There’s a paradox in strength training that doesn’t get talked about enough.
Here’s how we are used to learning new skills:
- You start out, and you are terrible. Everything is super challenging, and you feel like you are never going to master it.
- You keep practicing, and it starts to get a little easier.
- You practice even more and eventually master the skill. What was once done with great difficulty, you can now do with ease.
Now consider strength training.
Like most new things, it’s challenging and more than a little scary in the beginning. Especially joining a gym for the first time. (Why is everyone looking at me? Am I wearing the right clothes? What are all these weird machines for?)
But when it comes to the actual weightlifting itself, you can adjust the weights and find what is right for your starting point, making it fairly easy.
The paradox comes after that.
The way we are used to things working is that if we practice them, they get easier.
But if you do that with strength training …
It doesn’t work.
If Nothing Changes, Nothing Will Change
Your body is a marvel when it comes to adaptation.
Expose it to a new stimulus or stress, such as lifting a barbell for ten repetitions, and your body will rebuild and improve itself to better handle that stress the next time.
Provided that you give it the resources, like rest and nutrition, to do so.
If you come back a few days later and lift that same weight for the same number of reps, it won’t be as stressful for your body as it was the first time.
In turn, it won’t trigger as much adaptation.
If you keep coming back and lifting that same first weight for the same number of reps, workout after workout, you will eventually plateau.
Your body will get so used to that stress that it no longer poses a challenge, and it doesn’t trigger any further adaption.
It has already successfully adapted to the challenges you bring it.
But what if you don’t want to plateau?
What if you want to get bigger and stronger?
The solution is simple: increase the stimulus to trigger new adaption.
And Here Is Where Most People Go Wrong
When you’re a beginner, progress pretty much happens automatically.
The weights get so much easier from workout to workout that you can’t help but add some weight or do some more reps. It’s not even that uncomfortable to do so.
After a few weeks or months, however, the progress slows down.
Humans are great at conserving energy and if we don’t have to work hard at something, it is often our instinct not to. Research consistently shows that most people underestimate how much they can lift.
What does this mean for your training?
That if you don’t consciously strive to make your workouts harder, you will eventually plateau.
You will eventually arrive at some weights and reps in different exercises, which require a modest amount of effort for you to lift each time, and then stay there. The training is enough to maintain your current strength and muscle, but not enough to stimulate further gains.
It is your instinct to do this.
And it goes against your instinct to make it harder all over again.
But that is what you must do to improve.
You must intentionally increase the challenge for your muscles by lifting more weight or doing more reps with the same weight.
But how do you do that?
By tracking.
It is for this purpose that our workout log StrengthLog was built. To make it easy for you to keep track of what you lifted in every exercise last time, and make sure to lift just a teeny-tiny bit more today.
The Good and the Bad News
This is good and bad news for your future training sessions.
- The bad news is that as soon as you can comfortably lift a weight in a given exercise, you must make it uncomfortable again by increasing the weight or reps. Like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill, your challenges will never end.
- The good news is that if you do this systematically, for every workout, every week, for months, and even years … there is no limit to how far you can go. You’ll improve beyond what you thought possible.
Most people in the gym go about their training randomly, and they stall at the same weights for years.
The small act of tracking your training and trying to lift just a little more each time is all it takes for you to soar past them.
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