Human beings are relatively predictable beings, so in general they will have a number of needs in order to achieve something. It is no different in strength training or getting jacked. There are general needs that everyone has, and if they are not addressing it, they are shortchanging their results. Give me any program and I can tell right away what it will do for most people.

There are many elements of training that need to be addressed. For the benefit of your jackedness, let’s go over the big three.

Element 1: Strength

In order to facilitate any adaptive change to your muscles, you need to overload them. This should be rule number one in your fitness universe. If you’re lifting the same amount of weight in the gym today as you were a year ago, you gave your body no reason to adapt.

This is the principle of progressive overload. There are many methods and programs to achieve this. Some people try to sell gimmicks and dumb programs to try and avoid it. The simple bottom line is to just do it. Add 5-10 lbs when you’re able to.

This is a required part of any program. No matter what the methods are, you better be stronger now than you were last year. This is very simple in concept but we run into the issue of “how?” If getting strong were so easy, we would see dozens of 500 lbs bench pressers everywhere. In part 2 of this series I’ll go over some methods to pursue progressive overload.

Element 2: Speed/Power

The strongest people in the world are very fast people. Or, at least, they tend to be pretty fast. This goes against a misconception and stigma about lifting weights that was prevalent back in late 1900s. Do you remember when people used to say that lifting weights and getting strong would make you slow?

This is probably one of the most uneducated things I’ve ever heard. Power is an expression of strength or force over time. In order to be powerful, you need to be strong. In order to be fast, you need to powerful.

My high school brain was able to wrap my head around that. It was probably the thing that saved my athleticism and got me a starting position on my college rugby team.

So when you increase strength, you improve power. However, the relationship goes the other way as well. If you increase power, you improve the potential for max strength production. Let’s think about it. There are many strong dudes who are slow, but rarely any very powerful dudes who are weak.

If you train with the strongest powerlifters in the world, they don’t try to lift their weights slowly. In fact, a massive part of their training will be focused around lifting moderately heavy weight as fast as possible.

In part 3 I will go over ways to incorporate power/speed training to your program.

Element 3: Volume

Volume is the total amount of work you perform in a given workout or training phase. Usually, people simply multiply their sets and reps by their weight to get total tonnage.

Volume will have an inverse relationship to intensity. If you have a very high intensity phase (ie very heavy weights, circa max), you will usually lower the total volume. Vice versa for lower intensity phases.

This has a number of effects but I will only go over two.

First, hypertrophy (or increases in muscle size) tends to occur with higher volume. This is why a lot of bodybuilders will use higher rep sets to achieve mass gains. Of course, they cannot ignore the first two principles.

Second, increases in total volume improves general physical preparedness, or GPP. What is GPP? It’s a expression of your overall state of fitness. Advanced training programs require higher levels of GPP, or overall fitness. The easiest way to think of this is to ask yourself, are you in shape to get in shape? Do you have the physical readiness to do a NFL linebacker’s workout?

How does this relate back to strength training? In order to continue to make gains, you will have to be able to endure more work and intensity. This relates back to the principle of progressive overload. Can you do more work today compared to last year?

Putting it together

Once you address all three of these elements, I would say you have a pretty solid program! No matter where I am in my lifting, I try to make sure that all of these elements are addressed in all of my own programs. This is how most athletes and some of the strongest lifters in the world train. Now, there is this misconception that you need to separate these elements into different training phases. I’ll show you how to train these elements simultaneously. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading. Let’s do this.