Strength Training: A Beginner's Guide to Building Strength and Confidence in the Gym

Learn the Basics and Essential Techniques to Kickstart Your Strength Training Journey and Achieve Lasting Fitness Success

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Embarking on a strength training journey is more than just lifting weights, it's about building confidence, understanding your limits, and progressively pushing past them. Whether you're a beginner stepping into the gym for the first time or someone returning after a hiatus, starting slow and ramping up intensity over time is crucial. This method not only helps prevent injuries but also allows your body to adapt and grow stronger in a sustainable manner, however, true progress in strength training comes from understanding the principle of lifting heavy weights close to failure. This doesn't mean lifting what merely feels heavy, but rather pushing toward the true limits of what your body can handle. Each session allows you to explore and expand your limits, gradually transforming perceived challenges into conquered milestones. Let's dive into the essentials of starting strength training and discover how to build your strength to the place that you desire!

Understanding Strength: Strength is the idea of generating as much force as possible no matter the time frame. This is different from trying to generate it quickly as that is what pushes us into power production. Both of these have their places but I want to talk specifically about the idea of strength here since typically when people start exercising they have a big focus on getting stronger. Knowing what that means and how that differs from building muscle and moving things quickly. When we are talking about building strength we are purely talking about making the muscle that you have lift as heavy weight as possible. This is done many times from greater synchronicity with the muscle fiber recruitment, form optimization, and slowly lifting heavier and heavier each time. These are the primary adaptations that we are looking to make when we are training for strength itself. Now to do this, it has to be very intentional, as strength training doesn’t always get you bigger muscles, while hypertrophy training will not always make you as strong as you want to be. This is where people have a misunderstanding of what training for strength truly means. Now this isn’t to say that there is no use for hypertrophy training for strength, but it is important to understand how the other training goals fit into the overall goal of getting stronger, to help paint the picture of why we would incorporate hypertrophy or power into the goal of getting stronger. 

To understand that a bit better, when we think about the goal of strength, being to generate the most amount of force possible, it is easy to understand how hypertrophy training will fit into this goal. When we look at the strongest men in the world, they have massive muscles, so a bigger set of muscles will have a higher potential for generating strength. There is more contractile tissue that has a higher ability to generate force. Very clear to see how incorporating some hypertrophy training can improve the overall potential of strength within a person. Now if we shift to power how that differentiates and how that can help you generate the most amount of strength is going to be a bit different. You need to have a bit of a deeper understanding of energy systems, primarily what fuels our strength, which is typically our creatine phosphate energy system. This is our fastest-acting energy system that can have a huge amount of force production quickly but falls off very fast. Typically lasting anywhere from 3-5 seconds, up to 5-8 seconds with creatine supplementation. Bringing this back to power production which is the amount of force created in a short amount of time. Training our body to generate the peak amount of force as fast as possible, will teach your body to fire in higher synchronicity, getting to that peak faster, so you have more time for your body to generate a peak force within your creatine phosphate energy system window. So the idea of strength is very simple to understand at face value, but when we dive deeper into how to optimize it and understand what that looks like, it gets a bit more complicated than it originally seemed. 

Training for Strength: Now that we understand what strength is, and how other training goals can impact the outcomes of strength training, let’s dive into how to train to get stronger. This is something that I think is fundamentally misunderstood by many people nowadays, as training in the gym, doing high-intensity movements, for higher reps, and pushing yourself hard will get you some strength gains while you’re a beginner in the gym. A lot of that comes from your body getting used to the movement, increasing your efficiency with it, and making your muscles fire in synchronicity for what is demanded at that weight. This is fantastic if your goal is to have that increased muscular endurance and to be able to move confidently and comfortably in your day to day life and have the confidence that if something heavier is thrown your way you can likely handle it. However, if you want to step it up and take it to the next level, you’re going to have to have the focus in your training to be lifting heavy. To build strength, there is no way around lifting heavier and heavier than you think and getting toward that intensity. Progress is made when we are out of our comfort zone. Strength training takes this to a different level as each time you go in to lift it should take you out of your comfort zone, if you’re lifting with a weight that you’re comfortable handling you’re probably not pushing yourself hard enough. It is incredibly tough mentally and physically to push yourself this hard. 

The most traditional programming for strength training is going to be your sets of 3-5 as this is enough to test yourself to make sure you’re not sandbagging it but pushing heavy enough with enough volume to truly get the adaptations that we are looking for. If you aren’t going a bit heavier or doing a bit more with your strength training then you’re not truly training for strength, it is normally very important to be training within a proximity of failure, but with strength training, it is the utmost importance to hit that point within the 5 rep range, then to test yourself going heavier the next time. May seem simple in principle but this is where many people get caught up, you get comfortable with a weight, that is challenging at 5 but never push yourself to get out of that range, never trying things that seem overwhelming, whether it is doubt that creeps in or a fatigued central drive to truly push as hard as you need to. It can all create avenues of stagnating and not truly training your body to get stronger. 

The other piece that I think is important to speak on when you’re training for strength, it is very important to consider how long you’re resting, this is another one that will hang up a lot of people. If you are pushing your body as hard as you can and fully depleting the creatine phosphate system, you’re going to need to give it time to replenish before you can give it another full effort to keep getting out of your comfort zone. This typically comes for most people with 3-5 minutes of rest after each working set. That is right, 3-5 minutes, of just sitting there, some people can take longer as it can take longer for some people to recover if they are less cardio trained, or just mentally drained from the previous set. There is no one size fits all but that is the typical recommendation to ensure that you’re physically ready to hit another set. This is a very time consuming and demanding way of training, that is why you can’t really implement it for a full workout, picking 1-2 movements most that you can hit to that intensity and that hard while hitting the rest of the movements as accessories at higher rep ranges is what is typically done. In order to either further one of those different aspects that we spoke about. Technique optimization, synchronicity, growing muscle size, the whole nine yards, that is what is typically the focus after hitting a really intense strength focused exercise.

Implementation for Beginners: If you have made the determination that training for strength and making these gains is something that you want to do, that is a great thing. It is never too late to start getting stronger but everybody has to go through the early steps, lifting enough to get confident with whatever the movement is that you want to get stronger on is going to be step one. Getting the technique down initially begins with many reps, feeling the movement out, finding where you are comfortable, then after you have found the technique that allows you to push toward failure is when you know that you’re going to be ready to begin ramping up how much weight you are using. When you begin, you don’t need to immediately dive into the 3-5 reps per set, but you want to be adding weight aggressively until your body is forced to do that many reps, if you’re on the upper end then you want to be pushing yourself up even higher in weight. It is a balancing act of making sure that you’re pushing right along and operating in that zone that we want to be seeing. This is where we traditionally see progressions with percentage of 1 rep maximum based lifting come in to ensure that you’re going heavier in a range that should be challenging and remain on the right end of that balancing act. As you get into that place, I recommend that you’re always increasing in weight until you’re reaching near the place that you need a deload. You’ll know when you’re due for a deload as you become physically incapable of increasing the weight further or pushing any harder. The last week before your deload should be the absolute maximum that you’re capable of doing. 

For the rest of the training day, I would recommend still operating with heavier weights but weights that you’re going to be able to push for more reps. As it’ll be less mentally fatiguing so you can still push closer to failure while not needing to dig deep into the motivation and effort to put into the workout. When you’re looking at how to structure this on your own, I would recommend 1 movement maybe 2 movements as you’re learning them and depending on how fatiguing each movement is to do sets of 3-5 very heavy. I would then go on and choose 3-5 more exercises to push anywhere in the 6-12 rep ranges, ideally keeping around 8, but those 8 reps should still be very intense. Pushing yourself near failure with each rep, we should see a physiological signal that you’re nearing that failure zone such as the speed of your rep moving slower and slower as you progress into the lift. That is one of the best indicators that we have from the outside that you are truly nearing failure. It doesn’t need to be complicated but it is hard work, there is no way of getting around lifting heavy and digging into that mental bank in order to get stronger. There are techniques such as visualization and other intensity techniques that I wiil dive into in another post. These techniques can help with priming your mental game to lift heavy, or just ensure that you are training hard enough, which is very difficult, effort can vary day to day and fatigue can play a huge part in it!

To conclude, initiating a journey into strength training extends beyond just weightlifting, it encompasses confidence in yourself, grasping your physical limitations, and gradually increasing what you’re capable of with time. Progressively intensifying workouts is critical to what it is all about. For strength development, it is important that you’re being deliberate with your exercise, lifting heavier weights, and consistently challenging yourself. While other training goals such as hypertrophy or power production can be beneficial in your strength journey, they should be strategically implemented if your overall goal is strength. Effective strength training entails pushing personal limits, incrementally increasing resistance, and allowing ample recovery between sets. For beginners, it is incredibly important to master the fundamentals of technique and ramping up the weight before diving into a strength-focused program. The journey to truly getting stronger demands perseverance and dedication, it does not happen overnight and the changes aren’t always massive but with commitment and enough time you’ll see the level of strength that you want to see!

I am excited to begin building a community to connect people with similar interests, making the fitness journey easier and more enjoyable for everyone. If you're interested, have any questions, or need personalized guidance, don't hesitate to reach out to me at sidneyabartlett@gmail.com.

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Until next time, let's keep pushing toward our goals together!

Sidney Bartlett, CSCS