strength training

Specificity of training

The adaptation of muscles, and indeed body systems generally, to tasks with which they are repeatedly challenged, is highly specific. Thus training for endurance, for flexibility, or for speed are all very different; and training for strength has little in common with any of them. One must ‘overload’ (in the physical educator's sense of ‘load beyond the ordinary’, not the engineer's sense of ‘break’) the ability of muscles to produce extreme force, not their ability to produce lesser forces very often or very fast, if strength is to be increased.

Resistance

Strength is increased by work against high resistance — ‘strength training’ and ‘resistance training’ are synonymous. After warming up against lesser loads, strength athletes during a high-intensity phase of training will perform, in a weight-room session, no more than perhaps ten efforts against loads almost as great as they can possibly manage. Strength trainers characterize loads in terms of the individual's ‘repetition maximum’ (RM). A 1 RM load can be managed just once in a session, a 10 RM load can be tackled 10 times within a period measured in minutes. Working against loads less than 60% of 1 RM is not considered capable of increasing strength at all.

(By contrast, in endurance training, any one stride or stroke or pedal-turn probably involves only 10–15% of the maximum force the limb can produce; however, not 10 but at least 10 000 such actions are performed in the course of an endurance training session.)

Phases of training

In someone whose genetic makeup allows a good response to strength training, the maximum load which can be handled may increase by 50–100% in the first 6–12 months. The improvement, however, is not all of one kind, but falls into two phases.

The first phase, lasting probably 8–12 weeks, is termed the ‘neural phase’ of strength training. Muscle bulk does not increase, though strength does. Electrical recordings show that more of the muscle fibres are being called into action simultaneously at the end of this phase than at the beginning. It is as if the nervous system has been teaching itself how to get the most force out of the muscle bulk it already has available to it. (The inability to do this without training should not be thought of as poor evolutionary design; it may well have protective benefits, while tendons, joints, and other parts of the system are also not adapted to the high loads being tackled.)

After this period, muscle bulk does increase. In high responders this ‘hypertrophic’ (enlargement) phase may continue for years, though the rates of increase of bulk and strength slow down markedly after 8–12 months. The hypertrophy is expressed at the individual fibre level: strength-trained muscles have bigger fibres, not more fibres.

Real programmes

The above account is a simplification. Within an actual session, lifts are grouped into ‘sets’ with rests between them, and repeated say 2–10 times in a set. Not all exercises are done each training day; they may recur only twice a week. Finally, over a year, the established strength athlete will probably alternate two periods of ‘volume’ training with two of high intensity.

Neil Spurway

Bibliography

Komi, P. V. (1991). Strength and Power in Sport. Blackwell, Oxford.