<strong>BEN COOMBER of Body Type Nutrition, is someone who's work I admire, respect and enjoy! </strong>

<strong>Having met and chatted on a number of occasions we are super excited to be working more closely throughout 2016 to bring YOU even more fabulous information and insights.</strong>

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To broaden the Juicemail contributors and sources even further can only be a good thing right!?</strong>

<strong>So in this article Ben talks to you about strength training....</strong>

There are two different types of people in the weight room (well, there are loads, but you know what I mean). There are those who are there to make improvements and there are those who are there to show off. One big distinction between these two groups is that one of them will tend to use more weight for everything than the other.

Now, I’m not going to turn this into ANOTHER article about why you shouldn’t use bad form and just shift weight from A to B in any way possible. That’s boring, old information and you won’t take anything from it – everyone now knows that half-repping and using momentum to do things isn’t going to make you stronger. What I’m going to do here is take a different angle and tell you that people who make progress over time train hard – really hard – but they don’t always lift as much weight as possible for a given rep range.

If we were to take an average lifter (most of you) then we are able to roughly predict the amount of reps they are capable of performing with a given percentage of their 1 rep max. It generally goes something like the image above.

The problem with this information, however, is that it only really takes an acute session into account. Sure, you should be able to perform 4 sets of 8 using 77% of your max – it’s well within your strength ability – but then what?

Total volume, frequency of training and intensity (load on the bar) are all inter-linked factors which must be considered when creating a program for someone. What this means is that we need to make sure they are training hard enough and often enough with an appropriate amount of total volume (sets x reps x weight over the course of a week or other microcycle) to create a growth response.

We know that a load of around 65%-85% is the most effective range to work in for improving strength and size, and we also know that 2-3 sessions per week is probably as close to optimal as possible for the majority, so that leaves total within-session volume as the variable that we want to play with the most.

Volume, however, is a tricky thing to maintain when intensity gets too high. If we were to perform the aforementioned 4 sets of 8 with 77% of our max it should theoretically be do-able, but the chances are that – because of total CNS and PNS fatigue - it will take a really long time to do and an even longer time to recover from. Taking multiple sets that close to failure can impact the rest of the session and even the rest of the week depending on your own personal ability to recover from lifting heavy, and that means that your performance in the rest of your training can suffer. Poor performance in other sessions will obviously hinder your ultimate results.

Not only that, but beyond training volume, intensity and frequency there is one other overarching factor which we must consider in order to get stronger and bigger – progressive overload.

Train with the perfect intensity, drive up training frequency to a point where you are training as often as possible while still recovering optimally and increase sets and reps as much as you like, eventually you need to add some weight to the bar or you’re not going to get anywhere. Go too heavy and overload is going to be all but impossible.

So, lets take our 4x8@77% example above and put some real numbers in, to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

Assuming your max is 100kg for sake of ease, 4 sets of 8 at 77.5% gives you (4 x 8 x 77.5kg) 2,480kg of volume. Great. Now let’s say you complete that and want to add some weight to the bar, so we move up to the next available increment, 80kg.

Not only have we moved up in weight, we have now moved up to 80% of your max, which means that we are now only able to perform 7 reps if we go to our maximum potential on each set, which would of course be all but impossible. You can’t go to absolute failure and expect performance not to dip – so let’s go to 4 sets of 6 with 80% - should be manageable, just.

That’s all well and good, but now we are only getting (4 x 6 x 80kg) 1920kg of volume, which is way less. We haven’t gotten anywhere but it’s not likely that we’re going to be able to do another set, and we certainly can’t do more reps or go heavier. We have nowhere to go and have therefore stalled.

You see it all the time in gyms. Guys will make initial progress and then stall out. They will get to a certain weight on a certain exercise and, despite evidently training REALLY hard, never actually manage to add more weight to it. It’s not uncommon to see someone busting their ass for YEARS and not actually adding weight to the bar and therefore, not actually getting any stronger.

It’s time to leave the ego at the door.

Sure, you may be ABLE to start off a program doing 4 sets of 8 at 77%, or any other similar rep range and intensity, but this will be exhausting as well as very, very difficult to improve upon. When looking at all successful training protocols (Smolov, Sheiko, Cube method etc) you will see that the average intensity will be somewhere around 70-73% but the rep ranges will usually leave you with 2-3 ‘in the tank’. What happens here is that the trainee is able to use a higher bar speed (thus producing more force per rep), is able to keep form perfect owing to the greater degree of control that <strong>not</strong> grinding out ugly near-to-failure reps offers you, and are, most importantly, given the opportunity to build up a progressively higher amount of total volume over time and thusly make IMPROVEMENTS.

Sure, you’re not going to failure and yes, this is comparatively ‘easy’ in a lot of ways to the typical ‘GO AS HARD AS POSSIBLE OR GO HOME’ advice thrown around on the internet or in magazines by guys and girls who have certain ‘advantages’ which means that they get better in spite of, rather than because of, what they do. It’s a little less taxing, but much more effective.

Training is about going into a session with the intention of doing what is necessary to improve, not with the intention of burying yourself. This means that we need to think about the variables we can control and the means by which we can alter them in our favour. Training is NOT about lifting as much as you can for as many reps as you can, it’s about planned progression.

Train smart, don’t just train hard, and you’ll go a lot further.

Did you enjoy this article from Ben?
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Email me your questions: <a href="mailto:rachel@biomechanicseducation.com">rachel@biomechanicseducation.com</a>