How To Increase Muscular Strength

Welcome to 5.14 Fitness,


Okay, so over the last week or so, I have decided to change my goal focus towards improving strength and performance. Today's post will be a walk through on how to increase your muscular strength.


So to start with what is muscular strength? Muscular strength is the amount of force exerted against a resistance. In other words; how strong your muscles are.


How do we improve muscular strength? The big mistake I was making was that I was doing one of two sets of heavy rep exercises, consequently as I am seeing/testing how long I can last, I am working on muscular endurance primarily and strength as a bonus feature.


What you should be aiming for is about 5 sets of much lower and much more intense reps, with breaks in between, and after a while once you have been completing the workout for a while and getting used to it (your muscles have grown and adapted in order to do this) you then start to increase the number of reps and so on and so fourth. This is a far more efficient way or increasing muscular strength as it tests/works on the muscles ability to explode from a static (exerting force).


Another tip on improving strength in a muscle is by, at the start and at the end of a workout, do a single set of low reps of what ever exercise you are doing. This does not work your muscles too much, but it does increase efficiency. This is due to the fact that more of the resistance (weight) is being taken by the targeted muscle area, rather than it being too heavy and having to share out the resistance across the body- affecting muscles you are not working on by taking away from the targeted ones. So if you are benching 100kg, only 60kg of that 100kg may reach your arms and chest. However if you bench 60kg, it is not testing your muscles as much, but the entire 60kg will reach the targeted muscles, having the same affect and consequently increasing your strength and efficiency. Keep working at this and only increase the resistance after you have increased the resistance of your main workout a few times and are finding the low rep warm up particularly easy.


My final bit of advice is concerning food; eat lots of protein. I have said this so many times in previous posts (if you want more detail check them out), protein is what makes your muscles grow and develop. It is the fuel to your car, the mushroom to your Mario! Without enough protein, getting results will take so much longer and you will have to work so much harder to achieve the same results. Trust me when I say do not go meat crazy, as too much of the stuff is not good for you, it is often high in fat so you could be wasting all your efforts by consuming too much. In addition the other food groups have a purpose also, so leave some room for them. But some extra protein with every meal, will sure as hell give you the results you are after, concerning strength, far quicker and much more noticeably too. I would say about 20%-30% of your diet, is a healthy range without going too over the top.


So there were my tips on how to improve muscular strength, ways to test it include the sergeant jump test and by lifting weight recording results and then trying again a week later and see if you can lift more.


For more posts similar to this please come again, thanks for reading, do all the usual stuff, any following is returned and greatly appreciated- work hard and peace!


Jason