What is resistance training?
When we talk about resistance training, we’re referring to moving your body through a full range of motion in a variety of movement patterns.
That’s basically it.
When we say a variety of movement patterns, movement patterns can be sliced and diced in lots of different ways.
Now, the goal of this is to gradually and steadily make it more difficult; this is known as progressive overloading.
They could be categorized by compound movement patterns, such as your classic push-pull, squat-hinge, or simply by muscle groups.
For example, biceps, triceps, chest, back, quads, hamstrings, etc.
To start off, for beginners and novices, the easiest way of conceptualizing movement patterns is this.
You have your six basic compound movement patterns.
That’s your horizontal push, your horizontal pull, your vertical push, your vertical pull, your squat, and your hinge.
The next layer we’re going to want to add on top of this is a series of isolation movements.
We’ll get into more detail on that in later sections below, but in simple terms, we can think of this as elbow flexion and extension, knee flexion and extension, core flexion and extension, and a couple of other movements here and there, but those would look like isolation movements.
To sum up, resistance training is active movement, full range of motion, progressively overloaded, over time.
We say this to emphasize what it is not.
It is not a steady state cardio, that is something fundamentally different.
It is not just isometric holds or static holds.
That is why if you see any program out there that primarily consists of various planks, 30 second plank holds, two minute plank holds, and that’s the majority of the program, that’s when you know something has gone wrong.
Active movement, full range of motion of the joints through a variety of movement patterns, standard ways that your body can move, slowly and steadily increase load over time, that is quality resistance training.
Why do resistance training?
Let’s start with a really simply uncontroversial stance that physical activity is good for you.
We aren’t going to go into detail about that here.
It’s fairly self-evident, self-explanatory, and there are international and national health bodies all around the world that has gone into this in much greater depth about longitudinal studies of health benefits far better than I could ever do.
I will talk about why resistance training in particular is necessary and provides a distinct difference to cardiovascular training.
Look up any international or national health body and they will specify for the general population to do at least 30 minutes of resistance training twice a week.
And mind you, this is the lowest common denominator.
We know that resistance training will increase muscle mass, allow for greater range of motion of your joints, it will increase your bone density, your tendon and ligament strength and generally decrease your risk of injury in everyday life.
So that’s also not particularly controversial.
To sum up, physical activity is obviously good for you.
In addition to any physical activity, we need a portion of that to be resistance training.
Resistance training and quality resistance training, what is that?
We’ve just covered it in the previous section.
Why not do yoga?
Why not just run?
Why not pilates?
Why not CrossFit / Les Mill / group classes?
With any number of these HIIT classes, you may continue to burn some calories, but it will not add lean muscle tissue and so for girls, you will not get that toned look that you are probably looking to get because the concept of having a toned look is simply having increased lean muscle tissue at a low body fat percentage, low body fat percentage for girls in this context, probably talking about 20 to 22 or 23%.
Won’t lifting make me bulky?
Should I train for size or strength?
The perennial question – are you training for strength or size?
The perennial question, are you training for size or strength?
This is probably one of the most common questions you’ll find.
However, I find this phrasing a tad misleading, and here’s why.
To increase muscle mass, it is a necessity to increase strength of an exercise in a variety of rep ranges.
Any rep range from 1 to 30 is reasonably hypertrophic, and an increase of strength across any number of rep ranges will very likely lead to an increase in lean muscle tissue provided you are on a caloric surplus.
Conversely, to increase strength, it is helpful to increase the size of the muscle.
Greg Knuckles has a great article on Stronger by Science talking about how the majority of lifters in competitive powerlifting are simply stronger when they are bigger.
In other words, weight classes are really just height classes in disguise, and there’s a lot of truth to that, and there’s a very simple reason why.
I propose an alternate way of conceptualizing the different styles of resistance training, the different styles of whether you’re training for size, or for strength, or for sport.
I propose the following conceptual model.
First, the base of training is this, progressively overloaded training through a full range of motion across a variety of movement patterns.
This layer encompasses many different cohorts.
Your average general population, the folks who do not care at all about lifts in the gym looking good on the beach, and are just training for health and longevity, should apply this type or this style of training.
For want of a better term, let’s call this general training.
All the way up to very serious enthusiasts, your bodybuilders training for bodybuilding shows to compete in, and everyone in between.
The methodology of training is the same.
Let’s just repeat this again.
Your average Peter Parker looking just to lift to their 80, don’t care about the gym, this is how they should train.
Progressively overloaded training through a full range of motion across a variety of movement patterns.
This is how a fairly serious bodybuilding enthusiast would train.
Whilst the goals are different, you can see the training methodology will be remarkably similar.
Of course, the actual meat and potatoes of the training will be extremely different.
Now what will be different is the volume, the intensity, the frequency, the effort and so on.
But the style is the same.
In other words, hypertrophy training, mass training, training to get toned, training to get jacked, training for health, training for longevity is all the same thing.
Next or second, one stand deviation away from what we’ll just call general training for now is this.
Think of this as strength training plus skill training, where the emphasis is still on strength.
So this is most strength sports, powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, strongman, CrossFit and so on.
It is simply training, general training plus a skill component.
In other words, it is one standard deviation away from general training.
And third, we’ve got folks who are serious athletes, your martial artists, your track and field athletes, team sports, contact sports, etc.
To conceptualize their style of training, they want to train quite differently.
It’s really general training, but two standard deviations away with a greater emphasis on the skill.
And so in a roundabout way, we do end up back at this classic category categories of training for size, training for strength and training for sports.
But I think it’s critical that we understand conceptually these are not three disparate circles, but they are layers built on top of each other.
And we get progressively less and less focus on the bottom layers as we go up the standard deviations.
Finally, the key thing to note is if you’re a beginner and you really want and if you’re a beginner and you want to train for size or you want to train for sports, you still need to start with the basics, six to 12 months, maybe 18, maybe 24 months, you will get your best bang for buck by starting with the base.