Your Cheat Code to Sustainable Results

Strength training is as old as time, yet getting stronger and more resilient seems to be something that a majority of people shy away from as studies show less than 30% of the world’s population has a membership to a health club.

Of course, strength training holds benefits to getting your stronger by helping build lean muscle, increase bone density, and improve joint integrity, but did you know it can also help decrease fat mass in the body, improve cardiovascular fitness and health, reduce the risk of diseases like obesity and diabetes, and even improve your mobility and flexibility?

Perhaps one of my favorite non-physical or physiological benefits of strength training is how it makes you feel: more confident and accomplished.  Those are feelings you can NOT put a price on.  Those are just a few of the benefits of strength training, but to be honest, I could spend an entire blog post on the benefits of it.

In fact, we often use strength training as our “cheat code” to an improved life.

Let’s take at an easy example I learned from my mentor Alwyn Cosgrove to place emphasis on the idea of this: in combat sports or certain competitive sports, a 10-year-old girl is allowed to compete against a 200-lb fully developed man.  A 10-year-old boy isn’t even allowed to compete against the same man.

This isn’t allowed because that would be unfair - the 200-lb man is too strong!  Strength is an advantage (which is also why steroids are banned in most professional competitive sports due to an unfair advantage of getting someone too strong).  It’s the reason why there are weight classes in most of these combat sports like wrestling, boxing, judo, etc.

It’s generally assumed and generally correct that the bigger person is also the stronger person.

Thus, strength training is a cheat code!!

Strength training is also the cheat code for your life, and can continue to be through a sustainably with the right program.

Not only does it make you stronger and fulfill the numerous benefits I stated above, research also shows that strength training can help you become more durable and resilient and that strength training is the ONLY form of exercise to help reverse the process of aging by literally “rewriting” new DNA in the body!  It helps it longevity!

So, how do you get strong (and stay strong)?

The easiest principle to follow is called the progressive overload principle.  Simply put, progressive overload is the gradual increase weight, repetitions, or frequency each week for specific exercises/movements to increase the demands of the musculoskeletal system.  A typical example is go up 5 lbs/week every week, or go up 1 rep each week, or add in an extra set or training day on a week. 

This principle works extremely well for beginners and/or people restarting their routine.  It works so well that the majority of the “strength results” a person can accomplish usually happens within this timeframe, which is usually 6-12 months.  Just think if you started an exercise, like a bench press, for example, and started at 5 lbs on week up and went up 5 lbs every week, you’d be at 260 lbs by the end of the year!

Obviously, that example wouldn’t work for everybody because of other factors.  When you reach a point where adding more weight or more reps or more frequency doesn’t work, you’ve now reached what we call a “plateau” and other techniques may need to be used to increase strength.

Those techniques and methods are also worthy of an entirely separate blog post, but the main concept to understand is that you need to continue to create some form of mechanical tension that requires the body to adapt, which then gives you the results during the recovery phase.

While the progressive overload principle can be applied to any form of strength training, also keep in mind that your body functions with overall movement.  You don’t accomplish most of your daily tasks in life sitting down, so why would you spend time strength training that way on machines?

The life you want to live doesn’t happen from you sitting down.

The more you can include movements and exercises that require you to move, the better off you’ll be and feel.  Exercises you do in a chair don’t incorporate your core, stabilizer muscles, or involve your joints in the process of completing the movement.  Instead, they isolate specific muscles while forcing you to comply with the design of the equipment which is based on the average person’s height and weight.

“Functional fitness” includes movements and exercises that incorporate how a person should move, making them more applicable to your everyday life.  These movements also include multiple joint segments (making them more complex and valuable to the body), balance and posture, and more coordination of your muscles to work together.

Learning to move well in this manner will make you even stronger!

Now if we include the progressive overload principle to functional movement and add in different variables like types of equipment, the way you stand, and how long it takes to complete each repetition, we’ve got an entirely new recipe for sustainable strength for you.  This allows the design of your program to be endless in possibilities, but still having a structure to be followed.

Furthermore, these movements and exercises can be selected for your program to be applied to your goals in life!  It’s easy to think about why a athlete in the NFL should squat, but should you?  Most likely, because we all have to take a seat on the toilet or get from point A to point B, but that doesn’t mean you need to be doing it for hundreds and hundreds of pounds.

By the way, none of this strength training means you’ll get bulky.  The only way that happens is if it’s part of your goals OR you’re cheating (steroids), so no need to worry about that!  It’s especially difficult for females to get bulky due to biological makeup as well.

Sustainable strength (and results) are closer to reality than you think! 

A sustainable approach will make sure you keep getting results from Day 1 and beyond, continually improving your overall physical and mental health, as well as making sure the results you’re gaining last!

An expertly designed program will be made specifically for you, allowing you to complete your training requirements without hesitation because the entire program is created for you, your abilities, your experience, and your goals!  That means all you have to do is show up because your entire routine is designed with “green lights”.  Just 2x/week can get you most of the results you desire!

Perhaps the BEST takeaway from this blog post is that this strength training and this way of developing strength is doable for ANY body at ANY age!  It works for everyone and the results are REAL!

If you want to have an experience like this designed for you from both an exercise routine, nutrition, and recovery standpoint, simply head over to this link to book a free consultation (called a No-Sweat Jumpstart Session).

We will sit down with you and cover all the information we need to know about you to help design the perfect program to get you back to living the life you want to live!  And if we feel like we’re not the right fit for you, we’ll make sure to send you in the direction that we feel is a better one.  It’s our commitment to you and making sure you’re on the right path to living your life with confidence, control, and clarity!