Strength Training

One Mistake That’s Ruining Your Strength and Conditioning

Strength and conditioning has been a passion of mine for a long time. Since studying for my degree in strength and conditioning in 2011, I’ve helped people improve performance in skiing, kayaking, football, basketball, track sports, martial arts, and more.

Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that there’s a lack of good strength and conditioning guidance for anyone who isn’t already a professional athlete. There are plenty of cool strength and conditioning exercises on social media, but these are often lacking nuance. A lack of nuance can easily lead to training mistakes. One of the mistakes I see most often in strength and conditioning is in the way we apply the concept of training specificity.

While it makes sense for training to be specific to your chosen sport, many people pursue training specificity in ineffective or even detrimental ways.

Here are some of the common mistakes relating to training specificity, and how you can correct them.

Two male kickboxers sparring on a red and blue matted surface. One is throwing a kick at the other's leg, and he has raised his knee to block the kick.
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Quick Post: 4 of the Best Deadlift Accessory Exercises

The deadlift is a fantastic strength exercise in its own right, but after a certain amount of progress, you will need to supplement it with other lifts to keep getting stronger. This is where deadlift accessory exercises become an essential part of your strength training programme.

How to Include Deadlift Accessory Exercises in Your Programme

These accessory exercises will help you rectify the weak links in your deadlifting game and strengthen important muscle groups. The downside to this is that these exercises will be hitting the same positions and muscle groups as deadlifts. This means you won’t be able to train every exercise on this list at the same time and deadlift heavy; you’ll have to choose what you want to focus on.

In the breakdown below, I’ll discuss when to use these accessory exercises to improve your deadlifting ability.

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More Speed And Strength With One Gym Hack

I’ve been working with athletes for a long time now, and I’m always amazed how poorly understood cluster training is. I just can’t believe that this super-simple method for training speed and strength isn’t more commonplace amongst sports players.

Regardless of what sport you play, it’s a certainty that you need to produce force to move and perform. In the majority of cases, it will be beneficial for you to produce this force as quickly as possible. There are plenty of exercises you can do to train speed and power, and I’ll write more on them soon. In the meantime, cluster set training will keep you fresher, and improve the force and speed of your resistance training. The best part is you don’t need any special equipment or skills to perform this style of training.

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How to Avoid Gaining Weight Whilst Getting Stronger

Believe it or not, you can gain strength without gaining weight in the gym. This is great news, because so many people avoid strength training for fear of becoming “bulky.”

By Scott Webb on Unsplash

Luckily, the gym has evolved so far past the point of being a bodybuilder’s playground, and we understand so much more about getting stronger, healthier, and better at physical activity without gaining lots of muscle.

For more information on the difference between strength and muscle gains, read this post.

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Should You Include the Bench Press in Your Training?

The barbell bench press is one of the “big three” strength training exercises. I have given a little attention to the squat and deadlift already, now it’s time to give the bench press the same treatment.

As with my other guides, this first part will cover training considerations for the bench press, like how and why we might use the bench press in training. Part two will discuss actual bench press execution. Without further ado, let’s get started.

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How I Increased My Squat Personal Best by 10kg in 3 months

I’d like to write about how I got a decent increase to my front squat personal best in the latter half of 2021. It feels a little self-indulgent, but I’m confident these tips will help you develop muscular strength and set some squat personal bests of your own.

Background

Prior to this, it had been a while since I had made progress in my front squat. That being said, I’ve been squatting (relatively) heavy for around 10 years now. Therefore, it’s safe to say this progress wasn’t a result of newbie gains – I can no longer get a new personal best just by looking at a bar!

The lessons I learned from this training block will probably be most applicable if you’re an intermediate or novice lifter. I didn’t do anything super-advanced, so these strength training tips should be useful no matter what your end goal.

Click here to see why I think it’s important to get strong at front squats, and squats in general. Click here for a guide to a lot of the strength training terminology I use in this blog.

In this next section I go into more detail about my own training in 2021. If you want to skip ahead to the main strength training tips, use this contents table.

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Your Guide to Strength Training Terms and Definitions

I’ve previously provided a guide to general gym terms; now it’s time to get a little more specific and talk about strength training terms in more detail. An online glossary may not be the most exciting thing you’ve ever read, but if you’re comfortable with weight training terms and definitions you’ll be better equipped to learn about other strength training topics. Let’s get started!

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3 Reasons Why Strength Standards Are Unhelpful

If you’ve been training for some time now, it’s natural to want to get a sense of your strength levels. We all want to quantify our strength progress, and this can lead to wanting to know how much you should be lifting in a given exercise. This is where strength standards come into the picture.

Strength standards are predictions of what weight you should be lifting, typically based on bodyweight and experience. For example, you may have read that high-level athletes should deadlift 2-2.5 times their bodyweight, squat 1.5-2 times their bodyweight, and so on.

Spotting Bench Press

I’m always reluctant to set strength benchmarks for my clients. Don’t get me wrong – they can provide something to aim for, and it can feel super-rewarding to hit these numbers, but they’re not always helpful. Here’s why.

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4 Ways to Get Stronger for Running

I’m not a great runner myself, but I’ve helped a number of athletes optimise their strength training for running. Whether cross-country is your thing or you prefer being on a track, or even if you favour a triathlon, these exercises will help improve you running performance. You’ll have to wait your turn if you’re a sprinter; we’re focussing on strength training for endurance running today.

strength training for running
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