If you’re an athlete and you’re feeling like you’re just not as strong as you should be…maybe you’re a wrestler or football player or in any other type of physical sport. It can be frustrating if you’re working your butt off in the weight room and feel like you can’t make the gains you want to.
So we’re going to be listing out three bona-fide ways to make massive strength gains in the gym, and continue to make progress over time while avoiding plateaus.
Prioritize Compound Movements
If you want full-body athletic strength, your prioritized lifts in the gym should be those that teach the body to produce force as a collective unit. This is where multi-joint exercises come into the mix.
This is your squats, your bench presses, your deadlifts, your overhead presses etc. Compound exercises promote true functional strength and improvement of joint mobility.
Why compound movements over isolation movements? Compound exercises will let you lift the heaviest loads your body is capable of. Lifting the heaviest loads your body can handle will overload your body to force it to get stronger.
Compound movements should take up the majority of your training time, using lower rep schemes, with isolation exercises being used at the end of your workout as accessories.
Utilize Accessory Exercises
Again, compound lifts should be your priority, but when you make time for your accessory exercises in your training time, you want to be doing exercises that help support your compound lifts.
Here's an example: if you’re stuck on a bench press plateau, one thing that can help is starting to introduce higher-rep bench press accessory movements. Because again, our compound lifts make us stronger, so our goal should be to continue to make progress on those lifts, and we can use accessory exercises to do that.
So we may start doing stuff like dumbbell incline bench press, or close-grip bench press, or dips as supporting movements to our bench press.
And we’re going to be keeping the volume relatively high here, because accessory exercises are about adding volume to build up smaller muscle fibers in specific areas that may be lacking.
Implement Progressive Overload
Progressive overload is the number one most important concept in strength training. Learning and organizing your training around this concept will be a game-changer for you as an athlete.
Progressive overload revolves around the fact that our bodies and our nervous system grow stronger through adaptations to the demands we place on it. That adaptation can be neuromuscular, meaning improving things like increasing the number of muscle fibers that our body recruits when lifting something heavy.
That adaptation can also be hypertrophy based, like increasing muscle size and facilitating growth. It can even build stronger ligaments, bones, tendons.
When we place a high stress on our body, we send it into a state of fatigue under our baseline normal state. In the rise back up to baseline homeostasis from that fatigued state, our bodies will super-compensate by bringing our baseline temporarily above where it was before we trained.
And the more we can get our body into that super-compensated state with training, at some point our body will begin treating that new state as your new baseline of homeostasis, and then the cycle repeats.
Here's an example: I just bench pressed 225 pounds for 5 reps. And then the next week I bench press 225 for 5 reps, and then I repeat that week after week, my body will become adapted to that stress at some point, and if I keep repeating the same load and volume, there won’t be any further adaptation that’ll need to take place, therefore I won't grow stronger.
So to give my body a new stress to adapt for, I would then want to work to push this a little further, whether that be an extra rep, an extra 5-10 pounds, or maybe I start bench pressing twice a week.
This is where keeping a log of your workouts is essential. If you want to get stronger, you can’t just hop in the gym, lift what gives you that pump you love and then leave. Maybe as a novice that’ll work, but at some point plateaus will be hit. You need to make track of your progress and look to make small improvements over time.
If you want to watch our full-length video on this subject, click here.
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