take a panoramic view of the situation

What makes you the strongest self?

1. Big muscle (nonsense! )。 This topic will be discussed in detail later in this guide.

2. Be proficient in several actions you need to perform to show your strength.

Who is the strongest athlete ever? Anatoly Pisarenko? Zydrunas Savickas？ Andrey Malanichev? In fact, this question can't be answered at all, because these athletes participate in different events. Strength is determined by several movements required for the sport you take part in. Mastering an action requires a lot of skills: you need to make your muscles work in a powerful and precise way, and it takes time to practice. The clearer the goal, the better.

Therefore, it is extremely important to keep practicing what you want to do. After this guide, I will mainly talk about squat, bench press and hard pull, because I am a weightlifter and I know it very well. However, this principle can be applied to any power movement.

3. Healthy joints and connective tissue

The lower the loss of your body, the stronger you will become. Your tendons need to be strong enough, otherwise you won't be able to transfer muscle strength to your joints. One track mind? Threshold? This structure, called Golgi Tendon Organ (Tendon Extension Receptor), if your tendon is not strong enough, when you use a heavy load, this structure will send a signal to the spinal cord and then transmit it to the muscles, so that the muscles will stop exerting force, otherwise the tendon will tear.

Mechanical organ receptors in ligaments will play a similar role. And when your joints are injured, it is difficult to recover 100%. If the ligament is completely torn, it is basically impossible to recover. Over time, this will lead to arthritis. Severe tissue damage takes a long time to recover. At this time, external pressure will lead to inflammation and gradually lead to degeneration.

Therefore, it is very important to give full play to one's strength and keep healthy. But please note: pain and injury are different. This topic is beyond the scope of this guide, so I won't repeat it.

4. Age

There are three advantages to being young:

Young people's nervous system is more excited, which means that muscles can contract faster. This is more critical for explosive sports (such as weightlifting) than extreme sports (such as weightlifting). In addition, young people's nervous system is more plastic, which means that learning and mastering an action will be much faster.

Young people have more connective proteins in connective tissue, so they can store more elastic potential energy (for example, they are more likely to bounce when squatting).

Young people recover faster after training. Young people have higher testosterone levels, sleep better and produce more growth hormone at night.

These factors are not so important in isolation, but they all have some influence. These advantages of young people peak around the age of 20, the nervous system begins to decline around the age of 30, and the elasticity of tendons begins to weaken around the age of 50. The plasticity of the nervous system is special. The plasticity of the nervous system peaks at birth, and then slowly declines (so you can learn things faster when you are young).

If you reach the peak of your competition in your twenties, you can make good use of these factors, but that doesn't mean that people who start late can't become strong.

What does proper training include?

This problem needs specific analysis. There are several factors (for example, if training is closely related to your goal, you must have some form of overload, etc. ), but when you really start designing a training plan, there are many factors that determine whether the plan is good or bad for an athlete. The factors related to individual differences are: athletes' training background, strength level, weaknesses, body structure, personal preferences, diet, living habits and so on. Other factors are based on different levels of experience. Suitable for most people.

In addition, before this article expands in detail, I hope you will remember the following two points:

1. This guide defaults that your main goal is to become as strong as possible as soon as possible. If this is not your goal, then this guide means little to you.

All roads lead to Rome. This guide is not the only way to get stronger.

All right, let's talk.

The four factors mentioned above: 1) Muscle 2) Mastery of movements 3) Health 4) Age/The sooner you reach a high level, the better. According to the experience level, we can focus on these four points for training. 1 and 2 are the growth of your muscles and strength, while 3 and 4 determine how you train to get these growth and how to reach your limit.

Every training stage needs to solve this simple question: what is the biggest obstacle that prevents me from achieving my goal at present?

For novice trainers, it should be noted that:

Habit formation

Skilled movements

Body/muscle perception

Training and recovery preparation

For intermediate trainers:

Muscle mass

Constantly enhance the ability to withstand a lot of training and adaptability.

For senior trainers:

From proficiency to mastery

Keep your joints healthy.

Master competitive skills

primary

For beginners, the most important factor is habit formation. I know it sounds boring, but it's really important.

If you want to be the best yourself in your heart, you must have the determination to work hard for many years. Yes, many years.

As a novice, you may think now: I am ready! I can't wait to know what I will be like in ten years! ? However, most people start a plan, but give up in less than a year. I'm sure you have such people around you. With the initial enthusiasm, it is difficult to go very far.

I can give you a long story about chicken soup for the soul, but you certainly don't like it. Let me just say a few things:

You need to be willing to participate in this process. This means investing time and money from the beginning. Everyone cherishes his time and money. For example, if you spend 30 yuan a week and exercise for two hours, you won't feel too sad if you give up. And if you spend more than ten hours a week exercising, spending money on books, hiring a coach, etc. It's even harder for you to give up. The more you put in, the easier it is for you to believe the importance of this matter.

You need to find like-minded people. It's best to find it around (people with certain experience are best, or persuade friends to lift iron with you). If you can't find it, it's better to communicate with people in the online fitness community than to practice it yourself. In any case, responsibility and mutual support are the key. If your exercise partner is irresponsible to you and always makes excuses not to practice, then they are not suitable for you. If people in the online community share some negative things all day, it's best not to touch them again.

You should learn to enjoy training. This point is ignored by most people. Keep doing what you want to keep doing, so that your motivation is greater than the obstacles you encounter. Motivation can be internal or external. When most people start fitness, they mainly rely on internal motivation (want to be in good shape, want to be strong and so on). ), but this motivation is actually not strong, even for some people, this motivation is not enough for them to persist in the second exercise. After learning to enjoy the training process, what you expect is not some goals, but you will expect every exercise in the gym and gradually form a habit.

In fact, if we think about it carefully, we rarely lack time to do what we like, and sometimes we should not even do what we like, and we will delay doing other things. Therefore, falling in love with training is extremely important for habit formation, rather than obsessing over the details of training plan in the novice stage. When a novice starts to exercise, whatever he does can increase his muscles and strength. The novice's body reacts too strongly to the training stimulus, even if it is not the optimal stimulus, if you can persist in doing it, the effect will not be bad. Many coaches will complain that novices always change their plans and don't carry them out seriously? Optimal? The plan goes on, but they ignore that for beginners, enjoying the process is as important as making progress.

The second point is skillful movements.

How to learn new sports patterns? It's simple, practice! Specifically, it is frequent and purposeful practice. The more times you do something in the right way, the more skilled you are, and the more familiar your nervous system is with this model.

Here are some things to remember:

Training must be deep and purposeful. You can't just finish the process. Training begins before a set of movements begins. Imagine in your mind how this group of movements should be completed, and recall every point: how does the barbell feel on your hands and back, what is your initial movement, what is the feeling of moving the barbell, and so on. At first, it was not easy to remember every point. But this skill will gradually become proficient. Until you knock down the barbell, all the skills and points come to mind. Don't think about what you want to do when you are in a group, feel your body when you are in a group, concentrate on finding the key points to improve your sports performance, and then remember them until you master them skillfully. When you're done, think back. How do you feel? How does it look (record it and watch it yourself if possible)? What can be improved? What skills can help you improve? Simple movements are really helpful, but deep thinking and purposeful movement training can help you firmly stick to the technical foundation from the beginning and prevent the formation of bad habits.

The weight you use should be what you can do with the right posture, but it should not be too light and exciting enough. This probably means using 60%-80% of the ultimate weight. Of course, if you are a novice, you probably don't know what your limit weight is. Then, using about 85% of the maximum weight, you are confident that you can move comfortably and easily.

Avoid fatigue at first. The harder you work, the easier it is to deform, at least until you master the movement mode. For example, you have to do five sets of movements. The first three sets were beautiful, the fourth set began to tremble, and the fifth set looked almost another move. So, 40% of the time in this training, you are not training the exercise mode you want to train at all. It takes you more time to master the correct way of exercise. You should be in a group that has been exhausted at least three times. Try not to wait until the action is deformed. At first, it's hard for you to know what it feels like, so it's helpful to have an exercise partner watch or video for you. You can watch the video to see which actions are correct, and remember how you feel when you do these actions.

Generally speaking, each movement should be trained 2-4 times a week. Why? What? Two reasons: 1. You need to practice more. Practice makes perfect. 2. You can practice more. If you can finish the training in one day, don't divide it into three days. Then why practice four times instead of five or six? To tell the truth, for beginners, if they do it frequently, there may not be any additional benefits. Moreover, the protein synthesis of novice muscles reached its peak within 36-48 hours. So 2-4 times a week can also guarantee the recovery time.

The third point is to develop muscle and kinesthetic consciousness.

? Motion perception? Just ... Know where your body is in space? Pretend to force. Developing this capability will help:

Do you know how to feel when doing an action? Right? . This kind of sensory feedback can help you adjust your body to better exercise.

It can make the body make better use of those external skills in the brain. External skills refer to those skills that pay attention to the effect of action (such as throwing barbells out of the ceiling when bench pressing, rather than saying? With pectoral muscles? ), these techniques are often more effective. The stronger your perception of your body moving in space, the easier it is for you to use these skills.

What's the best way to do it? I find some challenging self-esteem training very effective. I don't have any data to prove it, but it is based on my experience in teaching students and my communication with martial arts athletes and gymnasts who have worked in the past. For example: push-ups (the goal is to easily do one-handed push-ups), arm flexion, pull-ups rowing, pull-ups, flat support, horizontal bar training, one-legged self-weight hard pull, fast walking, split-legged squatting, one-legged jumping and so on. Of course, there are many actions that can be done. Choose two or three movements for each training and do two groups. Each group should do as much as possible, keep a good time rhythm, and don't try to be as fast as possible. But for people who have long been engaged in other sports, these exercises are not very helpful, because long-term exercise has helped you develop a good sense of sports.

These movements won't directly give you muscle or strength, unless you gradually gain weight to do these movements, but they can help you develop a sense of movement.

Then talk about muscle perception. I don't like it? Mind-muscle connection This statement, but this statement does tell the essence of the matter. Muscle perception can help you:

1. Find the weak link of the action. If your muscle perception is poor, even if the strength of a muscle can't keep up, it's hard to find which muscle it is.

2. It can make the body make better use of those internal skills. Contrary to the external skills mentioned above, internal skills refer to something similar to? The contraction of your chest muscles? This skill. These techniques are not as effective as external techniques, but they are very useful when you need to strengthen muscles that have become weak links or when you want to apply muscles to an action.

How come? Fitness? Practice and isolate muscle movements. What tools are used is secondary, barbells, dumbbells, machines and ropes can be used. The purpose is not to move more weight, but to feel the contraction of muscles used to build muscle perception, which is what bodybuilders often say is the connection between brain and muscles.

Just like exercising exercise perception, the purpose is not to gain more muscles (of course, multi-joint compound movements such as squat, push, hard pull, paddling and pull-ups are excellent for muscle gain, especially for beginners), but to learn the movements you want to learn as easily as possible, find out the problems and correct them.

The last factor is to cultivate the ability of training and recovery. This is often called GPP (general physical preparation). It means to enhance the ability to undertake work.

1. Body composition. High body fat rate is often related to poor insulin sensitivity, and the proportion of muscle in the increased weight will be lower and the proportion of fat will be higher. There are many reasons for this. High body fat is often caused by low androgen and high estrogen; Low insulin sensitivity, especially in muscle, means more energy is consumed from adipose tissue. There is conclusive evidence that low-level validation related to obesity will reduce the signal of anabolism (muscle increase) and enhance the signal of decomposition (muscle decrease). Simply put, your training and recovery will be better if your body fat is low. If you are a man with body fat over 20%, or a woman with body fat over 30%, it is best to reduce it to the range of 12- 15%/20%-25%.

2. Aerobic regulation. The specific conditioning work varies from person to person, but generally speaking, if your weight is below 90kg and your resting heart rate is around 60, or your weight is above 90kg and your resting heart rate is around 65, your aerobic capacity is enough to cope with strength training.

3. nutrition. This topic is very big. You'd better read more relevant books.

4. Lifestyle. Mainly refers to sleep and stress control. Lack of sleep or long-term stress can lead to body fat loss, difficulty in muscle gain and slow recovery from training. This question will be raised at the end of the article (not this article, but the end of the whole guide).

How you improve your training and recovery ability depends largely on your current state. If you are obese now, lose weight as soon as possible. If you are already very thin, don't tangle with eight-pack abdominal muscles. If you are well nourished but have poor aerobic capacity, do more conditioning training. If you are in good health, stay up for a long time at night and can't get up in the morning, then learn to go to bed early and get up early.

In addition, if you are obese now, don't worry that losing weight will lead to the progress of your strength muscles. Although the strength and muscle mass will increase more easily when the diet is in a state of excess calories, it is entirely possible for novices, especially obese novices, to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time. All other things being equal, keep the calorie gap, ensure enough protein intake (about 0.82g/lb, 1.8g/kg), and exercise hard, then you can lose weight and gain muscle at the same time.

How long does it take for a novice?

Many novices will make a mistake, that is, spend too much time planning for novices. The most important purpose is to develop habits and skilled movements. Training muscles and motor perception will help you master movements, and your ability to train and recover will make your future training more efficient.

Once you are familiar with the movements, you don't have to stick to the novice plan. Many people have been making novice plans for too long, until one bottleneck after another, and then they get discouraged.

Most of the strength growth in the novice stage comes from the adaptation of the nervous system. The nervous system will learn these movements. When you start lifting iron, your muscle mass may be enough to squat 140kg, but you can only squat 60kg. Because your nervous system is not familiar with movements.

In a few months, you will probably be able to increase your ultimate strength every week, and the squat may rapidly increase to 140kg. Your muscle mass may only increase by 10%-20%. Because your nervous system adapts to external forces much faster than your muscles. Then you hit a bottleneck, and your main movements can't grow as fast as before, because your nervous system finally makes full use of your existing muscle mass.

If you want to stay strong, you need more muscles. But from the perspective of muscle training, novice programs are often not optimal. Muscle hypertrophy training generally needs to be carried out under the condition of fatigue accumulation, because the main driving force of muscle growth is the amount of training, but the best time to learn movements is to compare the nervous system with muscles. Unfamiliar? At that time.

When your novice plan encounters a bottleneck, it is time to change the training method. Otherwise, the growth will be extremely slow.

So how long does it take to transfer from novice to intermediate training program? This also varies from person to person. Add some weight every week until you can't add it. This process usually takes 2-6 months. This process takes different time for different actions. For example, your bench press may have a bottleneck before you pull the squat, so change your bench press training plan, but still train your squat and squat according to the novice plan.

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The definition of novice, intermediate and advanced players in this paper is based on the most restricted factors in strength training, not absolute strength. The strength at the beginning and end of each stage is largely related to your reincarnation ability (your genes). This guide is not to help you break the world record, but to help you develop your full strength potential.

This guide focuses on training, but I must emphasize that training is not the whole of strength growth. Proper nutrition, adequate sleep and stress regulation are all very important, even more important than training itself.

You didn't get strong in the gym.

Many people have given up this basic principle. In fact, every time you walk out of the gym after exercise, you accumulate a lot of fatigue, which is much weaker than when you enter the gym.

You became strong outside the gym.

Remember this sentence. What was your previous view on training? I'm going to exercise. Exercise makes me stronger and taller? So, now change it to? I want to send a message to my body, hoping that my body can grow in response to this message? .

It may seem to be just another way of saying it, but looking at the same thing from different angles will change a lot. Remember, it's not the training itself that makes you progress, but your body's response to the training that makes you progress.

When you exercise, you are sending a message to your body. Does your body treat heavy objects as one? Threats? Then your body will gradually react and adapt. What if exercise is the only feeling in your body? Threats? That's no problem. The body can basically adapt well.

But what if it is too dangerous to the body?

How much can your body take? Threats? When, the processing ability is not so good. You can understand this as doing your own homework. Just write one door at a time. No problem. Can I write many doors at the same time? If possible, can you write every topic well?

Lack of sleep and life stress such as work stress, breakup and money pressure are the two main reasons why your body can't cope with training stress well? Threats? .

Simply put, your body will ensure that there is enough energy in your blood to keep you alert or let you run away at any time. This is your body's main way of coping with stress. For lifting iron, this process is catabolism (muscle catabolism). Your body breaks down glycogen and protein to ensure that you have enough energy to deal with external threats.

But getting stronger is an anabolic process (muscle synthesis).

When you are stressed or sleep less every day, your body will be in the process of catabolism for a long time, and the process of anabolism will become more difficult. If you do this for a long time, there will be some symptoms of diseases or infections. When your body's ability to cope with threats is washed away, your immune system's resistance will also decline, making you more susceptible to bacterial infection.

I hope this guide can be as detailed, understandable and accurate as possible. If you have any questions about this guide, please leave a message and point them out.

Author: Greg Nuckols (WeChat official account: Atlas sharing)

This article is an original article, the copyright belongs to the author, and it may not be reproduced without authorization!