How Start with your back foot on a bench and your front foot approximately 60cm in front of the bench, holding a dumbbell in each hand. Bend at the knee to lower towards the floor, keeping your torso upright, then press back up to the start.

Complete all the reps on one side, then switch. Sets 3 Reps 10 Rest 60sec. How Hold a barbell with your hands roughly double shoulder-width apart. Push through your heels and keep your chest up as you drive your hips forwards to lift the bar.

Why This full-body move engages all the muscles of your posterior chain — the ones involved in a deadlift. How Swing the kettlebell between your legs with both hands, then pop your hips forwards to drive it up to head height, keeping your arms relaxed.

Why This version of the deadlift is a good way of drilling a movement pattern where you engage your hamstrings and hinge at the hips to perform the move. How Taking a wider stance than in a regular deadlift, place the kettlebell between your legs. Start the move by straightening your legs without changing the angle of your torso.

Once your legs are straight, push your hips through to straighten up. Why The deadlift is arguably the most effective whole-body strength and muscle builder. It also focuses on your posterior chain — the muscles on the back of your body, which often end up undertrained but play a key role in promoting good posture and keeping you injury-free.

How Set up so you grip the bar with an overhand grip , hands just wider than shoulder-width apart. Initiate the movement by loading your hamstrings and straightening your knees.

Once the bar is past your knees you can straighten up fully. Sets 4 Reps Rest sec. Why After your heavy deadlift sets this is an ideal way of developing the hamstring strength needed to improve your deadlift.

How Hold a barbell with an overhand grip just outside your thighs. Hinge at the hips to send the bar down the front of your thighs, ensuring that the bar stays close to you throughout the lift.

Lower until you feel a strong stretch in your hamstrings, then straighten back up, contracting your glutes at the top of the move. How Lie on a bench set at a 45˚ incline, holding a bar over your chest with your hands just wider than shoulder-width apart. Sets 3 Reps To failure Rest 60sec.

Why The classic go-anywhere chest builder will also work your core, as well as teaching you to hold full-body tension. How Get into a press-up position with your hands just wider than shoulder width.

Keeping your abs braced, lower until your chest touches the floor — keeping your thighs off it — and then press back up. Why Using dumbbells for this classic strength training chest builder emphasises your pecs more than the barbell version, because the dumbbells move slightly inwards throughout the rep and also go through a greater range of motion.

How Lie on a bench with your feet on the floor directly underneath your knees. Hold the dumbbells above you with arms straight, then lower them to your chest.

Then drive your feet hard into the floor and push the dumbbells back strongly to the start position. Ensure your form is correct to avoid injury and maximise growth. How Grip the bar with hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart and squeeze your lats together to create a pressing platform before you take the bar out of the rack.

Lower the bar to your chest, aiming to brush your T-shirt without bouncing. Press up powerfully, pause at the top, then do your next rep.

Sets 3 Reps Rest 60sec. Why This press-up variation places extra emphasis on your triceps, while slightly changing the stress on your chest to hit it from a different angle. How Get into a press-up position, placing your hands close together so your thumbs and index fingers touch.

Keeping your body in a straight line with your abs braced, lower until your chest is just above the floor, and then press back up. Squat down, keeping your chest up, then drive up through your heels to stand. Sets 3 Reps 5 Rest 60sec.

Why This explosive strength training move will activate your fast-twitch muscle fibres, priming your nervous system so you get maximum muscle fibre recruitment. The rep count is low because this is about quality of movement rather than exhausting your target muscles.

How Stand with feet shoulder-width apart, holding a dumbbell in each hand. The Low Fatigue Strength Training Template is a program that has been carefully crafted using the latest research in exercise science and has been tested on over 1, lifters.

Fatigue represents the subjective experience of negative exercise-induced changes in the individual such as muscular soreness, muscle damage, reduced force production, tiredness, etc. The main components of a program that determine how much fatigue is generated are the volume sets and reps , the intensity weight lifted , and how close each set is taken to failure.

In general, fatigue goes up as these variables increase. Similar to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, we want to get the stress and fatigue just right for the individual. Prior to the creation of this template, the science on improving strength convincingly showed that higher intensity training generated greater strength gains than lower intensity training.

This led to multiple studies comparing exercise programs with the same volume, same intensity, but different proximities to failure, which have shown that the improvements in strength and hypertrophy are actually greater in compound lifts like the squat and bench press when the subjects stayed further away from failure.

This program offers a lot of variety, as it includes four different week strength and conditioning templates with three blocks of programming.

These templates are as follows:. While the medium ISF templates are slightly more intense than the low ISF templates, both are optimized to help you achieve maximum strength enhancement while keeping fatigue at lower levels by training away from muscular failure.

The best part of this program is, that once purchased, you will receive lifetime updates free of charge. The program also comes with an page eBook on programming theory and design, as well as tips on overcoming plateaus and managing progress. If you want to build strength while increasing muscle size, this program may be the right fit.

The Powerbuilding I Template is a week program that was designed as a fusion of powerlifting and bodybuilding training. It includes three lifting workouts consisting of both strength- and hypertrophy-focused exercises and rep schemes, along with two GPP workouts that include conditioning and direct arm, upper back, and core work.

Strength training, also known as resistance training , is a type of exercise where the muscles of the body create force via contraction against a load or weight.

The load or weight may be external or internal to the individual, e. barbell external or body-weight internal exercises.

Strength is defined as the amount of force produced measured in a specific context. For example, a powerlifter completing a heavy 1-Rep-Maximum 1RM squat is displaying force production in one context e.

a maximal, single-effort squat whereas a gymnast or shot-put thrower is displaying force production in a different context. In sum, there are many different types of strength that are linked together by the common feature of muscular force production. All of what we mentioned so far are the basics of strength training.

There are a few biological phenomena that occur as our bodies build strength. For strength training to work, multiple, complex adaptations must occur across many tissues including the central nervous system, peripheral nervous system, muscle, tendons, and bones. It all starts with muscular contraction, where the muscle produces enough force to overcome the resistance and move it through the desired range of motion.

In order to generate enough force to lift the weight, the brain sends a signal to the muscles to contract, which results in muscle fibers shortening through actin-myosin crossbridge production. The actin-myosin crossbridges are at the core of muscle contractions and, by sliding past each other, allow us to produce the force necessary to hopefully overcome the resistance.

As its name suggests, an actin-myosin crossbridge is a compound of two proteins; actin and myosin. When a muscle is activated by the signal from the brain, the proteins in these filaments react with each other, creating crossbridges.

To do that, we need to form more crossbridges in a coordinated way and have them transfer force more efficiently to the bones to cause movement. From a muscle loading perspective, we need to make sure we use enough weight so that the muscles are required to produce high amounts of force in an efficient manner.

We know that heavier loads e. higher intensity does this better than low loads. Repetitions that are too light do not require the muscles to form more crossbridges in an efficient way.

But with the appropriate amount of resistance, muscle contractions will occur in a manner that builds strength over time. Another factor that allows our bodies to build strength is muscle fiber recruitment , which is the phenomenon that occurs when our nervous system recruits motor units.

Motor units consist of a single motor neuron and all of the muscle fibers they activate. All muscle groups contain motor units that come in a variety of sizes, and the smaller motor units are always activated first.

As the mechanical load increases, the movement starts demanding more force, which is when bigger motor units are activated. When the muscle is continually trained, the nervous system sends the signal to the motor units to contract more frequently, which both recruits more motor units total and increases the force each one produces.

This allows the muscle to react better to increasing mechanical loads through a process called neuromuscular adaptation. Lifting weights at challenging loads generates a strong signal within the muscle to make more muscle, a process called muscle protein synthesis. Increases in muscle protein synthesis rates are helpful in repairing the muscle protein breakdown that occurs with resistance training.

When more muscle protein is being synthesized than broken down, muscle size increases, which is called muscle hypertrophy. In humans, muscle size can change by altering the number of muscle fibers or the size of existing muscle fibers.

At present, hyperplasia has not yet been demonstrated in adults, rather changes in muscle size over a lifetime appears to be the result of hypertrophy and atrophy. While some believe that muscle protein breakdown from lifting weights is key to causing the muscle to grow, the scientific evidence shows that very little muscle growth takes place when levels of muscle protein breakdown are high.

Instead, muscle growth seems to mostly happen when relatively little muscle protein breakdown occurs from training. not too much or not too little stress, and as they get used to the demands of the program. All of these phenomena play into the strengthening of the muscle. However, there is a specific set of factors that a training program must have to help lifters achieve the maximum amount of strength.

The responses to training are heavily influenced by genetics , but not so much by age or sex based on current evidence. For example, one study looked at how men and women ages 19 to 78 responded to the same 6-month lifting program.

The response to the training programs varied independently of the sex or age of the subjects. Individuals respond uniquely to exercise, which is why applying the same programs to everyone would be unreasonable at best and detrimental at worst.

In other words, as people get stronger, the weight or reps completed must increase to match this improvement so that all the biological phenomena are signaled to improve strength. On days where someone is feeling strong, adding weight is likely the right call in order to match their current uptick in performance.

On days where someone is not performing as well, reducing the load would be the move in order to match their current performance potential.

We call this autoregulation. In addition to matching the training to what the individual needs based on real-time feedback, there are a few techniques that can help with recovery and adaptation rates. This is why we stress how crucial it is to get help from licensed professionals. So, this brings us to our next point— how can Barbell Medicine assist you in your strength training journey?

Strength training has the potential to offer a variety of physical and mental health benefits. This is the area that strength training specifically targets, and as so it is the area in which an individual will experience the most benefit.

In fact, strength training has proven to improve power, endurance, and speed as well, in accordance with muscle adaptation and development. Participation in strength training has long been associated with lowering the risk of many health issues such as type II diabetes, cancer , and cardiovascular diseases.

While a strength-focused training program is unlikely to increase muscle size as much as a hypertrophy-focused program, strength training does drive large improvements in muscle size when programmed appropriately, especially in someone new to lifting. Strength training can improve cardiorespiratory fitness in those with lower levels of aerobic capacity, as well as improve performance in endurance-based sports.

Strength training can strengthen bones and promote bone growth, which is crucial for individuals who are at risk of osteoporosis, such as menopausal women.

It is well-known that strength training increases muscle mass, reduces risk of weight regain, and tends to reduce waist circumference by reducing abdominal fat.

Osteoarthritis is one of the most common disabling conditions related to joint pain. It most often affects the knees, hips, and hands of middle-aged and older individuals. Strength training tends to produce clinically significant improvements in muscle strength, functional ability, and pain scores, even in patients with advanced disease [33] Additionally, starting to lift earlier seems to not only reduce loss of strength associated with osteoarthritis, but also slows down or even stops progression of the disease.

Regular strength training has been proven to reduce the risks or symptoms of some mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety. Strength training has also been proven to improve sleep quality in individuals, which is a huge plus, as getting enough sleep is pivotal to having good mental health.

Anyone could benefit from becoming stronger. One obvious advantage would be the ability to perform daily tasks, such as carrying heavy objects or opening stubborn jar lids easily which is a total flex, in our opinion.

But jokes aside, strength training hosts a myriad of benefits for all groups of people, regardless of age, sex, and fitness level. From helping individuals with mood stability issues or anxiety to allowing us to age better, strength training is an enjoyable and healthy solution to many health issues.

And our answer to that is, what better time than now? Huber, Machteld et al. Caspersen, C J et al. Sullivan, J. Strength training for health in adults: Terminology, principles, benefits, and risks.

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