Are you training for size or strength?

It is always important to ask yourself questions to determine what benefit it is you are seeking from your training.  Knowing what you want is the first step to finding it.  We know of so many people that have spent countless hours in the gym doing training exercises and programs that are not giving them the results that they were looking for.

That just plain sucks.

This is the kind of disappointment that can lead to giving up on reaching your goals.  The reason it wasn’t working for them is that they never bothered to ask the questions about whether or not this kind of program was going to give them the results they were looking for.

We must say, most of today’s advertising hasn’t helped this problem at all.  We’ve got huge ripped guys acting in ads for programs or machines that definitely did not give them the results that they have.  They might not even say that that is the case but our brains make that connection.  This is no doubt intended by the advertisers companies who are more interested in making money that truly helping you.

Now, while the changes necessary to move from say increasing strength to increasing size or to increasing endurance are not always major changes they are necessary if you want to reach the desired results.  So, be sure to ask yourself lots of question about what you want and then go and find the answers so you don’t just wind up wasting a lot of time, sweat and pain in the gym.

Okay so, strength or size?

The kind of exercises that we would recommend for either of these benefits are exactly the same.  We are big advocates of the whole body kind of exercises used in Olympic lifts or in training for Olympic Weight Lifting competition.  They are the dead lift, squat, bench press, military press, dip, row, chip up / pull up, clean and press, clean and jerk and snatch.

The reason that we recommend these is because of their whole body benefit.  Using these kinds of exercises will make you better, faster and stronger.  Better because these exercises teach your bodies muscle groups to work together providing you with a more functional strength.  Obviously working multiple muscle groups at once will make your workouts go by much faster than focusing on doing reps for each individual muscle.

Finally, It has been proven that these whole body exercises leave you with a much higher explosive strength than what you will get from focusing on individual muscles.

The only real change that needs to happen in your exercises to switch from a strength benefit to a size benefit or visa versa is the number of reps you do.  When looking to build strength your reps need to be very low (2 maximum).  The weight should be set very high so that 2 reps is all you can do.  The benefit of strength training of course is that when it comes time to build some more size you can do it faster because of the increased strength and therefore weight you are able to handle.

To switch to more of a size benefit you are going to increase the reps to 4-6.  Obviously the weight will need to come down to compensate for the increase in reps.  Size training should generally involve lifts that are about 80% of your maximum weight limit for each exercise.  Most important is that you find a weight where 4 – 6 reps is all you can do.  That is the number one difference you will need to make to switch from a strength benefit to a size benefit in your training.

Knowledge is one of the most important factors in your training.  It will be the guide to lead you to the results that you desire.  Use it now to kick some butt in the gym.

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