| How can you define strength? Well in a nutshell, strength can be described as, ‘the ability of our muscles to exert a force required for moving a large resistance for a short period.’ In anatomical terms then strength is actually the number of motor units your nervous system assigns to a muscle to perform a specific task. The stronger you are the more motor units / muscle fibres activated, hence the greater the force exerted. If we want to get stronger, we must teach our body to assign more motor units to our muscles. We all have the ability to become stronger; it’s purely a matter of training adaptation. Of course we all have our limitations forced upon us by our genetic make up. Natural strength is a genetic gift. These are the people we see who compete in competitions such as the Olympics and Worlds Strongest Man/Women. These are people who have a greater number of fast and intermediate type muscle fibres. They may be naturally strong, but they still have to train hard to become one of the elite. Just because your genetics are not naturally tuned towards strength doesn’t mean that you can’t become stronger. On the contrary, as I said earlier everyone has the ability to become much stronger than they are. It just means we don’t all have the ability to become Olympic Power lifters. It’s all about training and they way in which we apply our training. When referring to resistance training, then maximal strength is usually measured as a 1 RM or one repetition maximum. So for example, if you can dead lift 100kg once only then that is your 1RM. But your 1 RM will be different for each exercise. For example your 1RM for an arm curl will be considerably less than a dead lift or chest press. So before you embark on a strength workout routine you need to define your workout and the exercises you will be including. A word of warning; finding out your 1 RM for an exercise can be quite dangerous if you don’t take necessary precautions. Always warm up thoroughly beforehand as a risk of injury from over exerting the muscles is high. Always use a spotter to help you with exercises such as bench press, squat etc. as there is a risk of dropping the weight on yourself or losing balance. When planning your strength workout routine you need to consider these guidelines; Training for strength requires high intensity sets of exercise, with resistances at 85% of 1RM. You should aim to perform between 1 and 5 repetitions of each exercise. Rest recovery between sets should be 3 to 5 minutes. You should be performing a high volume of exercises, so 2 to 6 sets of each exercise is required. Ideally you should be training each muscle group 1 to 2 times per week. Because of the numbers of sets and recovery time required between sets and routines, then most strength workout routines are best performed as a split routine, where you target specific muscle groups on different days. This allows you to get the necessary recovery time and time for each workout routine. Also, when putting together your strength workout routine, focus more on compound exercises that work large muscle groups together.
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