Strength Training 101

The all-in-one beginner strength training article I wish I had found when I was younger

Introduction

When I was first learning about strength training, I remember encountering a vast amount of information online. Endless discussions about which program is optimal, what supplements to take, which exercises are the most efficient, and more.

This article is the opposite of that. My goal is to provide you with the necessary info so you can stop reading and start lifting.

As a disclaimer, I’m not certified nor a professional in this space. The below is my personal point of view and is not an official recommendation in any capacity. Please make sure to take your unique situation into account and be safe at all times.

The three pillars of building muscle

In order to make progress, you need all three of these, as a deficit in any of them will impact your overall progress.

1. Training: Workout safely and consistently using progressive overload.

2. Nutrition: Eat a varied diet with sufficient protein and micronutrients.

3. Recovery: Get enough quality sleep and live a healthy lifestyle.

Pillar 1: Training

Training Vocabulary

1. Rep: A single full movement of an exercise (e.g., going down and up on a push up).

2. Set: A group of reps (e.g., a set may include 8 reps).

3. Range of motion: The amount of distance your weight covers (e.g., a pull up from completely straight arms has a greater range of motion than a pull up from partially bent arms).

4. Split: How you divide up your workout days (e.g., upper/lower, full body, etc.).

5. Muscular failure (“training to failure”): Reaching the point where you physically can not move a weight any more, generally with respect to a particular movement in a particular set.

6. Compound movement: A movement involving muscle groups (e.g., a squat).

7. Isolation movement: A movement involving one/few muscles (e.g., a bicep curl).

Training concept 1: Safety first

This is the most important part of lifting. An injury can affect you outside the weight room, and in some cases, they can be permanent. Avoid risky lifts and do not raise your weight on any lift until you are ready.

For example, if you can barely do a 135lb bench press, and you think you might be able to do a 145lb bench press but could hurt yourself, don’t do it. It may take you 2-4 weeks to properly build up to that 145lb bench press, but it may take you months to recover from an injury, and then several more weeks to return to your original level of muscle.

Training concept 2: Progressive overload builds muscle

To continuously build muscle, you must either raise your volume or weight. Here are two examples that illustrate this, one increases reps and one increases weight:

1. 40lbs x 8 reps => 40lbs x 12 reps

2. 40lbs x 8 reps => 45lbs x 8 reps

I encourage you to safely explore the amount of weight that you can move, as sometimes your limits can be in your head. I’ve personally had the experience where my muscles felt like they were going to fail simply because my brain knew that we were reaching the end of the set. You need to be sure that the weights you’re moving are sufficient to stimulate growth, otherwise you won’t see the results you are looking for.

I still remember one time that I was working on leg press for sets of 7. I thought I was close to failure, but I decided that day to see if I could increase the weight. I added 45lbs, then did a full set of 7. Puzzled, I added another 45 pounds, and did another full set of 7, except this time the last rep was extremely hard (legs shaking, near failure). And just like that, my working weight for leg press increased 90 pounds in one session, simply because I identified that I wasn’t using as much weight as I should have been.

Training concept 3: You don’t need a lot of time in the gym (as a beginner)

Three 45-70 minute sessions per week is more than enough to build muscle. As you get more advanced and your muscles require more training, the time required in the gym will increase.

Training concept 4: You’re building more than just your muscles

When you start lifting, you’re not only training your target muscles, but you’re also training your connective tissues, your bones, your supporting muscles, your nervous system, and your mindset.

Your limiting factor in progression may be any one of these, and it’s important that you don’t ignore these. When I was first training, I had a pain in one of my elbows from bench pressing, and it took me several weeks of time off and reduced intensity lifting for it to go away.

At the beginning, it’s likely that you’ll have soreness in a variety of muscles, and that’s normal. Also, you may have muscle imbalances (e.g., your right side might be stronger than your left side), and these will take some time to balance out. This is also normal.

Training concept 5: Do the full range of motion for the movement

If you look up content online, you will see some research and advocates for partial range of motion. I don’t recommend this for beginners, as in my experience, limiting factors are often much simpler.

There’s a time and place for that -- specific ranges of motion are often used for specific scenarios such as competition or moving past plateaus (points where experienced lifters find it difficult to increase their strength).

Training concept 6: You don’t need the perfect program

When I was first starting out, I remember feeling like there was no consensus on what the best workout program was. There were countless opinions on the internet, and I had no idea where to start.

My take is that as a beginner, you don’t need the perfect workout. You don’t need the perfect rep ranges, the perfect splits, or really the perfect anything. What you need is to start going to the gym consistently and maintaining your other strength training pillars (eating and sleeping). Make sure your beginner program has compound movements to build your base strength, then give it a shot.

Muscle takes time to grow, so you’ll have plenty of time to customize your program once you have some experience.

Training concept 7: Muscle gain may take a few weeks to show

When you first start out, expect to workout for four weeks before noticing any difference, but by the 8-12 week mark you will likely notice a difference, and it’s likely the people around you will likely start to notice at this point too.

Training concept 8: Most people at the gym are nice

Everyone in the gym is there to better themselves, and at one point, we were all beginners. In fact, I still consider myself a beginner, and I learn something almost every time I go to the gym.

If you don’t know a lift, it is 100% ok to ask someone. If you’re afraid of dropping a weight, ask someone to spot you. If you want to watch a YouTube video in the gym, watch it. How else are you going to learn and grow?

Training concept 9: Avoid total muscle failure

Until you have greater experience in the gym, you will likely want to avoid training to failure, especially on the bigger lifts. Leaving a couple “extra reps” when you finish a set is a good way to prevent injury and limit risk of overtraining.

A common framework is that the smaller the muscle is, the closer you can safely take it to failure. For example, if you take your bicep curls to failure, you likely won’t hurt yourself if you drop the weight, and your arms will likely recover within a couple of days. If you take your deadlift to failure, your risk of an injury is much greater and due to the amount of muscle recruitment, you’re almost guaranteed a longer recovery period.

Training concept 10: You don’t need to be super sore to grow

You need to lift hard in the gym, but you don’t need to lift so hard that you’re super sore each day. It’s normal to be sore for the initial weeks as you’re getting into your routine, but after that, you want to aim for 3/10 soreness maximum (on average -- this does not include unique scenarios like max out days or when other variables are involved).

Pillar 2: Nutrition

To grow your muscles, you need to supply them with the nutrients they need to grow. This means that you need to have a healthy diet with enough protein to build muscles.

To keep it simple, I recommend the following. As I mentioned above, I’m not a professional, and this is not an official recommendation.

1. 1g of protein per pound of muscle

2. To gain weight: eat 200-500 more calories than you burn per day

3. To lose weight: eat 200-500 calories less than you burn each day

4. Eat healthy and varied foods, with 1 serving of fruits and 1 serving of vegetables per 1000 calories.

Nutrition Vocabulary

1. Macronutrients: protein, carbs, and fats (high concentration in meats, grains, etc.)

2. Micronutrients: vitamins, etc. (high concentration in fruits, vegetables, etc.)

Nutrition concept 1: Your weight and body appearance will fluctuate every day

Depending on your diet, activity, and factors mostly of your control (hormones, environment, etc.), your body will have a different appearance and weight every day. Your weight may fluctuate several pounds in a given day. Some things that can affect your weight: stress, high carb/fat/sodium meals, skipping or adding a workout, having extra meals or snacks, drinking alcohol, medication, illness, and so much more.

These metrics are important to inform you if you’re eating, sleeping, and training correctly, but they’re not the most important thing.

Nutrition concept 2: Determining how much you need to eat

This is a huge topic and one that I will not be able to cover sufficiently in-depth here. The most simple approach is to keep eating as you normally do, then make a modification in-line with your goals (e.g., add a snack to gain weight, or remove a snack/small amount of food to lose weight).

If you would like more structure, you can measure what you currently eat, use that to determine your baseline, then modify it as you need. Feel free to perform your own research and structure your eating in a way that works for you. Personally, I generally eat the same things most days to hit certain macro/micro targets, but I’m also flexible when I have events, traveling, or other things that interfere.

If you do decide to track, it can be helpful to allow some flexibility. For example, if you have a travel day, it’s ok to not hit perfect macros and just focus on protein and eating enough calories.

Nutrition concept 3: It’s okay to fluctuate your eating on a daily basis

Within reasonable bounds, you can fluctuate on a daily basis. For example, if I go out for dinner on a Friday and have extra food and dessert, I’ll eat a bit less on Saturday to compensate.

Nutrition concept 4: You only need 1g protein per pound of muscle

As a beginner, this is a good starting point. You can tailor this as you go -- some people prefer to eat less, and some people prefer to eat more.

Nutrition concept 5: Have a varied and healthy diet

Incorporate fruits, vegetables, and a variety of food to ensure you’re receiving your vitamins and micronutrients that you need. A simple recommendation is one serving of fruit and one serving of vegetables per 1000 calories.

Nutrition concept 6: Take supplements if you would like

Commonly recommended supplements are creatine, vitamin D, and fish oil. I take all of these. If you would like to take them, I recommend buying from a reputable brand. These can help your progress, but at the beginner level, supplements are not the most important thing to focus on.

Nutrition concept 7: Alcohol interferes with your workouts, muscle growth, and sleep

Decisions around alcohol are personal. For sake of completeness in this article, it’s worth it to mention that consuming alcohol can interfere with strength training, especially through indirect effects like reduced sleep quality.

Nutrition concept 8: The muscle building window is 36-48 hours

Don’t worry too much about “timing” your protein or your meals. As long as you have some food with protein prior to working out, you will be fine. If you’re working out and eating consistently, your muscles should be constantly growing.

Pillar 3: Recovery

While going to the gym provides the stimulus for muscle growth, our muscles actually grow when we’re outside of the gym. The main component here is sleep, which helps us to repair our body, build memories, regulate our mood, and more. It allows us to tackle the next day and next workout with full energy and strength. Below are basic sleep recommendations below, and I plan to post another article on sleep with more details for those interested.

Recovery concept 1: Get enough sleep

7-9 hours per night is what’s recommended for most adults.

Recovery concept 2: Sleep consistently

Going to sleep and waking up at the same time each day helps your body to maintain a consistent circadian rhythm, which reinforces your sleep habits and helps to increase your sleep quality.

Recovery concept 3: Optimize your sleeping conditions

This is a general recommendation that includes things like not using electronics before bed, having a dark and cool sleeping environment, avoiding caffeine later in the day, and seeing sunlight/bright lights in the morning.

So what now?

If you’re interested in strength training, you now have enough information to get started, so recommendation is to stop reading and take action. Don’t worry if any of the three pillars are suboptimal. Just focus on getting better each day and you’ll see results.

Closing

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed, feel free to subscribe, and I’ll let you know when I post the next one. And if this post was impactful to you or you would otherwise like to get in touch, please feel free to send me an email at hi@cameronanundson.com.