Solutions to 5 Common Strength Training Mistakes
Mistake #1
Working out to perform a prescribed amount of sets and reps rather than working out to achieve a productive workout state for your own body.
If I were to tell you to do the bench press exercise for three sets of ten reps, how would you know that it’s the right amount of sets, and how would you know how hard to push yourself during each set? Three sets of ten reps might be too much or not enough for you. In regard to how you should push yourself during a set, it’s also possible to push yourself too hard or not hard enough. Is there a way to know the right amount of sets, and how hard to push each set for best results?
There is an effective way to determine how many sets you should do for an exercise and how many reps you should do for a set, as it can be determined by understanding a productive workout state. A productive workout state means you will be using the creatine phosphate (or phosphocreatine) energy system for as much training as it can handle in an optimum training state, but no more than it can handle in an optimum training state. Further explanation is needed.
When you move or exercise, your body uses a substance called ATP (adenosine triphosphate) to supply the energy necessary to move. In order to move, the ATP is broken down, causing energy to be released so that your muscles can perform a task. Your body only contains enough ATP to last for a few seconds during hard exercise. Fortunately, ATP can be regenerated through three different energy systems which include: the aerobic system, the lactate system, and the creatine phosphate system. The creatine phosphate system is the only energy system that will provide phosphate molecules to form ATP at a fast enough rate to produce maximum speed, force, or strength in your muscles. Training that emphases the creatine phosphate system is what will improve your strength the most.
The problem that occurs when using the creatine phosphate system is that it does not provide energy for ATP for very long. Once the pool of phosphate molecules from the creatine phosphate system diminishes and can no longer fuel the formation of ATP at a rapid rate, the force and speed of your muscle contractions will decrease. If you choose to keep on exercising even after your ability to produce force has decreased, your body will look to the lactate system and aerobic system to keep on moving. These two energy systems will help you to keep exercising, but they won’t help you exercise with maximum strength, speed or force. The lactate system and aerobic system are concerned with helping you with endurance activity. Endurance activity is based on helping you to exercise longer, rather than to help you to exercise faster, stronger, or with more force.
When you train for strength, the idea is to teach the body to use the phosphocreatine system, and to get better at releasing the maximum amount of energy possible within a given moment. The greater the release of energy, the more strength, speed, and force is produced by your muscles. If you train too far into a set, or do too many sets, your phosphocreatine system quits working optimally, and your body begins to find ways to help you get better at training longer rather stronger. Longer training is endurance training and endurance training will teach your body to conserve some of its energy to allow you to keep on exercising longer, rather than to release maximum energy so that you can train at your strongest level. The solution to this is to stop doing reps in a set when you sense your rep speed suddenly starts to slow down and feels harder. It’s also why you should stop doing sets for an exercise when you can no longer do as many reps as you could for your first set of an exercise, because it means you are in a weakened state and your body will shift over to endurance adaptations in order to help you keep exercising, rather than to exercise as powerfully as possible.
If you stop doing reps when your reps first begin to weaken, and you stop doing sets when your sets begin to weaken, you will be doing the right amount of sets and reps for the right reason, rather than to do a prescribed amount of sets and reps without knowing why you are doing the amount that you are doing. Understanding the phosphocreatine system and when it is operating optimally will help you understand how many sets and reps you should do, rather than to guess at the right amount of sets and reps.
Mistake #2
Basing progression on increasing the difficulty of training rather than basing progression on allowing the difficulty of training to become easier.
Thinking that the primary way to progress is to make workouts harder is one of the most common mistakes that runs people into a massive dead end in regard to gaining strength. This way of thinking does work for a while, which is what makes it so deceiving. However, there comes a time where the strategy of continually trying to add more weight, more sets, and more reps, in order to train harder will backfire and progression must be perceived in a different way. Of course it is true that at some point in time, workouts must become more difficult, but this should occur between time periods of weeks where a lifter gives their workouts a chance to become easier due to an increase in strength. This does not at all mean that a workout should be made easier by decreasing the amount of weight or reps. It simply means that your body will want to get stronger so that if you keep repeating the same workouts, they will become easier over time. In other words, if you keep on lifting 100 pounds for 10 reps, it will become easier as you gain strength.
People often think that strength can only be stimulated when you make a training stress harder. Of course this does eventually become true, but there is often a time period of several weeks in which the body is very willing to become stronger when you keep doing the same workout again and again without ever making it harder. You will know when the same workout is causing your body to become stronger when the workout feels easier. Since a gain in strength is due to your body’s desire to make your workouts easier, let your body accomplish its goal. Once the body has had sufficient time to make a workout easier, then you can slightly increase the difficulty of the workout by adding a small amount of weight. Don’t keep trying to beat your previous best in every workout. Let yourself progress by allowing workouts to become easier before you try to make them harder. For best results in regard to gaining strength from repeating the same workouts, it is important to train at the right level of difficulty which is discussed in the next section under Mistake #3
Mistake #3
Trying to progress from the wrong level of difficulty
Gaining strength by repeating the same workouts works best when you train at the right level of difficulty. If you train at a difficulty level that is too easy, the body may not be pushed enough to see the need to make the workout stress easier because it is already easy enough. If the workout stress is too hard, the body may see an increase in strength as a threat and be afraid to allow the training to become harder. This is because an increase in strength will give you the ability to use even more weight for more reps. The last thing your body wants when it is overly stressed from severe training stresses, is to give you the ability to create even more training stress, which is what will occur when you gain the ability to increase the amount of weight and reps. This means that when your body becomes overly stressed, it is more concerned about turning off your ability to gain strength than it is about gaining strength. Of course the result is that the body will stay at the same strength level.
Rather than progressing from a very high stress level, it is better to progress from a stress level where an increase in strength is not threatening and will also allow the body to transition across a threshold that will move it from a moderately uncomfortable training state into a more comfortable training state that is easier.
If you are familiar with Precision Point Training, you know that there is a transition point which training revolves around. The transition point occurs during a set when you push yourself enough to transition from a positive training state into a negative training state. Let me explain how this works. As long as you can exert near maximum force into a repetition, you are in a positive training state. When fatigue accumulates during a set to the point where it has a negative effect on rep speed and the amount of force you can exert into a rep, you’ve reached the transition point and have transitioned into a negative training state. If you go one rep past the transition point, the body will be in a slightly negative training state. It’s at this level of training difficulty that an increase in strength will make the training easier so that the body can transition back into a positive training state. You will know when this has happened when your last rep can be done as fast as the previous rep of the set.
For beginning lifters, or for anyone doing lifts that limit you to a one hundred to two hundred pound max, a five pound gain in strength will produce a much more noticeable transition in how hard a lift is in comparison to lifters who have a huge one rep max. A very strong lifter who is doing a basic exercise that allows for the use of heavy weight, may gain five pounds of strength without noticing much of a transition from a slightly negative training state into a positive training state. For this reason, a very strong lifter may be better off pushing a set to the rep just short of the transition point, and letting their body gain some strength to create a little more space between their last rep and the transition point.
When training revolves around the transition point, the training is hard enough to cause the body to want to become stronger, but not so difficult that the body becomes threatened by a possible increase in strength. Instead, training at this level is where an increase in strength makes sense to the body because it will be able to move into an easier training state.
Mistake #4
The Wrong idea of Recovery and Training Frequency
Many people see training frequency as a constant and make a rule as to how often you should train. The truth is that finding the right recovery period between workouts can vary according to how long, how hard, and how heavy a person trains. Longer, harder, heavier workouts take longer to recover from. In addition, establishing a productive training frequency can also depend upon a person’s individual physiology, their current fitness level, and the specific exercises that they are recovering from.
Finding the right training frequency is based on how long it takes to recover after a workout. If you workout before you have fully recovered, you will fail to regain the necessary strength and energy to do the next workout at a maximum strength level. If you wait too long between workouts, detraining and loss of strength can occur because the muscles haven’t been stimulated often enough to increase or maintain strength.
One of the problems that often goes unnoticed when considering recovery is that there are different types of recovery that must be in sync with one another. One aspect of recovery is simply to recover the necessary energy that was lost during a workout so that full strength is regained. A second aspect of recovery deals with protein synthesis, which simply refers to the body rebuilding its muscle tissue after a workout. The problem is that these two types of recovery don’t necessarily occur at the same rate. If you do a really hard workout, we all know that it affects your muscles, but it also stresses your nervous system and adrenal glands. This will then diminish your energy level, which in turn will diminish your level of strength. You won’t regain your full strength capacity until your energy level is fully restored. At the same time that your body is recovering its energy level, a second type of recovery is occurring, as your body is also trying to rebuild its muscle tissue. However, the optimum recovery time for rebuilding muscle may not occur within the same time span that it takes for recovering your energy level.
Rebuilding muscle tissue occurs from being in an anabolic state. An anabolic state is dependent upon your level of natural anabolic hormones, such as testosterone, growth hormone, Insulin growth factor 1, and insulin sensitivity. These are not drugs that are taken, but they are natural hormones within the body that can be elevated to higher levels as a result of working out, plus taking in adequate nutrition. A problem occurs when a person does a very hard workout, and the recovery time in terms of regaining energy takes longer than the amount of time that natural anabolic hormones are elevated to promote the rebuilding of muscle tissue. Further explanation is needed to illustrate this.
We can look at an example of a person who possesses the ability to maintain a high level of anabolic hormones after a workout. Such a person may benefit from a hard workout that requires 72 hours or more of recovery time to regain strength and energy. During the time he is recovering his strength and energy level, his body is also engaging in the second type of recovery where it is rebuilding (or recovering) muscle tissue. The main reason his body is rebuilding muscle tissue is because his workout has stimulated a temporary increase in his level of natural anabolic hormones. If this temporary increase in his level of anabolic hormones can hold out for 72 hours, then he will be rebuilding muscle tissue during the whole time period that he is also recovering his energy level. However, if the level of his anabolic hormones does not stay elevated for most of the 72 hours, there will be a mismatch between the amount of time it takes to recover energy, and the amount of time he can maintain a muscle building anabolic state. If he is fortunate enough to have the type of physiology that can continuously stay in an anabolic state during the whole 72 hours of time that he needs to fully regain his energy, then he will benefit from a 72 hour recovery time. However, not everyone is so fortunate.
A problem occurs if a person does a hard workout that requires seventy two hours of recovery time to regain strength and energy, but their personal physiology only permits their level of anabolic hormones to stay elevated for 36 hours after a workout, and then starts to decline way before the necessary 72 hours of recovery time is completed. When this happens, a person will eventually find themselves stuck at the same level of strength. They can’t gain the additional strength desired because the time needed for recovery from a hard workout is longer than the amount of time they can maintain an anabolic state. What is the solution? The solution is to perform workouts that are effective at stimulating both strength and the level of natural anabolic hormones, while minimizing fatigue by not working any longer or any harder than necessary. If fatigue is minimized, less recovery time is required to regain energy and a person can do their next workout before their level of anabolic hormones has decreased.
Hard gaining ectomorphs are often told to train less often so they can recover better, as lack of recovery is seen as the chief culprit for finding it difficult to gain strength. This may help them recover their energy, but the problem is that they may not be maintaining an anabolic state while recovering their energy. Longer recovery periods may work for some, but for many it is terrible advice that leaves them baffled because they have been taught that longer recovery times are a sure way to grow stronger, but it keeps failing. A far better solution is to do non-fatiguing workouts that are easy to recover from, and do them three, four, or five times per week. While this training strategy will work for many people, we have already discussed that there are others who may benefit from training a body part twice, and even as little as once per week. Each person must experiment to find out what works for themselves.
Mistake #5
Poor exercise selection and poor exercise technique
Choosing exercises that target small muscles may have some benefit in building strength, but it is not the optimum way to build strength. The biggest, strongest muscles of the body are the muscles that are designed for gaining the most strength. The body is designed so that smaller muscle groups will often be required to assist the bigger muscle groups when they are being exercised. Exercises that require the use of the biggest muscles plus the assistance of the smaller muscles are the best one’s for gaining strength. Squats and squat variations, dead lifts and dead lift variations, the bench press and various bench press variations along with variations of pulling motions, are all exercises that allow you to use the most weight while also exercising more than one muscle at the same time. These are the exercises that are the most effective for building strength. Dumbbell flies, cable crossovers, various forms of dumbbell raises, leg extension, and curls, are not necessarily bad exercises that should never be done, but they don’t build strength nearly as well as the exercises discussed previously.
Exercise technique is also important. Proper exercise technique will place your body in the most advantageous position to lift a weight while also taking into account the safety and well-being of your body. Proper exercise technique means keeping the weight and the body under control at all times. If the lifting motion is jerky, and the weight or the body is off balance during the lift, either decrease the weight, or slow down the lifting motion to practice lifting the weight with control.
In general, your back should be in alignment from your hips to your head regardless of the lift. When doing pushing or pulling motions, be careful not to flare your elbows and upper arm straight out to the side so that they form a T shape in relationship with your body. Positioning your arms and elbows at close to 45 degrees from your sides is generally safer and easier on your shoulders.
For strength training, repetitions should be performed by exerting maximum force into the lift. More force means that the weight will be lifted faster rather than trying to move the weight slowly. However, faster reps does not mean using sloppy, injurious form. Lowering the weight rapidly and bouncing out of the bottom position of bench presses, squats, and bent over rowing positions is risky for your body. It is generally safer to lower the weight with control and transition into lifting the weight without bouncing. One thing that keeps people from making progress in strength training is injuries. Using good lifting form helps you avoid injuries so that you can continue to train consistently without setbacks and disruptions in your training plan.
The idea behind training is to improve and get stronger while using good form. If you have to improve by changing to poor technique in order to lift more weight, it is not really an indicator that progress is being made. Some people may feel like cheating on form can be used in a constructive way, but I believe in the long run, improving by simply using good form is your best bet for success.
Conclusion
Many of the solutions to the mistakes discussed in this report are quite different than the common perceptions of how to gain strength. If you put the concepts from this report into practice, don’t be surprised if others think you are doing everything wrong. Don’t let this stop you from putting these training methods into practice as you will never know whether they work or not unless you stick with them. I am confident that if you avoid the 5 common training mistakes, you will be able to continue to gain strength for a longer period of time, as you will be training smarter, not just harder.