Everyone would benefit from being stronger. Being strong is awesome and affords many benefits such as the opportunity to move better, perform better, and be leaner.

Conversely, a lack of strength can increase your injury risk, decrease your performance, and stop your body composition improvement dead in it’s tracks.

That’s right, it’s the quality which affects all other qualities. When it goes up, other things go up. It IS the alpha and the omega.

So what exactly is strength and how can you get yourself some more?

Strength is Neural

Strength is a function of the nervous system and has more to do with your brain than the size of your muscles. Really.

In order to display true strength your brain must be able to coordinate the many muscle groups involved in the movement to work together to accomplish the task. We’re talking contraction, relaxation, stabilization, and more.

Beginners in the gym are a prime example of this. They are able to make great strength gains in the first few weeks of training despite very small changes in muscle mass. This is because their bodies are learning to perform the movements and learning to coordinate their strength.

As their technique improves their performance does as well. Does this mean that intermediate and advanced trainees are done with training their nervous systems? Absolutely not. For your body to learn and get better at anything you need to practice.

Strength, being a skill, is also something that can be practiced. The key is to figure out the best type of practice for you.

Who Are You?

Beginners

It has been shown that beginners can make progress with as little as 40% of their 1RM. For you guys just work on practicing the lifts, nothing super heavy, in the 6-8 rep range for your main lifts and the 10-15 rep range for your accessory lifts. Stick with 3-4 sets.

Intermediates

Intermediates require weights in the 80-90% of 1RM to make strength gains. Your bodies are now decently proficient in the lifts that coordination doesn’t play quite as huge a role as it once did in your early days. Now you gotta start lifting some heavy weights.

Start working in the 3-5 rep range along with increasing the number of sets to 4-5. The lower reps will allow you to use heavier weights and the increase in sets will give you enough volume of practice to make progress. Start using heavier weights for your accessory work as well by lifting in the 8-12 rep range.

Advanced

Welcome to the big leagues. You guys need to lift in the 90%+ range to make real progress; these are going to be maximal efforts.

Start lifting in the 1-3 rep range for your main lifts and up the number of sets to as high as 10! With the reps being so low you will require many sets to get enough volume in.

Your accessory work can stay in the 8-10 range and can even dip down into the 5-7 rep range if you can handle it.

Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

Are you practicing the proper skills for YOU to make gains? Figure out where you stand on the beginner – advanced spectrum and then lift in the parameters which work for you.