you looking to get bigger, stronger, and shredded?
If so, you are going to want to take a look at this Strength Training System: A workout that delivers results.