Strength

Strength Theory--Greg Nuckols

One of the biggest training mistakes people make: asking themselves, "where will I be after this 8 week cycle?" instead of, "where will I be 8 years from now?"

That's what makes people pursue hyper-specialized programs, and then find that they're worn out by the end, but have to do something even crazier to keep progressing from there. Or (maybe worse) training with really low volume all the time so they're always fresh and can perform at peak each training session, instead of allowing for some fatigue and the dip in performance that comes with it. It's the good sessions that make for the best Instagram videos, after all.

When you take a longer view of it, though, at least for powerlifting, there are three main things that almost entirely determine if you'll reach your strength potential:

1. How much muscle are you carrying?

2. How good of aerobic shape are you in?

3. How healthy are your joints?

If you're jacked, you're in good shape (ability to handle and recover from more training, for both metabolic and peripheral nervous system reasons), and your joints aren't beat up, you're never more than 8-12 weeks away from wrecking worlds. Gaining proficiency in a movement or re-mastering one you'd previously mastered is a pretty quick process. Building up your muscular and aerobic base takes a LONG time, but in the long run, it gives you the highest return on investment.

This carries with it a few training implications, though.

1. those hyper-specialized programs that are so good for short-term strength gains (mainly due to neural factors) aren't actually doing too much to drive progress toward your long-term potential. At least, not more than something else with a higher risk/reward.

2. the training volume required to get huge and build/maintain a solid aerobic base probably means you're very rarely going to be fully recovered between training sessions, and even if you were, those max triples that look sweet on Instagram give you a pretty low ROI compared to other things you could be doing.

Treat strength as a (minimum) year to year pursuit, not week to week and CERTAINLY not day to day.