The secret to getting insanely strong (it’s not what you think)

In this video, I’m going to share with you the secret to getting insanely strong, which has allowed me to go from a very dedicated, consistent, but frustrated trainee not getting the results that I wanted with my strength and physique to gaining all the strength you see me with now. And as a result, having the physique that comes along with that by doing just 40 minutes of training a week. The same secret that’s allowed me to teach dozens of other people how to do the same thing, starting from the ground up, from absolute beginner level, all the way to advanced the people I see who are spending a lot of their time training in the gym or otherwise and are seeing no real changes in their physique are all missing this. And by contrast, the people who are all absolutely jacked and getting stupidly strong regardless of how much time they spend training or the specifics of their approach, they have all absolutely dialled this thing in.
So what is this secret? Well, first, a bit of context. Why do we want to get insanely strong in the first place? Apart from it being a cool party trick? Strength of the sake of strength is not really that exciting or worth wiring about, but there are two things that strength gives us. If we can get it to a high enough level, the first is muscle mass, which is going to allow us to look good. If we wanted to be ripped, lean, toned, have a great physique, we need as much muscle in this as possible. The more the better. And strength is the way that we get our bodies to build that muscle. And then the second reason is that the mobility, the functionality that having high levels of strength gives us means that we can function well, be pain-free and stay healthy as we age, able to do the things we want to do rather than breaking down.
So for vanity reasons, which are very fair and for longevity, health, lifestyle reasons, we want as much strength as we can possibly build. And the basic way that we build that strength is a process of signalling and adaptation, training and recovery. And so what happens is we do some training with the idea that that sends a signal to our body to tell it, Hey, we want more strength. We want to build muscle tissue and be stronger. We don’t get stronger when we do that training, but it starts a cascade of biological signalling that gets those processes of growth and improvement, adaptation in motion. And so then we go away and while we’re chilling out, sleeping, eating, working, doing all the things we do in our lives, our body’s recovering and building that new muscle tissue to be stronger. And then we come back a week later or however long it is and we send the signal again that Hey, we want to be stronger than we are now.
And then the body grows and adapts and gets stronger. Now, the thing that most people miss, most people get both parts of this wrong, and I spend a lot of time talking about how important it is to realise that growth happens here without the recovery. The time in between training, we don’t get stronger, we don’t build anything. But the secret I want to talk about today comes down to how effectively we send this signal to our bodies to grow. And the principle is this. Let’s say our strength is on the Y axis here, and this is time. At any point in time we say we’re sitting here, this is our current level of strength. We want this to improve. Let’s say that anywhere below this is strength that we have access to. We could use as much strength as we wanted between these limits. This is lying down not using any muscles, and this is working at the threshold of our strength.
What most people miss with strength training is that to be an effective signal, we need to be working at the threshold of our strength because by doing that, we signal to our bodies that we are using currently all the resources that we have at our disposal and to keep us alive in future, to make sure that we can deal with the demands of our environment. We probably want more of a buffer than that. And so the beautiful thing about human physiology is that when we test its true limits and use everything we’ve got, when it goes and recovers and does this cycle of adaptation, it builds in buffer. And so then we get a bit weaker, but we come back stronger Once it’s done, its recovery and adaptation. And so now we have a new level. Now we have more strength within our capacity, but if we keep doing the same training, then there’s no need for the body to actually get stronger and overcompensate because we’re well within our limit and most people’s training most of the time sits somewhere in this region below our maximum threshold.
The only way that we will grow stronger at anywhere close to the rate that our body is capable of changing is if every time we train we are going as hard as possible, as heavy as possible with the training that we do so that we actually test for limits of our strength, use every bit of strength in our current capacity, and therefore signal an adaptive response rather than just recovery back to baseline. Basically to get strong, you need to be going as heavy as you possibly can because everything else is a waste of time. Imagine effective strength training. The stuff that gets you stronger and builds muscle tissue is when you’re sprinting a flat out 100% as fast as possible. You apply that to lifting that looks like struggling, straining to be able to move whatever resistance you’re using to do your strength training. Most people when they’re training are sitting somewhere around a light jog.
They just never get anywhere near their limit and they can spend hours and hours and hours doing that jogging or maybe it’s a brisk walk, but because they never get anywhere close to their current potential limit of strength, their body’s never under the stress that tells that there needs to do any changing. And so it doesn’t. And so people can spend hours a week in the gym at this slow cruising pace of a jog sitting somewhere down here in terms of the limit of their strength until they consistently for years and never see changes in their body, never see more definition, more strength, more mobility. Their bodies just stay average as they are. And this can be extremely frustrating when you’re putting in lots of time but not getting a result. Another analogy we could use is learning the piano. If all you ever did was play things that were easy for you that you could already play, then you’d never really get any better at piano.
You would just stay at the level you are unless you’re challenging yourself with new things that are outside or at the limits of your current capacity, then there’s no learning, there’s no adaptation that needs to take place. And so for our training to be effective, we need to be at that struggling straining intentional limit where things are difficult and we’ve got to figure out, our boats have to figure out how to adapt to those demands. And if you made this mistake in the past, it’s not necessarily your fault. Not only is there a lot distraction in the fitness world, but it gets in the way of us focusing properly on this. But there’s also a lot of very tangible issues with the approaches of traditional strength training, which make it very difficult to ever do this properly. One huge issue with normal traditional fixed resistance strength exercises is that training doesn’t rise to match your maximum level of ability as you train.
And so it actually takes a lot of time and reps and sets to be able to get glimpses of this limit, which looks like when you fail at the end of the set of bench press for a little fraction of some of those final couple reps, that’s the only time we ever get here. And so using a gym, it takes a lot of time, a lot of training to actually get enough of that signal to max out that adaptation for the week. It’s like if we were playing piano and only one tiny portion, maybe a couple seconds of a five minute song we’re actually challenging for us to play that we’re trying to learn. But whenever we rocked up to practise, we were just playing through the entire song. And so if most of it’s way too easy for us, we’re not really learning or improving signalling any adaptation from our bodies, and that’s just to get a glimpse of those couple seconds which are challenging, but then we have to do the whole song again before we get to repeat that difficult section.
You would never practise piano like that. If there was a tiny bit that was difficult, you would just practise it over and over and over and over again until it was great and then you could put it back into the song and play the whole thing. And that’s how we approach strength training, isolate the work that is actually sending the signal, don’t worry about the rest, just practise it and then it only takes you a couple minutes for each of you movements for the week rather than an hour. So basically we want our training to always rise to our level whenever we’re training so that we can just send the signal and spend the rest of our time on the couch or doing anything else rather than being in the gym just going through the motions for no reason. The other issue that pops up is training that doesn’t lower to that limit because if you’re trying to train above your capability, well you’re not training because you can’t move the resistance.
And so there’s another common issue with people who do the right thing with this whole idea of intent and max effort, but then don’t adjust the difficulty of what they’re doing down so that they can actually train through full range of motion and actually get a signal cent at all. So if we’re up here, nothing’s happening. If we’re down here, it’s useless work. We just want to make sure that we scale up and down with the difficulty of our movements so that we have the ability to pour everything in terms of effort, in terms of intent so that we can get this signal sent at the highest strength possible. There’s this myth that’s promoted everywhere of thinking we need to do so much weekly training because we expect of ourselves to be in the gym 3, 4, 5 hours a week. We rightly so spread ourselves over that so that we can actually last all that training time.
There is no possible way that you can train at the limit of your strength for five hours a week. You can do it for about 20 minutes and beyond that, things become impossible, which is why once you write in rest time and stuff between movements, 40 minutes a week is all it ever takes us when we’re trading constantly at max intensity to get to the point of complete diminishing returns being cooked. You can think of that like if you were sprinting and trying to maintain your max effort sprint, your fastest possible speed, how long do you think you can keep that up for not long normal gym programmes if you apply this constant max intensity method EL trying to do an 800 metres or a thousand metres or a couple Ks at a sprint, it’s physiologically impossible for you to do that. And so you’re setting yourself up roughly the outset for disappointment and frustration.
I used to have this so backwards I could feel a lot of people do. I thought it was all programming that mattered and how well your routine was designed. As we were developing this constant max intensity 40 minutes a week method, I started just testing less and less reps and sets each week seeing what happened. And the more I did that, the more I realised that all the science-based best practise programming didn’t really matter for shit, especially when you’re adjusting the difficulty yourself, when you’re constantly adjusting the load to match your maximum level of strength numbers, reps sets, volume all go out the window. In fact, what I found was that trying to hit a certain number of reps and sets each week was getting in the way of me putting in the level of effort that I needed to push progress. It was making me stretch myself out and focus on numbers rather than focusing on intensity, on using the limits of my strength.
Once I cut it all the way back to one continuous set per week per movement, I started going nuts and that was when I realised that we had been missing the point the whole time I was now using strength. I didn’t even know I was training at levels of intensity that I had never experienced before. And from then on, my strength gain just has never been more consistent, reliable, or easy. Everything that’s not those few minutes of max effort work for each of your movements each week is a distraction. It’s getting in the way because I can tell you this, you will not be able to put in the level of effort needed to push strength gains as fast as possible if you’re trying to stretch yourself across a lot of work, if you’re trying to do a bunch of sub maximal work, if you’re not able to adjust your movements to match the level of your strength, you need to set your routine up so that it is as simple as possible, as minimal as possible so that you can focus on the one thing that you’ve got to do, which is training as hard and as heavy as possible across the full range of motion of the movements that you train.
Most people just never even experience anything close to what they’re capable of in terms of intensity. That’s why they don’t realise what they’re missing because until you’ve actually truly pushed the limits of your strength through the full range of motion of an exercise, you just have no idea what it feels like or what you actually are capable of. Another analogy would be like the hammer game that you might play at a fair where you have to whack the sledgehammer onto the sensor and it reads how hard you’re hitting when you’re going into a set to train. That’s the level of intent you want. You are literally trying to generate as much force as you physically possibly can, and you’re doing that 20 times throughout the ramp at every single point in the range of motion, you are dosing it as hard as possible. You’re trying to crank the level of difficulty up to get the highest number that you can to get the best score possible to beat what you’ve done in the past.
When I’m training, when I’m doing any of my movements, you could almost see steam coming out my ears, my head looks like it’s about to explode. The way I know that my students are really training properly when I watch their videos is because the facial expressions they’re making are concerning. There is no hiding the level of effort that they’re putting in. They look like they’re going through some excruciating exorcism and despite what that might look like, so an outsider, you haven’t on this before, it’s not a negative experience because you’re stopping your set as soon as you are actually not enjoying it. But it shows you how hard you have to try to really push this limit. It doesn’t happen by itself, and that’s why we want to focus on removing every barrier possible to stand in our way or distract us from putting that level of effort in.
And it does take time to learn. Training as heavy as possible is a skill in itself, but as you do get stronger in your body adapts so you get better with that at using that strength and of exerting that maximum force. And so it’s a skill that you are forever improving at as you get stronger. I’m still getting better at that and the better I get at going hard, the stronger I, the more muscle I have, the better my body looks. It truly is all that matters. We can talk about diet and recovery and how we programme those movements in the week, but none of it is relevant if you are not putting in that effort, if you’re not testing the limits of your strength and if you’re not improving at it over time, and this is another reason I put so much emphasis on having clear strength goals because if you don’t have a clarity on where you’re trying to get that strength to, eventually it’s very easy to be like sedate school.
Basically everything is working against you when it comes to trying to reach the limits of your strength. Everything is trying to make you not work there, either not working at all or just doing sub maximal stuff that might feel like productive but not be. And so the clearer you can be on the goals that you’re trying to achieve with your strength, where you’re ultimately trying to get each of you movement patterns too, it makes it a whole lot easier to focus your training in. And something that can help a lot is just trying to do those goals every time you train failing and then having utter clarity as a result on how weak you are in comparison to where you want to be because then there’s no excuse not to be working as close to that limit, that goal limit as you can be whenever you train because you’re trying to be here.
And so if you can’t train there, the next best thing you can do is where your current threshold is. So an easy way to find that limit is by literally trying the goal failing and just scaling back enough that you can move. And so that’s the idea. If you can work as hard as possible, if you can use all the strength that you currently have, challenge yourself with every bit of intent you’ve got. Then over time through successive cycles of maxing out adaptation and overcompensation over time, we get our strength to just keep on increasing and keep on increasing. And because we are always working at our limit every time we train, essentially we should be going slightly harder, slightly heavier because our strength has improved. So if you always basically focus on getting your sprint to a hundred percent, finding your level of actual muscular failure and working there, then automatically you should find that every time you train, you’re coming back a little bit stronger and working at a slightly higher level and then you look back and see that your strength and physique have been developing in line with that.
That’s the principle. Work as hard as possible, remove everything that gets in the way of that, trying to work through hard and having exercises that don’t actually allow you to do that work. Once you understand that principle, all you need is two things. One, a really clear set of strength goals that represent the level up here that you’re ultimately trying to build towards. You only need six well-selected movements to achieve that. If you want a video running through the ones I use, check that out here. And then you just need to start training each of them once a week, giving it everything you’ve got every time you train to go as heavy as possible and make that heavier and heavier and heavier and heavier every week. The best way to do that is to adjust the difficulties you train so that it’s never too light or too heavy, and that’ll allow you to get all this effective signal sent in under 40 minutes a week of training. Got a bunch of videos going through that so you can start learning about how all that works here. And I hope this helps you start process of making it a lot of strength gains.

We discuss the secret to getting insanely strong, which involves training at the maximum intensity level for a short duration of time (around 40 minutes per week). The key principles are:

• Strength is built through signalling and adaptation – training sends a signal to the body to get stronger, and the body adapts and grows stronger during the recovery period. [01:44]
• To maximise this adaptation, we emphasise the importance of training at the absolute maximum effort and intensity, using all available strength, rather than training at a moderate or sub-maximal level.
• Traditional strength training approaches often fail to provide this maximal stimulus, as the resistance does not properly adjust to the user’s increasing strength levels. [06:23]
• We advocate a minimalist approach of 1 high-intensity set per exercise per week, rather than higher volume training, in order to focus solely on the critical high-intensity effort. [11:00]
• Clearly defining specific strength goals is also important to provide focus and motivation to push to the limits of your current abilities. [14:24]