How to Become Stronger

One of the most important aspects of fitness is strength. Strength improves almost everything about someone's athleticism. Strength can lead to increased speed, more useful endurance, lower injury risk, more body control and the list goes on! Now that you know that strength is important, how do you become stronger?

It's a stress game. That's how you get stronger: stress. No, not late exams or papers kind of stress. Stressing your muscle. Why? Stress will make the body adapt to handle the stress better. I will use weight lifting as an example, because weight lifting is easier to understand. If you lift a heavy object every couple of days your body will eventually adapt to picking up that heavy object. That adaption results in muscle growth, and thus strength gains. Awesome! That's simple! One problem: once adapt to lifting a certain weight, you will not progress any further. 

Can you guess how to increase the stress on your muscle? You increase the weight! You don't need to be Sherlock to figure that one out. There is a special way to do so. It's called progressive overload. What you do is lift a weight you can handle relatively easily for 5-8 reps. You lift that weight one week, then the next week you add 2.5-5 pounds. Repeat for a long time, and boom: you're stronger...and still getting stronger.

Notice I didn't say do 50-100 reps with a weight and slowly add weight. That kind of stress builds endurance, not strength. You'd build a little strength, but not much. You will also plateau in your gains. Adding 2.5-5 pounds weekly is pretty hard to do to when trying to do 50-100 reps (also, that's really boring). It just won't work. To gain decent strength, you have to keep your reps under 20, and usually under 12.

This cool and all, but how are you going to apply this to body weight training?! You can't just add 2.5-5 pounds your body without becoming extremely fat, really fast...and no one wants to get really fat. So how does one increase the stress on the muscles with bodyweight only exercises? Here's how

1. Put more weight on to the limb doing work. You can do this by moving what ever you're working closer to your center of gravity. For example, moving you hands closer and closer to your hips while doing a push up, this will make the push-up more difficult. 

2. Increase the lever arm. This one is really cool, and I think the best way to explain it is through an example: try doing a pull up. Depending on your strength level, this may be easy, moderate or an extreme challenge. Now try doing a pull up with straight arms. Yeah, I bet no one reading this could do a strict straight arm pull up. I know I can't!

3. Make it unilateral! Try a bilateral pushup (aka: a normal pushup). Now try it with one arm. A lot more strength and core strength is required! That's just another great way to progress with bodyweight only exercises!

4. Weighted vest/ankle weights. This is now not strictly body weight training, but it is pretty fun to do! I would never recommend this for any kind of running. It would wreck joints like no tomorrow.

5. Change the exercise. Some times you can just completely change an exercise to get great strength improvements. Bored or think pushups are too easy? Dips. Back lever. Planche. Etc.

I listed 5 ways to increase the stress on your muscles with bodyweight training. Sometimes these mix together. Like the pushup example: when you brought your hands closer to your center of gravity, you also increased the lever arm a bit. Pretty cool, eh?

I will write about progressions through these various exercises later on!