Building strength isn’t just about bigger muscles or always lifting heavy. It’s about optimizing ten key adaptations in your body. Get ready to rethink what you thought you knew about building serious strength.
The 3 Core Pillars of Strength Development
To approach strength development holistically, we can group these ten key adaptations into three fundamental categories:
1) Effort
Effort is the mental and physical push you bring to each session. It’s about testing the limits of your body’s voluntary muscle activation and output.
2) Efficiency
Efficiency focuses on using your body and energy to maximize the benefit of each movement. It’s about making sure every bit of effort has the greatest impact.
3) Architecture
Architecture refers to structural changes within your muscles, connective tissues, and skeletal system as they adapt to your training.
For training to be productive and avoid wasted effort, understanding these adaptations is essential. Developing these attributes helps you to consistently build strength in a predictable, sustainable way.
Defining Strength
For the purposes of this guide, we’re focusing on absolute strength—the maximal force output at low velocity for a short duration. Once you’ve built a foundation of absolute strength, you can then work on speed-strength, endurance-strength, and other dynamic adaptations.
The 10 Adaptations that Drive Strength Development
Each category of strength adaptation has its own unique attributes, all of which contribute to building a stronger, more capable body.
Effort
1) Psychological Preparation and Readiness: The mental state to tackle high-intensity effort.
2) Motor Unit Recruitment: The extent to which your nervous system activates muscle fibers.
3) Motor Unit Firing Rate: How quickly your nervous system signals muscle fibers, impacting force output.Efficiency
4) Improved Technique: Refining form to enhance performance and reduce injury risk.
5) Inter-muscular Coordination: Optimizing muscle groups to work together seamlessly.
6) Reduced Antagonistic Co-activation: Limiting opposing muscle activation to maximize intended muscle engagement.Architecture
7) Muscle Hypertrophy: Building functional muscle size as a foundation for strength.
8) Myofibrillar Density: Increasing the density of contractile units within muscle fibers to generate force.
9) Lateral Force Transmission: Improving force transfer through muscle and tendon for greater power.
10) Tendon Stiffness: Enhancing the stiffness of tendons for efficient force application.
Building an Athlete Capability Profile
Every individual has a unique strength profile, shaped by their training background, physical development, and training goals.
By evaluating each of these ten attributes on a scale from 1 to 5, we can create a customized capability profile.
For a complete novice, all areas are in an underdeveloped state. This is why almost any training program will produce results for a novice.
As time progresses, and the athlete’s capability profile takes shape, the types of training the athlete will respond to narrows.
For this reason, you’re much more likely to hear how one program worked and another didn’t. The underlying reason is that the developmental focus of a specific program didn’t match the developmental needs of that athlete.
No single program can be everything for everyone. Trade-offs need to be made where certain qualities are emphasized at the expense of others. The key is knowing which areas to target and how to target them.
Next Up: Targeted Training Methods
Now that you have an understanding of the ten pathways to strength, it’s time to apply that knowledge. Continue reading to learn specific training methods that target each of these ten areas and help you maximize your strength potential.