Six Strength Training “rules” You Can Safely Ignore.

Most of us don’t strength train enough to appreciate its health benefits . The American College of Sports Medicine has released new strength training guidelines that offer more realistic advice than what you might hear about strength training elsewhere. In addition to defining the required training volume, the new guidelines also contain a few surprises, specifically, they overturn many long-held “rules” of strength training. Among them: training to failure is not necessary, and unstable surfaces are not necessary for improving balance.

I constantly hear fitness professionals praising the new ACSM guidelines, considering them a significant improvement over the previous ones. Certainly, the new version is more specific in how to achieve various training benefits (for example, strength versus muscle mass), but it also teaches us not to get too bogged down in detail. Below, I’ll outline the main points, and then you can read the press release and the full list of recommendations .

Why strength training is important

If you’re interested in fitness for its own sake, you should know that both cardio and strength training are important —you can’t just do one and ignore the other. But even if you’re only interested in health benefits, strength training is crucial.

I’ve previously written about the benefits of gaining muscle mass , which include improved metabolism, overall health, and the ability to remain active and independent as we age. The American Association of Sports Medicine (ACSM) writes in its article that strength training (their preferred term for what I call power training) has a positive impact on health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, and sleep quality.

How much strength training should you plan?

We should all engage in strength training, as recommended by all exercise guidelines. (In particular, the most recent US guidelines recommend strength training twice a week.) The American Council on Sports Medicine agrees with the minimum practice of twice a week per muscle group. This means you can perform a full-body workout twice a week or split your workouts so that each muscle gets a workout at least two days a week.

Six things you shouldn’t think about too much when strength training.

I think some of the most interesting aspects of the new ACSM guidelines are what they tell us about what we should n’t worry about. According to the data the authors analyzed, many things aren’t clearly supported, and you can safely stop worrying about them:

• Training to failure isn’t necessary. Don’t continue the exercise until it becomes physically impossible. While significant effort is required , reaching the point of failure isn’t critical.

• Instability training does not improve balance . You don’t need to stand on unstable surfaces to train your balance; balance improves as you become stronger, regardless of whether you trained on stable or unstable surfaces.

• Time under tension doesn’t matter . Some gym regulars will tell you that the most important thing is the time the muscle spends in the exercise, so slow reps are better than fast ones. The ACSM review found no benefit from increasing time under tension for either strength or muscle growth.

• There aren’t necessarily training programs for beginners, intermediates, or advanced athletes . The American Society of Sports Medicine (ACSM) concludes that the same basic recommendations apply to everyone. This doesn’t mean an advanced athlete should train the same as a beginner, but it also means you can simply continue doing what works for you as long as it works.

• Any equipment will do for strength training . Gym workouts, home workouts, resistance bands, bodyweight exercises—anything that allows for a good muscle workout will do. Make sure you can perform complex sets with the equipment you choose, but there’s no compelling reason to choose barbells over, say, resistance bands at home.

• Progressive overload isn’t always necessary . This will come as a surprise to many fitness enthusiasts! Gradually increasing the difficulty of your workouts is a way to get stronger, but it’s not always necessary to reap the major health benefits. However, if you’re starting with very easy or simple exercises, you’ll need to gradually increase the difficulty to ensure you’re training hard enough.

Ultimately, the recommendations emphasize that doing something is better than nothing, and that finding a routine you’ll stick with is more important than fine-tuning the details of your program. Only about 30% of us do strength training twice a week, and that figure can drop to as low as 10% for older adults.

How to achieve strength training goals, according to the American Association of Sports Medicine (ACSM) guidelines.

Here is the basic diagram that ACSM provides for various purposes:

• To develop strength, lift heavy weights (at least 80% of your one-set max) for at least 2-3 sets of each exercise.

• To increase muscle mass (hypertrophy), aim to perform 10 sets of strength exercises for each muscle group per week.

• To develop strength (explosive power), use loads that are between 30% and 70% of your one-set maximum and aim to lift the weight as quickly as possible during the concentric (lifting) phase of the exercise.

If you’ve never thought about these things separately, let me explain in more detail:

• Strength is perhaps the easiest thing to ignore, but as exercise specialist Jason Sawyer told Medical News Today , it’s one of the things older people lose the fastest and rarely train. Strength is how quickly or explosively you can contract a muscle. Box jumps are an exercise that develops leg strength; barbell squats, performed as quickly as possible, are another leg-strengthening exercise.

• Strength is essentially what the name implies: the ability to lift heavy objects or exert significant force. The stronger you are, the easier it will be to carry a child, a bag of dog food, or cement (in real-life terms).

• Hypertrophy is the growth of muscle mass. As we age, we all lose muscle mass, so hypertrophy training helps counteract this tendency. Muscle tissue is beneficial for our body, including our metabolism, as I mentioned earlier.

You can work all three of these areas using different exercises and loads, but you may find it easier to focus on one at a time.

More…