Here’s how you can start getting stronger every single week, regardless of your current rate of progress, without adding extra training to your program—provided you’ve got 40 minutes a week that you can dedicate to training.
The Common Strength Plateau
I have been there in the past, putting 4, 5, 6 hours a week consistently into training, doing what I think is a perfect program, nailing my diet, and yet making no tangible progress with my strength. Yes, it’s true—making changes to your body does take time, but continuing on like this, week after week, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is quite literally the definition of insanity. And if you don’t fix this fast, you’re setting yourself up to, at best, get no results and make no further progress. But at worst—and this is far more common—you soon lose motivation because of that lack of results and then quickly fall off the wagon and stop training entirely. I see this way too often, and so I want to show you how to avoid that.
Here’s how you can quickly put a stop to that lack of strength gain and start getting fast, tangible results with your strength training from as little as six movements and half an hour of work a week. In doing that, you ensure that you actually continue progressing long-term.
How to get stronger every single week (WITHOUT training more)
In guaranteeing rapid progress with our strength, there are only really two things we need to get right. The first is how we signal that strength gain, and the second is how we actually allow that strength gain to occur.
The Three Barriers To Effective Training
The single driver of progress with your strength is intensity. It’s how heavy the movement you’re trying to do is relative to your maximum possible ability—your maximum level of strength that you could exert. To be an effective stimulus, to be something that actually tells your body, ‘Hey, go build muscle, get stronger, and do it fast,’ that stimulus needs to be as heavy as physically possible for you at that point in time.
That’s a simple concept—most people are aware of it to some extent. Rather than worrying about that, if we can remove every barrier that normally gets in the way of us achieving that, then it’s going to allow us the time, attention, physical resources, and energy to actually get it done.
1. Too Much Weekly Volume
So, there are three things I see constantly getting in the way of people being able to actually use properly intense stimulus to signal strength gain. The first is trying to do too much weekly volume—too many reps, too many sets, too much time in the gym. The simple fact is that if you are trying to spread your energy, your physical resources, over sets and sets and sets, and reps and reps of work over the week, trying to put in 2, 3, 4, 5 hours of training a week, by the nature of human physiology, that work cannot be a constant high quality. We just don’t have that much maximum intensity strength exertion potential in us each week.
So, by trying to do 20 sets per muscle group, by trying to spend 4 hours a week in the gym, we ensure that we are diluting the quality of our training. Not only does that take us more time and expose us to injury, but it simply means that, in terms of progress, we are fighting a constant battle against trying to do high-intensity, quality strength-signalling work versus trying to last through the reps, sets, and workouts we’ve set ourselves for the week.
2. Too Many Exercises
The second issue, in the same vein, is trying to work too many movements at a time. When you have four different chest exercises, four different leg exercises, seven different exercises to target every head of your shoulder from every angle possible, it quickly becomes very difficult to channel your focus into actually pushing progress on any of them. Strength gain does not come down to how many types of lateral raises you do in a week; it comes down to the level that you get your strength to. It’s progressive overload—very simple. But again, we’re getting in our own way. If you’re trying to push progress on 20 or 30 different exercises at any given point in your training, it’s very likely that you’re not pushing much progress on any.
So, rather than throwing the kitchen sink at our bodies and expecting a huge amount of different stimuli to just work their magic and make us stronger, if we just have a handful of carefully chosen exercises—only six, one for each basic plane of motion—then we can channel all our resources, every single time we show up to train, into actually being better than we were the week before. Pushing progress beyond the beginner level will not happen without that intent. It does not happen by itself, and it’s hard. So, if we want to give ourselves the best chance possible of pushing that progress, of guaranteeing that it’s happening, having as few movements as possible to be progressing on is, in my experience, by far the best strategy.
3. No Clear Strength Goals
The third thing that gets in the way of people getting anywhere with regular strength gain is not having clear targets to get their strength to. Without specific, very difficult strength goals, your training has no purpose, and there is no direction that you are trying to get your movements to. Again, impressive strength gain won’t come from just a few weeks of randomly doing exercises. It takes years of consistent progress in a single direction on each of your movements. Without a long-term North Star for each of your basic movement patterns, without a goal that you know will take you years, that will require huge amounts of muscle mass to be built and your body to literally transform in order to achieve, your training is weak. It’s directionless, and you’re never going to show up and train with the intensity required to make the progress necessary, because you don’t even know what that progress looks like.
It’s human nature to take the easiest route to getting a result. If your goal is purely to show up and work hard, the easiest way to do that is by doing very little. If you want to get to impressive levels of strength, you need to get very clear on what that looks like for you specifically, and not have too many goals. Again, I only have six that I’m building towards long-term. Then you might stand a chance of your training taking you there.
What About Recovery?
So, those are the three things I see stopping people from getting effective training done in order to stimulate their bodies to get stronger, build muscle tissue, and make the transformation that we want to come as a result of effective strength training. That’s the signal.
But once we’ve sent that signal, we’ve got clear strength targets, we’ve only got a handful of them, and we’re doing as little work each week as possible to make sure that work is potent and actually sending a clear, effective signal to grow stronger. Where does the actual strength gain itself come from?
That all comes down to recovery, because you don’t get stronger in the gym. You don’t get stronger when you’re training, when you’re on the rings, working hard. You get stronger in the rest of the time—when you’re eating, when you’re sleeping, when you’re having a shower, when you’re at work. If we want to maximize the rate of progress that we’re making with our strength, it makes sense to also ensure that we’re not putting up barriers to our body going about that recovery as effectively as possible.
There are a few things that people miss here as well. I think the recovery side is much, much simpler and more straightforward than sending the signal itself, but it’s equally important. If we’re undercutting ourselves here, there’s so much progress that we’re leaving on the table and so much more bang for our buck that we could be getting out of our training.
1. Protein
There’s essentially two things. The first is massive, and just fixing this alone will allow you to get almost all of the benefits out of your training, and that is getting enough protein in. If we don’t eat enough protein, then our bodies simply won’t have enough building blocks at their disposal to build the muscle tissue required to get stronger. This doesn’t have to be anything crazy. 1.8 grams per kilogram of body weight pretty much reaches the point of diminishing returns with this. So, if you’re an 80kg guy, eating 150 grams of protein a day is ample to make sure that you’re not short-changing yourself in terms of your diet.
People worry about calories and think they need to bulk and freak themselves out. If you are eating enough protein and you are training properly, I’ve met very few people who need to consciously worry about their calorie intake. Your appetite has evolved for good reason. It’s very, very rarely calories that are stopping you from getting stronger; it’s a lack of proper training, as we’ve talked about. If there’s anything with diet, it’s just about that protein target. So, if you can figure out a way to make that part of your lifestyle, it’s going to pay dividends for decades to come—quite literally.
2. Downtime
The other main part of this is just getting good sleep and rest. We often try so hard to push ourselves to make progress in fitness and in other parts of our lives, but honestly, all the training I do fits into half an hour a week. It’s really not that much, but it still takes my body all those other hours in the week to recover, build, and grow stronger. The best thing you can do, once you train well and eat protein, if you want to maximise progress, is to look after yourself. Get enough hours of sleep, get downtime in your life, and just give your body the space it needs to do its thing and grow.
To Get Stronger, Don’t Try To Add More Training – Eliminate The Obstacles Instead
These are some of the problems I see getting in the way of people making regular weekly progress with their strength. What I’ve found to be so true is that if you can just remove these blocks, these barriers to getting results, the gains tend to happen by themselves. Remove the excess training from your routine, remove all the extra exercises, chisel them down to a few clear strength goals, make sure you’re fuelling yourself with enough protein, and getting good rest, and you will find that strength gain is not that complicated, difficult, or time-consuming at all. In fact, it’s extremely time-efficient, rewarding, and fun.
Rather than being a demotivating, unsustainable approach, get those things right, and that process quickly becomes very addictive and self-sustaining. That’s what I’d like as many people as possible to realise, because the benefits are just so incredible.
If you need help focusing your training down and figuring out what effective strength goals look like, read this. If you want to see how you can cut down the excess volume and get maximum bang for your buck in terms of potent training to build your strength on those movements, then read this.