Keck's Column: Strength: Are You Building it, or Just Testing it?

Strength: Are You Building it, or Just Testing it?

Strength comes in many forms and fashions: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. They're all interrelated. However, for this article we're going to focus on the raw physical component.

Many of us here are “formal” competitors, while the majority of readers, I dare say, are not. Without getting into a philosophical debate that adds nothing to the point of the article, I'll make the observation that if you're here, on elitefts™, reading this article, you ARE a competitor. You constantly push and strive against yourself to go higher, push harder, lift more weight and smash previous PRs! That makes you a competitor.

With that being said, how do many of us productively spend our time building strength vs. testing our strength? I will admit, this article came as a revelation of a mistake I made recently. I was spending too much time testing my strength and my progress was going nowhere, in fact I stalled completely. During this time, I was dieting off some excess body fat. I was also training without a plan (this has it’s upsides as well as downsides, but that's an article for another day). It was this absence of a plan that created a void that my mindset and thus training fell into. Every session I wanted to see if “I still had it.” Could I still hit X on bench, or Z on my pulls or squats? This lead to me grinding out weights nearly every workout. I was testing my strength constantly with lifts at or above 100 percent of what I was capable of that day. This type of training is not only ineffective, it’s totally counterproductive. After several weeks of missing weights that I knew should be easy lifts, I decided to actually think about my training and the rookie mistake I allowed myself to fall victim to. It was during this reflection I concluded that I needed to be focused on building my strength and not constantly testing it.

So what’s the difference? Good question and you may find as many different answers as you care to ask different people. The best way to build strength, in my opinion, is to routinely handle challenging weights within a proper volume and frequency allocation while allowing for recovery and compensation. Great, how do I know what that is? Prilepin's Chart is a wonderful starting point.

Prilepin’s Chart

Now you need a good coach and lots of trial and error. Hopefully you find the coach before you go through all the trial and error.

So, how do I know if I’m building strength and not just testing it?

Well, you'll identify a pattern in your lifts (you should be tracking them) and over time, you should be continually adding weight to the bar while exerting a similar amount of effort to the additional weight as you did the lesser weight. When this is accomplished, you can be assured that you're building strength.

There's certainly a time and place to test your strength, occasionally in the gym and always on the platform. Be smart, have a plan and spend your time building your strength. Your mind, body and total will thank you for it.