Strength What It Means & Why It Matters

If there was ever an exercise that you should prioritize above all others, regardless of what ever your goal is, it would be strength training. It doesn’t matter whether you want lose weight or to enhance your performance as an athlete. You’re priority should be to get stronger. The time you spend at the gym should be devoted to getting stronger.

Now why would that be you might ask? Isn’t any exercise good enough? Aren’t they all the same? What if I prefer say cardio over strength training? What makes strength training in particular so important compared to any other exercise? The reason is very simple because you as a human being were made to be strong. Being strong is being healthy! A strong body is a healthy body by default. A weak body is never thought of as healthy by anyone. Let us explore the reasons why.

What Is Strength

“Humans are not physically normal in the absence of hard physical effort.”

-Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

To understand the importance of strength, one must first understand what is strength. To put it simply strength is nothing more than the ability to produce force against an external resistance. That’s all it really is. Whether that external resistance takes the form of you being able to lift your body off of a surface, picking up an object off the floor, or you pushing/pulling something heavy you are producing force against an external resistance.

With that in mind we can begin to understand the importance of strength in our lives. Almost every physical activity we perform is dependent upon how strong we are to some degree. The more physically demanding an action is the more strength we need to exert in to perform that action. Likewise the less physically demanding an action is the less strength we need exert to perform said action. For example it takes a less strength to pick up a chair  than it does to pick up a couch. The couch being much heavier than the chair requires more force to  pick it up off the ground.

Naturally people who are strong are able to produce more force than people who are weak. They are also far healthier and more fit than weak people. This benefits don’t stop with being physically strong though. Stronger people in general tend to have much better self esteem than weaker people. It’s not hard to see why when you think about it. When you wake up everyday feeling stronger than you were before  it’s hard not to feel better. Your newfound strength gives you a huge confidence boost. That’s not to say you can’t have high self-esteem without being strong. You just much more likely to have high self esteem as a result of getting stronger.

Getting Stronger

Understand that the only way that you are ever going to get stronger is through heavy compound weightlifting. While you can develop strength with body weight exercises ideally you’ll want to get into barbell exercises at some point if you are serious about getting stronger. The reason being is that of all the compound exercises that you can perform to develop strength the best ones that offer the best results are performed in the weight room.

Because most of the equipment you need is readily available in the weight room you will be spending most of your time in the gym doing the following barbell exercises:

• Squats
• Deadlifts
• Standing Overhead Press
• Bench Press

You can also train with dumbbells and kettlebells but these should be secondary to your barbell exercises. The reason is  because with barbells your exercises will involve your entire body working as a complete system in order to lift those heavier weights. While you can sort of do this with some kettlebell, dumbbell, and even body weight exercises they are not quite as effective as barbell exercises are at getting you to become as strong as you could be. Still don’t be shy about incorporating kettlebells, dumbbells, and even other barbell exercises into your workouts.

The goal is to become stronger by progressively lifting heavier weights with each workout set. The sets themselves should be low rep (usually 5 reps per set) in order to lift the most weight possible with perfect form. Over time if you perform these exercises correctly you will get stronger and be able to lift even heavier weights.

One thing you want to remember about strength training is the importance of rest and recovery post workout. Understand that it won’t matter how hard you trained during your workouts. If you don’t allow your body recover from the stress by getting plenty of rest you risk the possibility of seriously injuring yourself. Remember that the whole purpose of strength training is to produce just enough stress on your body so that your body can adapt to the stress following the recovery period.

Usually this recovery period is about a days rest following the workout but you want to get at a minimum of a good night’s sleep before you go back to pumping iron in the gym again. Remember you’ll only get stronger after your body has successfully adapted to the stress you imposed on it during the last workout. It’s all about stress, recovery, and finally adaptation.

The Stronger You Are The Better You’ll Be At Everything Else

Being stronger is always better than being weaker. Stronger people in general are not only healthier than weaker people they are happier than weaker people. A skilled athlete will perform much better at his sport when he becomes stronger than he was before. Getting strong will always be a good investment of your time because almost every aspect of your life will improve as a result of you getting stronger. Just the sense of pride you get knowing how far you’ve come from where you were before when you were weak is it’s own reward.

Barbell training in particular not only builds muscle it builds confidence. In many ways it trains the mind to prepare for the hardships of life because so much of barbell training mirrors what we go through in real life in a way. Life often gets harder and harder much like how the weights on the bar get heavier and heavier. In that sense it prepares us to endure and persevere through life’s hardships. As we get stronger we get better. The things that used to hold us back before now seem like a minor road bump. The confidence and the energy that strength training gives us allows us to perform better not just in the gym but in our own personal lives as we take on new challenges and overcome new obstacles.

Best of all because strength is the most general of all physical adaptations you really can’t go wrong with focusing just on strength and ignoring any other kind of exercise. Of course you can still do things like cardio and endurance exercises to compliment your strength training but they all should be simply that; a compliment to your training not the focus of it. The value of strength in your life cannot be over stated. If you want to see improvement in your life and your performance all you have to do is get under the bar and start lifting heavy weights; and once those weights start to feel a bit lighter add some more weight to that bar.