Written by Jess Greenaway
The success of strength training
When it comes to success with your strength and conditioning training it would be easy to assume it’s about the programming. Easy, buy a program, train at your local gym or join a group fitness gym where it is planned for you.
However, there is a little more to it than that.
You could have the best program in the world, but if you don’t do a few key inputs you won’t get the full benefits of that program. These key areas being:
- Consistency
- Tracking your training
- Your intensity for the days workout
- How you fuel your body
- Recovery
This article will look at four areas of your training that are probably not talked about often enough, but play an important role in your training success.
Train with purpose
What intensity are you bringing to your training? Do you just show up and move through the motions to tick ‘going to the gym’ off your list?
The intensity you bring to your sessions matters. It’s not about going full speed 100% every session, that’s not sustainable. But if we are showing up to a strength training session, lifting weights at an effort of 4 or 5 out of 10 week in week out we may struggle to see significant strength gains.
Intensity drives adaptions. We need to be sufficiently challenging the body. In our group training we do this through progressive overload. And if you are using our training app, recording your strength session each time, this will guide you for your intensity.
Are you tracking?
Tracking our progress helps to identify what’s working or not working. It is feedback on whether your strength is increasing. It guides us in our weekly training and for our testing weeks towards new PBs. It reduces the risk of injury if we know what we lifted last week and then can build on that, as opposed to guessing each session.
You can track your training in a notebook or a training app. Using a training app takes away the burden of remembering what you did in your last session and you can easily refer or search your lifts/training. It’s about measuring what matters so we know where our improvements can be made.
Fuelling our bodies
Have you ever heard someone say:
- “Abs are made in the kitchen” or
- “You can’t out train a poor diet”
Well there is some merit in these. It is suggested that your nutrition accounts for 70-80% of your strength and fitness gains.
What you put into your body pre and post training impacts how your body performs and how it recovers and repairs afterwards.
For example if we look at protein. During a strength session we are creating micro tears in our muscles. Our body then needs to work to repair and strengthen these muscles, as this is how we build our strength. To repair our muscles effectively and to support our body the most we need to replenish our protein stores.
Fuelling your training effectively is whole blog post in itself. In this article I wanted to mention it is an area to put on your radar to think about. If you would like to read more about nutrition, you can take a look at the following articles on our blog:
The power of recovery
Recovery. Rest. Repair. It is essential for our body to have recovery time so it can adapt to the stressors we placed on it in the gym.
Recovery includes adequate sleep, rest days, active rest days and stretch and release work.
Getting your optimal hours of sleep is crucial for your body to repair. This is when our body rebuilds muscle tissue and recovers from the stress that has been placed on it during strength training. It also helps us to replenish our energy levels which impacts our performance in the next session. To learn more about the impacts of sleep you can read our article, The Profound Impact of Sleep to get started.
Having rest days is also beneficial to allow time for our bodies to recover throughout the week. Not taking rest days can lead to over training and increase the risk of injury. For some, an active rest day is preferred, which can be of walking, yoga or light swimming. The goal with an active rest day is to get the body moving to promote blood flow, but not put too much strain on the body.
It’s a system
The success of your training doesn’t come from the perfect program or the perfect nutrition. It’s the cumulative effect of consistent effort across all these areas. It is a system that can be layered and different areas prioritised to impact where you will or won’t see gains.
At times you may be on point with your nutrition, but lacking in your recovery. Some days you may bring the intensity and some days it’s not there.
I know for myself I am incredibly consistent with my training, but can fall short with my recovery. If I was trying to make bigger improvements in my strength, I would be well served to make more effort to get my optimal sleep. So I’m not here to tell you that you have to get all these areas 100% right all the time or else it’s not worth it.
What I am here to say is that if you feel you aren’t making progress in the gym but you are being consistent with your training and have a solid program, maybe you could look at these other areas. Pick one to focus on and see how it impacts your strength and fitness.
Thanks for reading. I hope you have a least one take away that helps you in your health and fitness journey.
I love hearing about what others are working on in their training. Send me an email to jess@westendstrength.com.au and let me know what a week of training looks like for.
