How to Increase Your Strength
Any sport technique can benefit from being stronger. An athlete is not going to just magically jump higher, run faster and push harder. All of these attributes can be improved through increased strength.

To increase your strength you must utilize the fundamental physiological principals that make a person stronger. Although there are many different types of strength and many different exercise techniques for attaining them the laws of physiology are the same. This means the principles of attaining strength are the same for everyone they are to achieve overload through frequency, intensity and volume.

Overload

  • Frequency
  • Intensity
  • Volume  

Overload simply means for a person to continually make gains in strength one must increase the demands put on their body. In other words to become stronger the body must be conditioned beyond the level it is currently accustomed to. There are three ways this can be done 1) increasing the frequency of exercise, 2) increasing the intensity of the exercise and 3) increasing the volume of the exercise.

Frequency is the number of training sessions done each week or each day. Frequency must be balanced; training sessions that are too frequent will cause over training, injury or inadequate recovery. Lack of frequency will not result in a positive adaptation to the workout stress.  Maintaining a level of conditioning requires less frequency that acquiring it.

Intensity is how difficult a training session is. The more effort required during a training session the more difficult the training will be. If the intensity of a workout is to low overload will not be placed on the body and adaptation will not occur. If the intensity is too high the body will fatigue more quickly and the goals of the workout may not be met.

Volume is the total amount of weight lifted in a training session. To increase strength you must progressively increase volume.¹ The volume of a workout can be calculated by multiplying the number of set of an exercise by amount of weight lifted per set. Here's an example; and athlete who weighs 150 lbs performs 3 sets of 15 push-ups.
150 x 15 = 2,250  2,250 X 3 = 6,750 Total Volume = 6,750

All three of these variables must increase to bring about continued physiological adaptation. Each of them must be applied systematically over time according to every individual’s capacity this is why most one size fits all strength programs don’t work successfully.

 

Good Luck and Good Training

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¹Baechle, T., & Earle, M. (2000). Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning (pg 419) China: Human Kinetics 

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How to Increase Your Strength by Samuel D. Kressin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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