So, your new years resolution is to start strength training. You know it could be important to you and you’ve heard a lot of chat about it, but let me help break down the benefits and how to build yourself up safely.
Strength training means you are loading your muscles in a relative high load or heavy way. This is heavy to you. When you load the muscle, you load the tendon that is attached to it. The tendon then pulls on the bone. If you load these structures gradually and slowly over time, you build up the tolerance and the capacity of the muscle, bone and tendon.
Why is strength training important?
If you load a tendon too quickly or you reduce the load tolerance of a tendon, you are more prone to a tendon injury. By keeping the tendon loaded and continually progressing this, you allow the tendon to tolerate a lot of pulling and loading to avoid this painful pathology.
Our bodies are incredible at adapting. As you provide heavy loads gradually, the body adapts and can produce more structures that lay down to overcome this. Like a bridge that is getting used a lot, the constant strain of that use means it needs more reinforcement. Your body will lay down more supporting structures and change the cell types to help with the architecture to support this and build up what it needs over time. How incredible is this? This means your bones can maintain its density, like the bridge metal beams, your tendons can hold the tension, like the tension rods that hold the bridge up, and your muscles can pull on those levers and absorb the shock and move the load.
How does strength training prevent injuries?
If you train harder than life, life is easy. In other words, your daily routine might be washing (oh, the endless washing), stairs, commuting to and from work and picking up the kids. Therefore, if you lift heavier than the kids and train your body harder than this, the kids feel light, stairs are easy, and you have gas in the tank at the end of the day. Overall, this means at the end of the day, you have extra resources and capacity than life requires.
Most injuries happen when you load beyond the capacity of your muscles, tendons and ligaments (ie: a spike in your load). So, if you train harder, train and load more than your baseline, your capacity is higher than daily expenditure. Therefore, when you spike your load (like you help a friend move or you go to the bach and have to load the car with a billion bags and fit in extra-long walks on the beach), your body is less likely to become injured as you’ve trained for this extra load.
I’m going to break down how to start loading from beginning in a way that allows a smooth transition from nothing to sport. This can be important if you are coming back from an injury, time off, or have recurring pain and injury. If you are familiar and have started, jump in where you feel suits best. If you aren’t sure, please speak to your medical professional or physio for some advice, particularly around cardiovascular health, pregnancy, post-partum, and falls risks. Let’s get you started in a way that doesn’t overload you, overwhelm you and, most importantly, doesn’t injure you.
Control
Before you strengthen a muscle, you want to make sure you’re actually engaging the right muscle in the right way. This is called neuromuscular control: can you turn on the muscle you want to in the way you want to and when you want to. You also have proprioception: an awareness of where your body is in space. When we work these two together, it means we can engage the right muscles, in the right way, with good coordination. Otherwise, if you skip a few steps, you could be loading heavy and compensating or loading too much in a poor way, leading to injury.
Pain can be a powerful muscle inhibitor, this prevents good coordination and activation of muscles. For example, in knee or hip pain, you might not get good quality quad or glute activation. If you’re not sure if you are doing this right or you do have pain, make sure you see a physiotherapist or a medical professional to have the right advice around this.
Endurance
Now that you feel well coordinated and the foundations are there, we can start to build up your tolerance to load. Endurance training is your next step. This is low loads and high repetitions. You want to pick a weight to load the muscles in a way you can complete 10 to 16 repetitions (ie: bridges, body weight squats) and aiming for 2-4 sets of each. Slow and good quality movements are more important than speed and how many you get to (quality over quantity). You’ll notice when you start, you might be at the low end of repetitions and then over time you can increase them as you tolerate more load. It can take about 2 weeks to feel like you can progress. Anytime you increase the load, you’ll have to drop your repetitions back down again and build your way up. For example, in a leg extension machine, if you could complete 10 kg on a double leg extension machine for 8 repetitions to start, then over 2 weeks you build your way up to 16 repetitions. If you increase to 15 kg, you might have to start back at 8kg until you feel quite fatigued.
Strength
Pure strength means high loads and low repetitions. This is relative heavy, or what feels heavy to you. At a heavy weight, you would feel pretty fatigued (tired, shaky or technique starts to suffer) around 1 to 6 repetitions, 3 to 4 sets with a rest period of 1 to 2 minutes in between. Full body strengthening is 3 times a week. If you are breaking up the body areas (ie: upper and lower body) then you can do up to 6 times a week. You’ll definitely have to structure this well, consider nutrition and fuel well as well as build up very slowly and considered. Technique is important when you start to load heavy, and slow is better than fast. If you aren’t sure you are doing this well, please seek some advice from a physio or a trainer.
Power
Power is when you consider force over time. An example is, if you can push a sled across a floor, that is strong, however, power is pushing the sled fast along the floor. Power adds a speed component and is great for sport. Plyometrics is considered power as you have to move your body over a quick period of time (ie: a box jump). This is a very challenging and difficult thing to train so please seek some help to minimize injury if you aren’t experienced here.
Summary
As I said earlier, quality is more important than quantity. Ask for help to get started. And more importantly, be open to the journey and pace yourself. You will have muscle soreness as your body adapts. This should feel bearable and like you can still carry on your day. If it feels too sore or it affects your daily function, lessen the load and build up slower. Think of the tortoise and the hare – slow and steady wins the race, not the boom and bust sprinter. Good luck and I hope you enjoy the journey!
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