Strength training is recognized as a critical element of successful fitness for people of all ages and conditions. In the past, the idea of developing muscular strength primarily applied to athletes. Recent research shows that it has a dramatic effect on weight loss, metabolism, and other critical health considerations as we age. Learning how to strength train can be tricky. There’s no shortage of videos, books, and articles offering how-to instruction for weightlifting and other resistance training approaches. The breadth of available material can be overwhelming. In this article, I offer background information and basic concepts about how best to approach strength training. Even if you’ve been in the gym and lifting weights for years, some of these concepts will help you improve the effectiveness of your training. If you’re new to strength training or have tried to do it but felt you were a little lost, this will give you a solid foundation and help you move ahead with confidence that you are on the right path. It is worth noting that this article focuses on developing greater muscle size and strength and not on increasing muscle endurance. But both goals help you lose weight, become more fit, and reduce injury potential. Also, this article focuses more on the “what” and “why” of strength training and less on the “how.” It’s a good place to start so that you can pick a program and exercises knowing how to get the most from them. I have also included a cheat sheet at the bottom to help you remember the key points.
What is Strength Training?
Strength training, in its most basic form, is performed with the intent to make your muscles and body stronger. This usually results not only in greater strength but also in increases in muscle size and definition. Don’t worry about getting muscles that are too big or looking like a bodybuilder. The increase in muscle size will be inspiring but not overwhelming, and most of what you’ll notice will be greater muscle strength and definition. Strength training differs from other types of exercise, like cardio or flexibility training, which offer improvement in endurance, flexibility, and balance. Strength training, while important, doesn’t replace those other exercises. It does, though, improve your performance in those areas and offers you benefits not often found in other forms of exercise. These benefits include reduced injury potential, maintaining or growing muscle mass, and helping with losing and managing body weight over time. It also strengthens joints and connective tissue and maintains bone mass. Strength training burns calories during your workouts and for a few days after each workout while your muscles recover. For that reason, it is recognized as a critical part of body weight management.
To improve the strength of your muscles, you must place them under stress and then allow them to recover. This is done through resistance. The resistance must be progressive. In other words, you must increase the resistance (i.e., weight or tension) as you progress through a workout and across workouts over time. This is known as progressive resistance training, which is core to strength training. There are many ways to approach progressive resistance training, which can make getting started confusing. Regardless of which program or approach you choose, the following considerations are important and will help you succeed.
Muscle Development Basics
Muscles exist in your body to move bones. They connect to bones through tendons (connective tissue), and they act on your bones by contracting or flexing and then relaxing. When muscles contract, they push or pull bones. Muscle tissue reacts to the stress caused by resistance. So, when stress or resistance to muscle flexing increases, the muscle encounters damage in the form of small tears in the muscle tissue. This is why your muscles feel sore after intense use. That soreness takes twenty-four to forty-eight hours to heal. The term for that is “Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness” or “DOMS.” Muscles grow, developing greater strength, definition, and size while healing, during DOMS. They don’t develop during the exercise, even though they fill with blood and look bigger after you start working them. When your muscles look bigger during a workout, we call that a “pump” because blood is pumped into them to help them contract against resistance (e.g., by moving a heavy weight). Actual muscle development, or growth, occurs during recovery. So, you must make sure your muscles have time to recover after a workout before working them again.
Increasing resistance is critical to muscle development. If you do the same exercises with the same level of resistance continually, you won’t experience increases in strength or muscle size. Such an approach will help to maintain muscle strength, but it won’t improve muscle strength, which is necessary to enjoy many of the benefits of strength training. The effort must be progressive, which means you must increase the stress on your muscles over time. That means you should have strength training goals. For example, you should want to increase the amount of weight you can move over time, or increase the number of times (reps) you can move it, or both. There will be times when you fall behind, and your strength reduces due to muscle atrophy (e.g., you’re on vacation, or you’re sick for a long time and can’t exercise). That’s okay; restarting your routine and finding the right level of DOMS again has all the same benefits that it did before.
Muscles are comprised of two types of muscle fiber (collections of muscle cells): type one or fast-twitch and type two or slow-twitch. Fast-twitch fibers cause muscles to contract quickly and with force. Slow-twitch fibers cause slower contractions that can be repeated for longer periods of time before fatigue sets in. Most strength training utilizes fast-twitch muscle fibers. Slow-twitch fibers drive endurance-related performance for exercises like swimming, biking, and distance running. Slow-twitch development can also occur with strength training, where lighter weights and higher repetitions are the focus. Training one type of muscle fiber does not improve the performance of the other. Both types will develop more strength as you increase resistance. You must train your muscles for what you want to achieve. Most weightlifting, including bodybuilding and power lifting, results in the development of fast-twitch muscle fibers. If you are focusing on higher repetition -lots of reps and sets at lower weight- your muscle endurance will increase, but you won’t see large changes in muscle size or strength. So, if your goal is to reshape your body, you need to focus on training fast-twitch muscles, which means increasing weight or similar resistance (band resistance, etc.) over time. If your goal is to improve running or biking performance, slow-twitch muscle development is more important. DOMS will set in with both types of training and is a good indicator of how effective your training is. However, DOMS will be more prevalent when developing fast-twitch muscle fibers from activities like weightlifting. If there is no DOMS, you’ve likely hit a plateau and are not longer developing new muscle tissue. Hence, the old saying: “No Pain, No Gain.”
“No Pain, No Gain”
Just know that too much pain is a problem. You’ll experience more soreness early in your journey. It will diminish over time. But, if you fail to continue to challenge your muscles with greater goals (progressive resistance), you won’t experience DOMS or new development. You should feel a little sore a day or so after each workout, but it shouldn’t be like it was at first unless you’re pushing hard. A “little” soreness is what we sometimes call a good soreness or good burn. Listen to your body. It will tell you not only when you’ve overdone it, but also when you haven’t done enough.
Keys to Muscle Development
There is an endless array of strength training programs suggesting various exercise sequences for various reasons. Many of these are the result of an individual’s success in developing strength and muscle size and don’t necessarily work well for everyone. If your focus is primarily on increasing your muscle strength, shape, and size, there are a few basic concepts you should consider. These might also be helpful if your goals are to increase muscle endurance.
- Focus on the muscles you want to develop, not on the exercise. Unlike a sport where your focus is on the mechanics of hitting a ball or moving an object, developing your muscles is best done by thinking about the muscle you want to develop. Muscle development goals should drive which exercise you choose and how you perform it for maximum effect on the muscle or muscle group. There is always more than one exercise to develop any given muscle or muscle group. As you look at the equipment and weights in the gym or as you watch others working out, think about what muscles are being worked (flexed) and how that activity causes them to flex and move bones. I rarely get frustrated at the gym when the equipment I need is in use because it makes me consider a different exercise for the same muscle group. Mixing things up like that can be beneficial.
- The order in which you work muscles matters! There are various theories about how to order your exercises to maximize muscle development. Most of them come from power lifting and bodybuilding experience, while others come from newer fitness concepts like HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). I offer a simple and effective approach: work big muscles before small ones. This basic idea is time-honored and addresses one of the most common challenges in muscle development. If you work small muscles first, like your triceps -the muscle on the back of the upper arm that extends the lower arm out at the elbow- before working bigger muscles like the pectoralis major -the bigger part of your chest muscles-, then your bigger chest muscles will not develop because your smaller triceps are too fatigued from their workout earlier. In short, your triceps will give out before the stress from the chest exercise can affect your chest muscles. So, you would do a bench press or wide arm push-ups before triceps extensions.
- How much resistance is needed, and what about muscle failure? There’s a lot of conversation around the gym about working your muscles to failure. In general, you do need to significantly strain your muscles to develop them. Yet, working a muscle to total failure isn’t effective and can result in injury. An article in VeryWellFit.com by Paul Rogers (6/23/2024) suggests that, except for extreme athletes like bodybuilders who are preparing for competition, working to failure does not help. Instead, Rogers suggests working to what he calls “technical” failure. Rather than working until the muscle fails, you work until you can’t maintain good form. You can still complete the set, but you’re getting sloppy. I like this approach because I know that if I don’t push beyond my comfort level, I won’t realize gains. Keep in mind that any form of failure should happen in your last set or two of an exercise. You always start with a warm-up set at a relatively easy weight. If you’re doing 4 sets, the weight (resistance) on the third and fourth sets should be enough to make it hard to get more than 3 or 4 reps completed. But, don’t use weight you can only move for 1 rep. Also, initially, you might use a weight that allows for more reps for late sets until you get those muscles conditioned a little. Your goal is to have enough resistance to complete only 3 or 4 reps, but it’s okay to start with less resistance and more reps and work your way toward heavier weights (higher resistance).
- Recovery is critical. Assuming you are effective in straining your muscles during a workout, you’ll know that by how sore they become (DOMS), it is critical to give those muscles more than twenty-four hours to recover. Remember, all muscle development occurs during recovery, not during the workout. So you should not work the same muscles two days in a row. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t strength train every day or several days in a row. A great way to deal with this challenge is to follow a push-pull approach. In this approach, you work your “push” muscles one day and your “pull” muscles the next day. That way allows the muscles to get a full day of recovery before working again. For example, you would work your chest, shoulders, and triceps on Monday, and then your upper back, biceps, and forearms on Tuesday. See my article on “Push/Pull Split Strength Training” for specifics and sample plans. Also, if you’re exceptionally sore, take an extra day off. Excessive soreness (DOMS) is common when you start out or start increasing resistance significantly. Listen to your body and give it time to recover when necessary.
- Timing & Duration. Quantifying your workout can be a challenge. If you found a routine online or from a personal trainer, you have a pretty good sense of how much to do and for how long. But even if that’s the case, there are a few things you should think about. These include how much time to rest between sets, how long a repetition (rep) should take, and how many sets you should do for each exercise. Keep in mind these things can vary somewhat and that there’s no absolute right way to do things. Whatever produces results works.
- First, taking too much or too little time between sets can reduce the effectiveness of the exercise. For example, if you do a set of push-ups, say twenty-five of them, and then rest for thirty seconds before doing the next set, you’re not going complete all your sets, and your muscle development will be adversely affected by that. If you take 2 minutes between sets, you’re more likely to complete all the sets and get the full benefit. HIIT training and other programs like RIP and Body Pump offer almost no rest between sets. They are good programs for general fitness, but they will not drive significant increases in muscle strength or size. Ideally, you should rest for two to four minutes between sets. An article in MensHealth.com by Trevor Thieme (6/20/2024) suggests that resting longer between sets (3 minutes) results in more muscle development. I’ve not seen anything negative about taking even more time between sets, but waiting too long can result in incomplete workouts.
- Second is an issue with timing that relates to what’s called “time under tension” (TUT) or the amount of time the muscles are working during a rep. Some theories suggest that slowing down and keeping the muscle under tension for longer results in more development. Some research, however, indicates that increasing TUT has a negligible effect on increasing muscle size and strength. A 2016 article in SciELO Brazil, an online library of science articles, confirms this. The ideal duration for a single rep seems to be in the two to seven second range. I agree with this research. When you focus on keeping your muscles under tension for longer, it becomes harder to increase resistance for subsequent sets. We know that progressive increases in resistance are necessary to develop more size and strength.
- Finally, there’s always a question about how many sets are optimal. Some believe doing more sets is better, while others do too few to enjoy significant gains. In an article from Men’s Health by Kate Neudecker (10/9/2024), an optimal range is identified based on research and seems to be in 5-10 sets per week per muscle group range. So, if you’re working your chest twice a week, you would shoot for around 4 sets of bench press for each workout. Generally, professional bodybuilders will do a warm-up set with light weight and then 3 to 5 sets while increasing resistance for each set. So, you could do more than 4 sets, but I’ve found 4 sets (one set for warm up) works well if I stay true to increasing the weight for each set and again across weeks.
- Frequency Matters Too. Going to the gym can become burdensome, and it’s easy to find reasons to skip. But it’s very important to keep a regular and frequent routine. If you strength train only one or two days a week, you won’t see significant results, and you’ll become discouraged. Three days a week is better, but if you limit your time to that, you will need to work all muscles each day because you shouldn’t wait a full week to work the same muscle group again. Doing everything every time can be taxing and can result in burnout or poor effort in the gym. So, a good target is to work out at least four days a week and consider a push-pull approach to limit what you do for each workout. Also, it’s okay to take a week off for vacations or travel every now and then. You won’t lose everything in a week and you’ll have great workouts when you return to the gym. Sometimes I take a few days or a week off intentionally. Finally, know that everything you do counts. I’ve read books and articles about research studies that show that even one day a week of strength training has an effect on long-term health. The main concern with such a limited effort is that, while it’s good for your health, you won’t likely see results and might become discouraged.
Strength Training Cheat Sheet (8 Principles)
Here is a cheat sheet to help you remember the basics as you explore different routines and options for strength training:
- Strength train at least 3 or 4 days a week. Four is ideal with a Push-Pull approach.
- Focus on the muscles you want to develop for each workout and pick exercises for those muscles.
- Work big muscles before little ones during workouts.
- Increase resistance (weight) across sets and workouts a little at a time (progressive resistance).
- Shoot for 4 to 6 sets per exercise, where the last set or two are heavy/hard (only 3 to 4 reps).
- Take 2 to 4 minutes of rest between sets and finish each rep in 2 to 7 seconds (not too fast, not too slow).
- Don’t work the same muscles two days in a row (again, consider push-pull approach).
- Listen to your body and take an extra day off if you’re really sore. But don’t give up and let that become an excuse. If you’re not a little sore, you’re not developing.
Any and all training counts. So, if you disagree with my suggestions and have something that works for you, stay with it. There’s no one right way to get and stay in shape. If you feel good, have health, and are happy with your body, you’re doing great. My suggestions might help you get to the next level or help you get started, but In the end, the results are all that matter. As always, you should discuss your exercise and diet plans with a medical professional before beginning.
