Training for strength is different to training for muscle mass, and training for powerlifting is different again. If you want to be as strong as you can, you need to understand the fundamental principles and specific methods of relevance to your goal. Learn all of this and more in this episode of the HOW TO TRAIN series.
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Transcript
The following transcript is AI generated, so please excuse any errors:
Gary McGowan:
Hello and welcome to the Triage Method podcast with me Gary McGowan and my co-host as always, Mr Patrick Farrell. Paddy, how are you?
Paddy:
Positively splendid Gary I hope you were the same.
Gary McGowan:
Fantastic. I’m roasting here, sweating in Cork, Ireland, far more than I was in Portugal due to this lack of air conditioning that we have and I’m sure you’re the same.
Paddy:
Now London is very warm but at least all my windows can be open so there’s a nice breeze and my flat is like shaded in the early part of the day and then gets absolutely blasted out of it in the afternoon so it’s the early part of the day now so there’s still some shade.
Gary McGowan:
Very good. And today we’re talking about strength. We’re continuing the how to train series. And in the last one we talked about was muscle building and hypertrophy or bodybuilding. So that’s obviously one category of strength sports or ways that people might use resistance training where they’re trying to maximize muscle mass. However, in this episode, what we’re talking about is something that looks very similar to the average person training for strength. but is actually quite different when it comes to the specifics of programming. So there’s significant crossover, but there are definitely more specific considerations when it comes to training for strength, and then more specific again, if you’re training for powerlifting. And this is an important point, because strength is simply task-specific force production. That’s what it is. So we could talk about strength in the context of you being, for example, someone that does… moving, helping people move houses and you lift fridges and you lift sinks and whatever else. Okay, that could be what we’re talking about in terms of strength. But most often when it comes to the gym, what we’re talking about is the ability to lift as much weight as possible with specific or applied to specific exercises. So for example, squat strength, overhead press strength, deadlift strength and pull-up strength and so on. Most of the time we end up talking about that in the context of a one rep max. Probably because it’s so related to, one, you being able to lift as much as possible and everyone wants to see where their limit is, but then two, because of the sport of powerlifting, they test one rep max. But you could also talk about your three rep max strength, your five rep max strength, and these might be more relevant for different populations. So the first opening point that’s really important is that it’s task specific and you can think of strength in terms of your own goals. So you might be training for strength. even if you’re not a power lifter and even if you’re not trying to test your one rep max.
Paddy:
And the really difficult thing about strength, especially when we talk about like a programming discussion, it’s both generalized and specific in terms of if you want to just strengthen your pecs, right, those pressing muscles, you know, in your chest, right? It’s generalized in terms of if you get a stronger dumbbell bench press, stronger chest press, stronger bench press, there’s a degree of carryover between all of them because it’s the same muscles, it’s roughly the same movement pattern. Cool, right? So there’s a generalizable… aspect to it and obviously some exercises some movements some whatever have greater carryover to different movements you know whatever right but there’s also a very specific aspect to it as well just because you get stronger pecs stronger pressing muscles triceps shoulders etc you know from doing a chest press doesn’t mean that you’re going to maximize your ability on the bench press you know there is a there is some carryover there is a degree of generalized carryover but it may not be specific enough to improve your actual bench press because we have to remember that there is a large degree of technique involved in lifting. You know you think oh it’s just lifting weights, it’s just go in and lift the weights, it’s not a big deal right? But it is a very technical sport when we’re talking about powerlifting right? Like it’s heavy loads and you have to be so accurate with the way you actually move those loads. right because first of all there’s a large injury risk especially if you’re doing like a one rep max but also you’re not going to maximize your force output if there’s a load of you know extra movements elbows flaring all over the place shoulders moving whatever you know you’re not going to maximize your force production right so there’s that in an exercise sense that’s specific but also it’s specific in terms of the exact loading parameters you know if you are If you improve your, I don’t know, let’s say your 8 rep max on the bench press, there is a generalized carryover to improving your 1 rep max, but if you never practice 1 rep maxes, you’re not going to develop the skill of expressing that 1 rep max, right? Now that’s not to say that if all we really care about is our 1 rep max, or all we really care about is our 8 rep max, or whatever it is, that that’s the only thing that we train, that’s not to say that. you do have to train that specific, like again, if it’s a one rep max you want to improve, you do have to train four singles basically, but you also get some generalized carryover from training other rep ranges. And training other rep ranges might make more logistical sense in terms of you can get more practice with the movement, you can maybe build a specific muscle or muscle in specific areas. Like there’s a lot of reasons why you wouldn’t necessarily always just. do… well you wouldn’t always train the way you intend to compete, right? So again, strength is specific… sorry, let’s start again. Strength is generalized, there’s a large carryover, it’s specific to the exercises, but it’s also specific to the exact loading parameters, whether it’s the rep range or number of sets. Like you might want to improve your 5 rep an absolute strength thing in terms of your 5 rep max strength and then also an endurance aspect because you want to do it for multiple sets. So there’s a lot of components to this is basically what I’m trying to say and that can make it difficult when we’re actually trying to program for this stuff because like Gary said we’re talking today about improving strength and a lot of people when they think of strength they really think of lower rep ranges and they generally if we’re talking about a gym setting. they think of the powerlifting movements, you know? They’re like, oh, it’s the squat, the bench, the deadlift. But you could also do the same things for your chin up, your front squat, your hip thrust, your like any other movement, you know? Now, why would you do that? That’s ultimately the crux of the issue. You know, a lot of that is unnecessary. And again, oftentimes, and we’ve said it previously on the podcast multiple times, but often times people train the powerlifts when they’re not actually the best movement for the job that person is trying to actually accomplish, right? So, very specific, very generalized, the discussion is very convoluted, so how do we start the programming discussion, Gary? Yeah, absolutely.
Gary McGowan:
Yeah, so the thing I’d like to mention first and foremost when it comes to beginning to train strength is that when you train for muscle building, your focus is on trying to stimulate the muscle as much as possible. So what you’re primarily trying to achieve is some sort of internal stimulus that leads to an adaptation within the muscle. When you train for strength, what you’re trying to do is to be as efficient as possible. It’s kind of the opposite to training for hypertrophy, even though you can get hypertrophy while training for strength. Because training for hypertrophy, you’re actually trying to be inefficient. So we often do things, for example, if we’re doing chin-ups, we might use certain cues to try to focus more on the lats. So we wanna squeeze our lats, we wanna feel the muscles working. If you’re training for strength, you actually don’t want that at all. You just wanna be as efficient as possible. So it might actually work your lats a little bit less, but you’re able to do more weight. You see that in the difference between how someone might bench press, let’s say, for maximal strength, where they might arch their back as much as possible, reduce the range of motion as much as possible, take a super wide grip, and they’re actually trying to reduce the range of motion, they’re trying to reduce the total demand on the pecs, and just maximize the amount of weight they can lift. So that’s something that’s really important to differentiate here, is we’re aiming at efficiency, we’re aiming at performance. We’re not necessarily aiming at the internal stimulus, despite the fact that they are related. means is that when you begin to approach strength training you adopt a technique that maximizes your efficiency. So for example, you might do a low bar back squat, squatting to parallel or just an inch below to move as efficiently as possible, but you mightn’t feel your quads work as much when you do that versus when you do a really deep high bar back squat or a really deep front squat. So in the second context there, you’re maximizing range of motion, you’re trying to get a deep stretch in the quads, you have an internal focus on the quads, whereas with the strength example, you’re just trying to move as much weight as possible, as efficiently as possible, regardless of the internal stimulus on the muscle. This is a very key difference because it determines how you perform the exercises that you perform. Most programs will feature both internally focused exercises where there’s a hypertrophy component and those that are more force production focused where we’re trying to move the most amount of weight. A lot of people probably need a little bit of both. If you’re a bodybuilder, you’re gonna be more towards the internal side and if you’re a powerlifter, you’re gonna be more towards the performance or strength expression side, okay? So that’s the first thing. Anything to add on that point?
Paddy:
No, not a huge amount. And just practically speaking, like when you talk about this, like internal versus external focus, like say, for example, in a bodybuilding context, it might be a case of, you still have an internal focus, like you’re still trying to maximize the tension on, again, your pecs or whatever muscle it is. But you don’t mind if you don’t feel that as much, you don’t mind if, you know, there is a bit of, you know. I’m kind of just going through the movement if that movement is an like an externally focused movement like you might be like right This is just a high output movement It’s not great for any specific thing like we’ll just say like a bench press or something, you know It’s like it’s not great for you know overall peck development for a lot of people But it’s a good you know Standardizable movement that I can just you know put a lot of force into you put a lot of output into so you still have This kind of mix of internal and external cues where you’re just like the main focus is really improving my strength on this exercise I don’t care if that means that I don’t feel it as much and that’s the goal, the external focus. and then the rest of your movements you might have a very internal focus being like I’m really squeezing, I’m really making sure everything is lined up perfectly etc. Whereas for powerlifting or strength specific stuff you might have less of that internal focus. Like the overall focus is on what I really only care about the somewhat arbitrary standards that are set by my powerlifting federation being like this is how low I have to squat, these are the rules of the dead. lift these are the rules of the bench press which again like you take the bench press for example like if it was all about absolute strength you wouldn’t have to pause at the bottom of a bench press you know you would just touch and go same with kind of deadlifts to an extent like obviously you can do more like basically bouncing the bar off the ground you know so you could technically argue that oh well if you have to if you were able to walk the deadlift out you know take one step back and then bounce it off the ground like concentric phase first and then do the concentric, like you’d be able to lift more, a lot of the time, right? So the standards, what we’re actually trying to aim for, again, as I was saying earlier, it’s very specific. We have to be very clear on what we’re actually trying to improve because that dictates obviously the way we compete if it is powerlifting, but also the way we train. We have to make sure that we are actually training the right attributes.
Gary McGowan:
That just reminds me of the… I wonder why there’s never been any federation that’s done the mono lift version of the deadlift where like a squat, you lift up, they move the rack out and then you do the eccentric and the concentric. I’d be interested in seeing that. See if there’d be any difference in the world records. But anyway…
Paddy:
The movement is just arbitrarily. you know, they were based on the equipment was able to be, you know, done. It’s like, oh, I have a strength standard here, like what can you pick up off the ground, right? That’s a good general, like, oh, this is a good strength. But who the fuck decided on the radius, or, well, the diameter, obviously, but the radius of the plates, you know? Because that dictates the height at which you deadlift, you know? Like that’s why, like, you know, like Strongman, they use, like, the wagon wheel type things, you know? And it’s like, well, if that was just the standard, that’s now the standard. Like it’s all just arbitrary well largely arbitrary same with like bench height Like who the fuck decided like the height of the bench doesn’t work for tall lifters like It just doesn’t right like my knee is way above the bench in general whereas this little small person comes in They’re like yeah I don’t have to care about like my toes being on the floor versus my heels or whatever because their knee is below the fucking bench Regardless, you know, so it’s all just arbitrary
Gary McGowan:
And that brings us to practicing the actual skill, because this is very much related to what I just talked about. So you need to practice the skill of lifting. heavy weights. So these are different skills. So what you’ll notice very frequently, if you’ve done programming that features different rep ranges, is that within the first couple of weeks of doing a new rep range, you see very rapid increases in the weight that you’re lifting on the bar. And this is because lifting within different rep ranges has slightly different strength qualities. So if you were to go from doing sets of 10 to 15 to doing sets of let’s say three to five, on the first week, it’s probably gonna feel really weird to you doing the sets of three to five. and your estimated one rep max with the three to five rep weight might actually go down versus what you were doing in the 10 to 15 range. However, over subsequent weeks you’ll see fairly rapid increases in the weight that you’re lifting and it’s not necessarily that you’ve had any massive changes within your muscle, it’s that you’ve improved your skill considerably and gotten used to the requirements of lifting that percentage of your one rep max. So it’s very different because when people lift out a weight, let’s say that’s 60% of or at max, they take it out pretty casually, they bring it down slowly, they press it up. There’s a bit of effort, but they don’t have to really focus on bracing as hard as they can, breathing at the right time, getting their elbows in the right position, having strong wrists, if we’re talking about the bench press, and so on. So as you begin to develop all of those things, you are able to express more of the strength that you already inhabit. So that’s really important. So what this means then in practice is that
Paddy:
Sorry, just also on that, there’s a load of very specific things that you also do, like say for the bench press for example, you have to unwrap the bar, you have to bring it over the chest, so if you only ever do like, yeah well, say continuous reps, like you do three sets of eight reps, let’s just say, right? You only practice that three times, versus if you were to do singles every single time, like unwrapping the bar, stabilizing it, making sure it’s in the right place, everything, you’ve practiced that one component. way more, you know? Same with, you know, squatting. If you have to walk the bar out or whatever, or if it’s a…how do you call those things? The fucking… things, the clasps, yeah, yeah. Like if you’ve never practiced that, or you only do continuous reps, like you forget that that’s actually a skill, you know? You have to make sure you’re bracing, make sure you’re ready for that, you have to, you know, unwrap the bar, you have to do everything specifically. So if you, you need to practice that, as well as practice the actual skill of lifting the weights, you know?
Gary McGowan:
Absolutely. So that is really important. And what that looks like then in practice is you getting regular exposure to heavier weights. So, for example, the bulk of your training might be done, let’s say, in the five to eight rep range on average. but you’re getting that exposure to the one to three rep range relatively regularly. So for example, you might wanna be lifting close to your max all the time, but you might have one day per week where you do a single at RP seven to eight or two to three reps in reserve. So what you’re doing is maybe around your three rep max, you’re doing it for one rep, and then you’re getting exposure to 85 to 90% at least of your one rep max, and now you’re maintaining those adaptations. So even if you were doing a hypertrophy block of training reps you’re still getting exposure to these lower rep exposures. So just training for strength even if you’re training for a one rep max it doesn’t mean you need to do it all the time it doesn’t mean every set needs to be one to three but you need to have regular exposures so that is really important and getting those exposures at slightly lower RPE so it could be between six and eight let’s say not going all the way to failure and testing a one rep max really the fatigue that would come if you were testing your one rep max very regularly, okay? Now, this obviously becomes more important then as you move closer to a competition period or a deadline where you need to express your strength. So if you have a power lifting competition coming up during your peaking phase, you’re typically gonna have lower reps on average than if you were further away during a hypertrophy block. So at that point in time, you’re gonna have more regular exposures of this maximal force production. And even if you’re not doing very, very heavy weights, you might even still stick lower reps with lighter weights. So for example, you might be using your five to seven rep max and still just doing one to three reps to focus on speed, to focus on positioning, and to just focus on those one rep exposures. Another example of where this would come up would be even when people are doing their deadlifts as powerlifters, sometimes they’ll do the concentric, drop it really quickly, and then reset reps similar in terms of skill and requirements as the eventual exposure that they’re training for, which is the one rep max. So they’re resetting between reps rather than doing them continuously. So how specific you’re going to be here depends on how far you are from competition and how specific you actually need to be. If you’re a general trainee trying to get stronger, maybe you just generally want to lift more weights over time, you don’t need to worry too much about getting the regular one rep max or one rep exposures, you might want to get exposure in that one to three rep range at least at some point in the week over time. Again, it doesn’t have to be to failure. We would say that for strength generally, the kind of RPE or reps and reserve recommendations end up being somewhat similar to hypertrophy training on average. So maybe like one to three, one to four reps and reserve most of the time. But I would say that with my strength trainees, I often end up using slightly different techniques in terms of more sets of low reps or of more reps in reserve. So for example, it could be four to five reps in reserve for more sets. Let’s say it was just set to three. So three reps at four to five RIR by even like five to seven sets sometimes. Because the goal there is that if I’m trying to get my client to focus on developing their technique and get this exposure without their technique degrading, then that’s a really specific way of me being able to do that. Because if you’re doing all sets of eight, then sets five to eight are actually very different, or reps five to eight I should say, look very different to what your one rep max rep would look like if you were just doing that in isolation. So sometimes doing more sets, lower reps, and a little bit further from failure can allow someone to just really focus in on each rep and maintain the skill and the quality of their rep.
Paddy:
Yeah, I think that’s the key thing to understand about all of this. It’s the skill. Like you are practicing a skill here. It’s not testing, it’s not seeing going in going like, I wonder what my one rep max is today, has it gone up? That’s what a lot of people think powerlifting training is, right? It’s also not just like, oh, I’m gonna have to train like lower reps and all of those sets are gonna be as close to failure as possible. Like I’m gonna do three sets of three or something. They’re all like. 90% or more of my one rep max. It’s basically just skill. It’s skill acquisition, skill maintenance, and skill potentiation. To put this into a more practical or visual thing, let’s just say you’ve always trained more of a bodybuilding type training program. Let’s say you do four days per week. I would say that’s probably most people’s exposure. They’ve trained three, four days per week in some sort of more bodybuilding kind of way. refer back to the last step, I think it was the last step, so anyway, about how to set that up better. But let’s just take that general framework. If you were really like, right, I want to actually focus a little bit more on like specific strength. I want to maybe think about transitioning into powerlifting or think about, you know, seeing where my one rep max strength actually is on these movements, you know. A very simple change, if we’re thinking about this from a skill acquisition point of view, is all we would have to… change is maybe start bringing in some lower rep work still with kind of like that you know one to four to five even reps in reserve right so let’s say you know you do a lower body day an upper body day a lower body day an upper body day that’s the way your four day per week program looks right let’s just say you change nothing else about the general setup of that except your first lower body day you do the squat right and that’s what you do let’s just start with one set right you’re doing one set of a heavy weight let’s ninety percent seek a probably do three wraps or so with that way you’re just going to do one single rice or just one set one single without the urethra because that is if it is one that max you’re going in mentally setting up everything’s perfect to bracing from the start to practice in the movement taking the bar on rackiness everything right making sure it’s perfect right your technique perfect everything right the second upper body day then you’re doing one, one rep, that’s all. Right, it’s about 90% of your one rep max, or what you perceive, or what you think your one rep max is, because everyone always over inflates, they’re like, oh yeah, I could definitely do three plates. You know, there’s that whole discussion as well. But anyway, right, it’s about 90%, so you still have two, maybe three reps in the tank with this. You’re just practicing, it’s a heavy enough weight, I’m practicing for that one rep max. And then on the second lower body day, you do it with the deadlift. you know you just go okay I’m going in I’m practicing my deadlift I’m still setting it up as if it’s 90% but this is I’m treating this as if it’s a one rep max and then that second upper body day you do the bench press again because a lot of people do find they need a little bit more frequency of you know practicing the movement with the upper body pressing and there is also a large degree of carryover between the squat especially a kind of more lower bar large degree of carryover. So if we did nothing else except change this general four day per week bodybuilding program and we just introduced one set of 90% of your one rep max for one rep right on those movements as described right that would be that would give you a taste of what it’s like to train more in a kind of powerlifting specific manner. Now is that how you optimize your powerlifting training? Absolutely not. that would give you a taste and that’s something that I do a lot of times, maybe not that exact set up, but a lot of times with clients who are like, you know what, I actually want to just test out my OneRep Max on the bench or something. It’s something that I really, I just want to know where I am, I want to hit like a hundred kilo bench press or whatever it is. They’re just like, that’s a focus for me. We might bring in a low overall load exposure across the week of that, but we’re just going to practice it. We’re just going to practice that movement. We’re going to spend the next 12 weeks. slowly creeping up the other stuff, the general strength, the strengthening your pecs, getting better in the eight rep ranges, the six rep ranges, and whatever else, right? But we still need to practice feeling that heavier weight. And then when it comes into, if you’re a powerlifter or whatever, more competition-focused time, generally if you’re a powerlifter, that won’t be the overall setup of your program. But again, using a client as an example, they’re like, okay, well, I wanna test things in the next eight weeks. I want to peak 8 weeks time, I want to be at my max strength, that’s when I want to test. Then we might start reducing the overall exposure to hypertrophy work, that general bodybuilding training that we’re doing, and we start doing more sets, more practice sets of those heavier weights. And maybe we start creeping up the weights that we’re using in terms of, okay, now we’re going to try, go to whatever, like if we were doing 3 reps in reserve, now we’re going to do 2 reps in reserve. Let’s see how you… handle that stress. And we’re still just doing one rep, right? And then we might go, okay, over time, we might go, okay, we’re doing one rep in reserve. So this is your two rep max here, and we’re doing it for one rep. So this should be very challenging, right? And that kind of gives you a lot of practice with the skill of lifting, lifting those heavier weights. Now, that’s not how we would set it up for everyone. I just wanted to make it a bit more like practical, like visually to be like, okay, well, I already do a four day per week training program if I wanted to improve my one rep max. What would that look like?
Gary McGowan:
Spot on. And then there are a couple of additional nuances then when it comes to, for example, rest periods. So how long you rest between sets is generally going to be greater when you’re doing strength training. Because what you have to realise is that we’re not trying to be short of breath. We’re not trying to be sweaty. We’re not trying to feel the maximum muscle burn when we’re training for strength. We’re trying to recover sufficiently between our belts. So that might be three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, or even more if you’re doing very high effort sets, okay? Generally what you want is that you’re able to come back into the next set feeling prepared to go again. You don’t wanna be in a position where you’re still sore or short of breath from the previous set. That’s just not effective strength training, and that’s going to lead to disproportionate amounts of fatigue and poorer performance on each respective set. So generally speaking, longer rest periods is what you’re looking for, and… While you could make the argument for very long rest periods in some cases, it becomes quite impractical. So you might find that five to 10 minutes is best for you. You see a lot of powerlifters resting for 10 minutes or even more between sets. But if you’re trying to get in a decent amount of volume across the training session, now you’re in the gym for three, four hours, which some powerlifters will do, but most of our listeners don’t have three, four hours to be spending at the gym, okay? So if you were to think of like one to three minutes as the… the rest period that covers most people, when it comes to power lifting, especially your really heavy work, we might see more in the three to five minute range. I find that with most of my clients, even if they’re training for strength, three minutes is generally sufficient, but for some of those higher effort sets, we will go a little bit higher, okay? The other thing on that then is something like tempo. So when we’re using tempo for hypertrophy training, we’re often trying to choose the tempo that allows the greatest focus on the muscle. So for example, we might do Nice and slow, three seconds down, pause at the bottom, feel the stretch, and then press up explosively. When it comes to strength, it’s actually quite individual because some people find that a really slow eccentric allows them to maintain their positioning really well, and they’re super explosive then on the concentric. Others will be really aggressive with dropping into the hole, like on a squat, for example, and they’re able to maintain their positioning. You need to start kind of general, so I would say, you know, let’s say on the squat and on the bench press. two seconds, maybe three seconds on the way down is a good place to start. And then you’re changing direction. Obviously, when it comes to the bench press, you have to pause for a fixed period of time. With the squat, you just change direction immediately, okay? So this is somewhat individual. It’s not easy to give rules for everyone because you’ll see vastly different eccentrics among power lifters. Some will go three, four seconds, and some will literally just drop it aggressively onto their chest. or aggressively into the hole on the squat. But I would start with around two seconds, maybe three seconds, see how it feels, and go from there. Generally, as your technique improves, you’ll be able to kind of drop a little bit faster without sacrificing technique and maintaining your bar path better. But especially early on, I would just be a little bit more controlled and not focus too much on just maximizing weight. Find your technique first, and the strength will come later.
Paddy:
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Just on the rest period things, obviously this is going to change based on how strong you are. Like if you’re a 300 kilo squatter versus a 30 kilo squatter, like naturally enough, you’re probably going to need a little bit more recovery after your 300 kilo squat, you know? So that obviously has to be taken into account. And similarly with like tempo and stuff, it depends on your overall situation. For example, like if you’re doing a squat and you have like a power gut, you know, you have a bit of a belly, you know? Like that bottom position in a squat could be very little actual tension for you. You’re basically trying to close a book on a tennis ball or something. Like that’s the hip, closing the hip distance or hip angle. So in that bottom position on the squat, you could actually be like, well, I could chill out here. So you having a pause in the bottom position is actually beneficial because you feel like you’re doing no work. Now there is obviously a lot of… dissipation of overall energy and stored in tendons and ligaments and fucking whatever else so it may not be ideal to pause for multiple seconds but you might find that okay I just actually have a pause here and then I’m able to press up or squat up a lot more efficiently right I just compose myself and then I go whereas someone else maybe if they’re very lean for example they just find that like staying in that bottom position especially if it’s like a you know a 90 degree you know hip angle, shin angle or whatever, like they’re able to like very much, their thigh is just parallel to the ground and there’s no contact between like their hamstring and their calf and there’s no contact between their abs or their stomach and their thighs. They might find that bottom position is like the most challenging position ever because there’s absolutely no rest, you know? Conversely, you’ll see people like Olympic lifters where they’ll squat deep as fuck, right? But at that bottom position, there’s actually not a huge amount of tension overall on the muscles because you’re at the complete end range of motion like your calves are completely covered by your hamstrings and yeah you have to still hold the position there’s a lot of core strength there’s a lot of whatever you know coordination that has to go on but that position is not actually all that challenging compared to other positions in the movement you know so a lot of this is just dictated by your anthropometry I suppose you’d say like you’re the way your body is set up And but also when we talk about tempo, we do have to also factor in if you’re training for a sport, like on the bench press, for example, in powerlifting, you have to pause the bench. You have to pause it on your chest and you have to wait for that like press command, right? So if you never train for that press command, if you never train that pause, it’s gonna be a completely different experience than when you do actually go to compete. You know, you’re not, like you haven’t trained. a very integral part of that sport, i.e. the pause on the chest. If you’ve just always been like, I’m dropping the bar to my chest and basically bouncing it off my chest. Like that’s a different movement than the bench press that is required for powerlifting. So while there is carryover, obviously you’re strengthening similar muscles, it’s a similar movement pattern, it’s not, as we were saying earlier on, it’s not perfectly specific to what you are actually trying to compete in, what you’re actually trying to train for.
Gary McGowan:
So with all of that said about training for strength, it is important to realize that hypertrophy training does play a strong role in strength. So while there are considerable neural contributors, meaning that the nervous system plays a really important role in strength output, other things like connective tissue strength and other variables like internal moment arms, your own anthropometry as Paddy was discussing, all these things contribute to your ability to lift a given weight, but your… muscle mass does as well. This is really important, okay? The bigger you get over time, the more weight you’ll typically be able to lift. So while you can find people that are skinnier than you, people that have less muscle that are stronger, generally speaking for an individual over time, as they get bigger, they will get stronger. And there comes a point where, if you wanna maximize your strength, you simply won’t get much more out of your current body if you don’t gain more muscle mass. Okay, so over time, that’s why you will see powerlifters, for example, moving up in weight classes as they struggle to gain strength. So they might kind of top out their ability with any given weight class, and then move up by trying to gain more muscle over time. Okay, so you can keep gaining strength without gaining muscle, but there is a limit to that, and you need to eventually try to lay down more muscle. So as a result, when people are trying to get stronger, they’ll often have periods of time where they’re deliberately gaining weight or at least trying to gain muscle. So that obviously involves the dietary side of things, which is kind of beyond the scope of this, but from a training perspective, it involves doing more conventional bodybuilding training with a powerlifting twist. So for example, you might apply… all of the things that we discussed in the last podcast, such as doing most of your sets in the six to 15 rep range, sticking to between one to four kind of broadly, reps and reserve again, doing more sets overall and focusing on some of those internal components. But because you’re a powerlifter, what you’re gonna still do is keep in your work on squat bench and deadlift or variations thereof, and also keep focusing on your technique and some of the strength work, like I said previously, singles or doubles or triples for example. So these hypertrophy blocks would be best used when you’re further away from a competition or from when you’re testing your one rep max. So what you wouldn’t wanna do is say, like let’s say you’re not a powerlifter, you’re just a general strength training. You say to yourself, right, at the end of July, I wanna test my one rep max and hit a new personal best. So up to that point, you’re gonna run a hypertrophy block and then test it. That wouldn’t be optimal, you might gain strength, to lead to the most specific expression of those qualities. What you’d be better off to do would have been, let’s say, maybe from February to April, you run your hypertrophy block, okay? So you’re eating in a calorie surplus, you’re training in this more bodybuilding type of fashion, you’re doing more volume, and you’re trying to gain muscle. And then what you do from May to May and June is you run your strength-focused training and you peak then coming into July. So you’re focused more on the lower rep. lower rep ranges and you’re also focused on the skill of strength on the specific exercises. So for example in your hypertrophy block, you might have done more front squatting or more safety bar squatting whereas now as it comes up to the expression of the strength, you’re going to do more of your specific competition squat or your preferred type of squat to try to train. So if you train or if you try to maximize your wonder backs using a low bar back squat, then that’s what you would train leading up to the time that you’re testing it, whereas you could do front squats, safety bar squats, high bar squats and so on further away from that period of time. So that’s really important. Now the other thing that is key is that when it comes to hypertrophy, you’re thinking about the whole body. Okay, so you’re asking yourself, for the type of strength that I’m trying to develop, what are the muscles that are going to contribute to strength? So for example, if you’re trying to maximize your deadlift strength, you might train deadlifts and you might try to, you know, just do loads of volume on deadlifts, but you also might focus on doing lots of RDLs, hip thrusts, you might do lots of shrugs, you might do lots of rows. So you’re trying to hypertrophy the muscles that contribute to that lift, such as the traps, the lats, the glutes, the hamstrings, and so on. So you’re trying to hypertrophy all the muscles that could potentially later on translate to specific strength contributions in that exercise, okay? Anything to add? Or will I continue?
Paddy:
Well, continue.
Gary McGowan:
Perfect, that’s all good. So, that then brings us to something that’s important on the hypertrophy side, but also kind of on the strength side. So what you can do when you’re doing your hypertrophy blocks is use exercises that compliment. your standard strength exercises. So for example, you could use pause deadlifts to work on your control in the bottom position, your ability to maintain positioning while getting more volume for hypertrophy purposes. You might do Larson presses, for example, so this is where your legs are up, to focus more on the upper body without using the force contribution from the lower body. You might do more front squats to focus more on your quads. All these different exercises can contribute to your hypertrophy, complement your strength development and potentially bring up some of the weak points in your lifts. The other thing that this does and this is really important in my area of coaching is it gives you variety to your joints and to your muscles and thus may potentially play a role in injury prevention. Because if we’re constantly hammering the exact same movement patterns all the time and we’re hyper specialized, that seems to be in most sports and probably lifting and a risk factor for injury, because you’re just constantly hammering the exact same movement pattern, exact same connective tissues, exact same small stabilizing muscles and so on. Whereas if we can do slightly different exercise variations, we hit the muscles differently, we hit the joints differently, we hit the connective tissues differently, and as a result, we’re distributing that force a bit better, rather than just constantly hammering the same position. So what that might look like is, let’s say you’re training for the bench press, that’s your main focus. It doesn’t mean you do all of your strength work, all of your hypertrophy work, with just a flat bench press. You might do your flat bench press, but then you might have a day where you do incline barbell bench press, then you might do incline dumbbell press, dumbbell press, flat dumbbell press, you might do weighted dips, all these different exercises, training similar muscles, and of course we still wanna have the flat bench press in there, especially as we’re coming to the point of expressing that strength, but we can have variety, particularly within these hypertrophy blocks, where the goal is muscle building, and the goal is to get some more variety in. All good?
Paddy:
Yeah, 100%. And I think, yeah, I think a lot of people think that there are some magical exercises that they’re missing out on that are going to like massively increase their strength or their muscle building or whatever. And like, it’s very, very often, or very rarely I should say, the case to that is true. You know, like yes, there are definitely certain exercises that you’re going to see a really nice return on investment for. because they train a certain attribute or a certain part of the movement that you’re struggling with or whatever. But too many people think that they’re missing out on a special exercise or a magical exercise and if I just knew that exercise or if I was able to perform the movement in a certain way it would overcome all my problems. Like you see this on the bench press all the time where people will talk about like, oh I have a sticking point at a certain point, you know, and I really need to train around like improving that sticking point. And very often it’s just the case of unfortunately… that’s just the way your body is set up. That’s just your biomechanics, you know? It’s like, that bottom portion of the lift is going to be challenging for you if you have very long arms, you know? If you’re basically being put into this incredibly stretched position, and it might not be a sticking point for someone else because they have these little short T-Rex arms, you know? Like if we just standardized the bench press for elbow position, all of a sudden, half of these sticking points. just magically go away. You know? But obviously that’s harder to standardize then because it’s not touching the chest for a lot of people. You know? But having said that. there very often are exercises that can really help you develop certain parts of a lift or really contribute a lot to a lift. I have a few clients that I’m thinking of right now that they just really weren’t able to develop their quads just due to their biomechanics or whatever and as a result they found that squatting never really targeted their quads. Their quads were underdeveloped, they were weaker so we did a few blocks of training really focused on improving quad strength, improving like positioning in a kind of squat movement, and now that they’ve gone back to squatting, all of a sudden they’re like, wow, I actually really feel my quads working in this, I’m able to stay more upright, I’m able to actually use my quads in this movement, right? So… the fact that we had spent a block of time really working on quad strength then carried over into the squat movement that they wanted to use, they just enjoyed the movement, but they were able to get more from that movement as a result of building up the skill of using their quads. So again. There are no magical exercises, but that doesn’t discount the fact that we can use certain exercises to improve certain lifts and you can get a lot from specific exercises.
Gary McGowan:
And that brings me to another area that’s definitely important in the clients that I work with, which is prehab slash rehab work. Okay. So obviously if you’re training for strength all the time, there is some risk of you getting injured. And one of the things that I try to do is As mentioned in the last section, we try to have variety and we try to train the muscles and the joints and the connective tissues with different angles, different resistance profiles and so on. So that’s a core principle. The other core principle is that We don’t wanna just keep adding more weight and keep adding more load indefinitely. So we wanna have periods of time where training is a little bit easier. We wanna have sets where we’re a little bit further from failure. And that all just comes down to basic load management. If you’re constantly trying to add weight to the bar every single week, and you’re allowing your technique to slip with maximal weights, that’s just not great from an injury prevention perspective, okay? Other things you might then do is, if you have specific weak points, you might have specific strengthening that you do for them. maybe you find that you’re constantly getting triceps tendinopathy or elbow pain associated with your bench press. So you could do additional exercises to complement that. For example, you might do tempo close grip bench press where you focus more on the triceps or you might have some skull crushers that you do to make sure that your elbows and your triceps are staying strong or push downs or whatever it happens to be. Similar thing could be said for your low back when it comes to dead lifting or your quads when it comes to squatting, that just fill in those gaps for you and keep those injuries at bay or keep those tissues strong. What that looks like is kind of different for everyone because it depends on what you’re actually struggling with and in a lot of cases, it’s not really about adding more specific exercises in, it ends up being more about how we distribute your volume throughout the week. So for example, if someone’s having let’s say that elbow problem what I might get them to do is reduce their volume on the flat bench press. And we might do more volume than on dumbbell presses or machine chest presses where their elbows aren’t at them as much. And we’re still able to get the same total volume of work for the chest across the week and for pressing like movements, but we’re just not putting it all through the exact same type of movement and thus not getting the exact same problems when it comes to the elbow. And that applies to the shoulder, it applies to the knee, it applies to the hip, to the low back. so on. So this depends on your own situation, but just note that you don’t always have to be training these lifts like every single workout. Variation and load management are key principles and that I’d say would take care of like 90% of the clients that I end up dealing with who have problems associated with lifting for strength.
Paddy:
100% I couldn’t agree with you more and then just that final point that we have with regards to the resistance training and then we’ll just quickly touch on cardiovascular training and you should practice as you aim to compete right we discussed this earlier on in terms of like if you’re training for the one rep max you need to practice one rep max it’s if you’re training for a bench press with a pause you need to train the bench press with a pause like yes you’re going to get some carryover from like bouncing it off your chest but it’s not as specific as if you were training specifically for that. And this is important if you are aiming to compete in powerlifting, like on the day, on competition day, you’re going to be asked to train, well, effectively compete in a full body manner, right? You’re gonna be asked to compete in terms of you got your squat, you got your bench press, you got your deadlift, right? If you’ve never done that before, if you’ve always done something like I described earlier on where you do a lower body day, then you do an upper body day, a lower body day, an upper body day, like, you’ve… missed out on the skill acquisition of training a full body you know powerlifting completely like I’m just practicing my lifts on this day I’m just training those lifts on this day right now that might not be a problem but you potentially do see issues arise like people will find like I don’t know for example their lower back starts cramping up when they get to deadlifts you know they’ve never like they basically identify a weakness or an issue because they’ve done their squats you know obviously that you know trains the lower back to a degree and then they’re doing their bench press and especially if they have a huge arch on their bench press like you’re getting those erectors and everything into like these really shortened positions and then you go to do your deadlift and all of a sudden you’re knocking 20% off where you thought your strength was on the deadlift because your fatigue from squatting your low back your erectors everything are cramping up now and you’re just not able to express the strength that you already have because of the overall setup of the day right so There is a good argument to be made that you should integrate at least some, we’ll call it like a full body training day, into your overall programming if powerlifting is the goal. But, and this kind of applies to the cardiovascular stuff as well, like if you are competing in powerlifting, especially if you’re competing in certain federations that have basically a day of lifting, like you’re basically training all day. You’re basically being asked to compete for eight hours. That’s not always the case. you have to remember that is an endurance event as much as it is a strength event. Because if you’re being asked to do your one rep max squat earlier in the day and then your deadlift is not till fucking three, four hours later, again this happens in certain federations where there’s a lot of lifters, you have to be prepared for that. And some of that is just aerobic fitness. Some of it is obviously specific nutrition protocols and hydration. whatever else, but you can practice this. So if you are trying to be the best powerlifter possible, you probably should practice this.
Gary McGowan:
I would agree. And you touched there on the concept of aerobic fitness. And this is something that is obviously neglected quite a bit by people that are training for strength. And I would say that my recommendations, even if you’re competing in powerlifting, don’t really change. I think that you should still be doing your aerobic work. I think it’s really important for health. Obviously I’m biased, we’re biased because we talk about health a lot. But I think that doing your… you know, 150 minutes even, let’s say, of moderate intensity aerobic work per week, I’m not convinced that’s gonna take away from your recovery from your power lifting training or your adaptations in any way at all. You know, it’s relatively low intensity, you can do that kind of zone two, 60 to 70% of your max heart rate. It’s not gonna take much away from you and the aerobic fitness long term will, one, certainly contribute to better health, but two, may contribute to better recovery between those sets of your power. training and potentially to your endurance on these days when you are competing. So that’s sort of speculative because we don’t obviously have a lot of evidence on whether or not aerobic fitness makes any difference in power lifting but I think from a training longevity perspective and in particular especially as you transition into your hypertrophy blocks where you need a bit more cardiovascular fitness I think you get a bit more out of your training if you have a little bit more fitness okay so I would still recommend that you do that and of course even at the base level get in your step each day, you know, powerlifters, their training is not, you know, very energy intensive, okay, the stronger you get, obviously it becomes more energy intensive, but you should still be focusing on getting your five, seven, eight, ten thousand steps, hopefully, per day. That would be ideal, especially from a health perspective.
Paddy:
Yeah, like I always, when I talk to like my powerlifting friends or if I have clients that are interested in powerlifting or were previous powerlifters and they want to transition to more of a health focused approach, I always have the discussion of like, right, if you are getting absolutely dusted off by a fibre upset, you know, like your lungs are burning, you like struggled to catch your breath after that, like that impacts your entire quality of life, right? Because walking up a stairs… must be fucking awful for you, you know? So even if we just improve your baseline level of fitness to what we would probably call like a normal level of fitness, like you’re gonna see massive improvements, maybe not in your sport, but in your general life and your ability to interact with the world, you know? Like some of my like paralleling friends or whatever, like when I live in Ireland, I live beside a mountain, and we’d be like, oh yeah, let’s go for a hike. And they’d be four minutes into the hike. struggling to breathe you know and yeah obviously that’s a very specific situation but if you can’t interact with the world like you can’t go on a hike with your friends like what the fuck is all the training for yeah obviously you’re gonna be very strong but you’ve only maximized one aspect of overall strength whereas there’s people who are probably just as strong as you who are maybe even stronger than you who also already have a baseline level of fitness you know they’re able to do both of those things you know it’s like it’s not like it detracts so much from your ability to train for absolute strength that you know it’s just it’s just not worth it at all it’s probably very minimal if any impact on your overall strength or your ability to train powerlifting the only thing is obviously naturally enough takes some time you know what i often recommend is just getting those baseline steps maybe it is you go for a couple of walks resistance resistant to this so often times I’ll just be like put on a weight vest you know make it into a strength training thing you know and they paratroopers generally seem to be a bit more receptive to that just be like all I want you to do is rack up five to six thousand steps five to seven thousand whatever it is whatever makes sense for them per day just put on a ten kilo weight vest once that gets too easy for you use 15 kilos get to 20 kilos you know it’s just like make it into a strength focused thing for them and all of a sudden you get some buy in. You know, so that is a little cheat code that I often use.
Gary McGowan:
Perfect. And that’s a wrap on training for Strength, I think. Perfect, so guys, as always. If you enjoy the podcast, we appreciate when you share it, we appreciate when you recommend it to friends, and leave a rating and review if you can. If you’d like more from us, we do put out a weekly newsletter, which you can subscribe to. You get exclusive content there, you get occasional offers as well, and content that you just won’t find on our social media. If you don’t use social media very much, you can also use the newsletter as a means to catch up on what we’ve produced throughout the week. So we give a roundup of all of our Instagram posts, our YouTube videos, and so on. And on that note, We do post a lot on YouTube these days. We have at least three new videos every single week So make sure that you subscribe to keep up The feedback has been great so far, and we hope to continue building our YouTube following and get lots of you educated through that platform. We have coaching spaces available as well, so if you’re interested in our coaching service, do make sure that you get in touch. We have a form below that you can click and apply, and then you can work with a member of our expert coaching team. We also have our nutrition certification. There’s one more week that you can sign up to the triage method nutrition cert and get certified as a nutrition coach. get on that before the first intake closes, you can join this week and then it will be closed for the following six months at which point we’ll be launching version two. Just a note on that, if you do join, you will still have access to subsequent updates that we make. So don’t feel like joining within the next week is in any way a disadvantage. If anything, it’s better because you have more time to get through the initial content and then dig into any additional updates that we have.
Paddy:
Yeah, and also it’ll likely be more expensive when we relaunch it because naturally enough we will be updating it with lots more so, you know, it becomes more expensive. But yeah, I don’t have anything else to add. I’ll just reiterate that the intake does close on the 30th of June, I think it is, which is the Friday, and I know every single time we do this, you know, and this sounds like a marketing tactic or whatever, but it’s genuinely not. Every single time we have an end date of like… Oh, intake closes on this date or you know, this service ends or whatever on this date. The three or four days afterwards, we just get a load of messages from people being like, oh, I didn’t realize it was closed on this date. Can I jump in? Oh, I thought it was X, Y, Z, like so many different things, you know? And unfortunately, we won’t be able to let you in after it. Just the way the system, we have to work around the systems that we have. I can’t just manually go, oh yeah, just jump in. you know so unfortunately if you’re out you missed the intake you missed the intake so don’t miss it. Friday I think it’s the 30th just make sure you jump in.
Gary McGowan:
Wonderful. And we’ll see you in the next podcast, guys. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye.
Paddy:
Thank you.
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