STRENGTH FOCUSED FITNESS
No matter your health and/or fitness goals - whether it be improvements in athletic performance, aesthetics, or general health and well being - your efforts in the gym should revolve around getting stronger. Strength is the foundational adaptation that all other physical attributes respond positively to. There are no activities in your physical existence that do not benefit from the accumulation of strength. This is because strength is the most general of adaptations. No matter what your specific health and/or fitness goals are, strength training should always be incorporated in some capacity to realize the potential of those goals. From olympic weightlifter to marathon runner, from high school athlete to retired grandmother, strength benefits all. In this blog post you’ll get a short rundown about the training philosophy of Claypool Personal Training. It will discuss what strength is, how strength benefits your specific goals, and what tools are most efficient at getting you strong.
So, what is strength? Strength is the ability to produce force against an external resistance. What is force? Force is that which causes acceleration. What is an external resistance? This could be anything: a barbell, an Amazon box, a lawn mower, your grandkids, your own bodyweight, anything in your environment that you can physically interact with. In other words, strength grants the ability to interact with your environment. This idea is not revolutionary. It isn’t even original. This training philosophy can be found throughout a lot of the fitness industry, but popularized and articulated best, in my opinion, in Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training by Mark Rippetoe, Practical Programming for Strength Training by Mark Rippetoe and Andy Baker, and The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life after 40 by Dr. Jonathon Sullivan and Andy Baker. The benefit of being strong seems relatively self-evident. You can’t do things that you are not strong enough to do. Therefore, getting stronger would be useful. But, why is that true? How exactly does the acquisition of strength benefit your specific health and/or fitness goals?
Athletic performance is the easiest example. This is relatively well understood. Athletes need to be strong. This is because all sports revolve around the production of force, and those with the ability to produce more force generally separate themselves as higher level athletes. Hitting a ball, striking an opponent, running, jumping, throwing are all examples of force produced against an external resistance (the bat, ball, person, ground, etc.). Therefore, improving your force production capacity will improve these feats of athleticism. You can hit, kick and throw a ball harder and with more accuracy and precision. You can throw a punch harder, and grapple with a person more control. You can push from ground harder or with less effort, etc. This is why weight classes exist in combat sports, because a bigger athlete is generally stronger, giving them a significant advantage over a lighter athlete. This is also why the use of anabolic steroids is commonly seen as having an unfair advantage, because anabolic steroids allow the user to accumulate more strength than they otherwise could have, thus drastically improving their athletic performance. So, for an athlete who isn’t already strong, the fastest and most drastic increase in performance will come from getting strong. A combination of accumulating skill and conditioning from practicing your sport and accumulating strength from training in the weightroom, is the key to realizing your athletic potential.
Strength can benefit your health and quality of life. Most people who train don’t have a desire to improve their performance in a specific sport, but in life in general. They’re just in it to be a more healthy and capable human being. This is understandable. Most people aren’t high level athletes, and even high level athletes are in part, dependent on youth. For most of your life, the benefit of strength will go relatively unappreciated. People in nursing homes understand this all too well because their physical limitations are made obvious to them on a regular basis. They’ve lost a significant amount of independence, making some sort of assisted living necessary. What do they lack now that they once had? They lack the ability to interact with their environment. They lack strength - as well as the physical attributes that come with strength- to the degree of significantly affecting their quality of life. Strength training can prevent and in some cases even reverse this loss of independence at any age. When executed properly, strength training not only increases muscle mass, but also improves bone density, balance, coordination, and mobility, which are all vital to physical independence. Metabolic health is another can of worms. Many people struggle with metabolic health issues, and rightfully look to exercise to help correct these issues. While the optimal approach to correcting these issues is multifaceted and requires its own dedicated article, the strength training is very much an important component. This is because strength training increases muscle mass, which improves body composition, insulin sensitivity, blood pressure and other health markers.
Strength is even important for your aesthetic goals. Wanting to look better is the reason most people begin their fitness journey. Generally speaking, these aesthetic goals are to exacerbate an individual’s visible traits that are associated with their sex. For men, this typically means having broad shoulders, tall traps, deep hips, big arms and legs. For women this typically means having developed arms and legs, big glutes, a curvy silhouette, etc. While genetic factors will vary anthropometry, skin thickness, muscle belly length, and other factors from person to person, these masculine and feminine aesthetic archetypes are primarily shaped by muscle mass (with an appropriate body composition). As previously discussed, muscle mass is one of the resulting adaptations of strength training. So, if you want to look like a big strong man, you have to BE a big strong man. If you want to look like a strong and capable woman, you have to BE a strong and capable woman. There is simply no way around it.
So, how do you get strong? There are many answers to this question, some better than others. A better question would be: What is the most efficient way to get strong? This narrows the overwhelming number of options to a point that allows you to make educated decisions about your training. Data and experience have proven time and time again that the most efficient way to increase strength and size is through the progressive loading of a few fundamental movement patterns. Squatting down and standing up, picking up and putting down, pushing away, and pulling toward are these fundamental human movement patterns. To do this we use the squat, deadlift, press, bench press, Olympic lifts, and their variants, as well as arm pulling exercises (chin ups, rows, lat pulls etc.) as the corner stone of a program. When programed appropriately, these exercises with develop the entire musculoskeletal system, as well as every other biological system, allowing the body to function and develop as intended.
