Quit Majoring in the Minors. What Actually Matters for Strength Development?

If there is one thing that gym-goers do really well, it’s major in the minors. You know, have a $500 supplement stack but squat high. Have carbs and protein within 15 minutes of every training session but eat nothing more than a tall latte and a sushi roll outside of that. Wear blue light glasses before bed every night because #recovery but also take a week off training every month for the same reason.

So much time, money and effort is wasted on misguided training and nutrition interventions. So today I’m gonna break down the stuff that really doesn’t matter a lot for your strength progression and the stuff that does matter that you’re gonna want to get right. Of course, many of these things are context dependent; sometimes they matter more; sometimes less, and it’s not black and white in that they do matter or they don’t. Keep that in mind.

I’ve assigned a star rating to each item for a score of 1-5 on the “how much it matters scale” but remember context please.

Let’s go.

Shocking your body/changing things up.

There is no need to shock your body ever. This is not a thing. Repeating the same exercises, gradually increasing weight and volume for years and years is valuable. Doing 10x10 squats this Monday, glute kick backs next Monday and Zumba the one after is not valuable. Boring matters. Repetition matters. Changing things up only matters in so far that it keeps you engaged in your training. Repeat the same shit for as long as you enjoy it. When you’re getting bored, change things up — not for accelerated gains but for enhanced enjoyment so you want to keep going back and making gains.

What time you train.

People often ask what time of day is best for training. Should they do cardio in the morning or at night? Strength earlier than cardio or the other way around? Truth is, it doesn’t matter that much. Train at the time of day that best suits you; the time you can actually get to the gym and put in some valuable effort. It doesn’t matter if that is 6am or 10pm. Fitting your training in such a way that it doesn’t detract from the rest of your life and so that you actually enjoy it is important. Being well fed and well energised is important too, but only secondary to the former points.

If you have all of the free time in the world and you can train whenever you want, train when you most enjoy it — when you feel energised, well fed, when you can train with your friends that hype you, etc. This is more important than the relative position of the sun. If you’re doing strength and cardio back to back, do your strength work first.

What equipment you’re using and have access to.

If you’re an elitist (like me, hi) it’s easy to be put off by a smooth barbell / bumper plates / forgetting your belt or borrowing someone else’s. When you’re used to having everything in meticulous order, it’s easy to feel dishevelled when you don’t have your usual training kit. Realistically, these things don’t matter unless you let them matter. If you’re training in a suboptimal environment with suboptimal equipment, take a moment to ground yourself, then get back to work.

If you don’t have your belt, consider dropping the load so that you’ll produce a set of an equivalent difficulty to your prescribed weight with your belt. If the bar is smooth, chalk yourself up. Consider lifting straps for deadlifts if you need. Using them once won’t make your grip weaker. If you can swap sessions to something with less demand on your grip, perhaps do that. If none of the equipment you want is available, improvise. Meant to squat but there’s only a leg press? Get some volume in your legs with that. The specifics of what you do matter considerably less than just getting quality session in that places sufficient stress on the muscles you’re trying to develop.

How good or bad an individual session goes.

One good session is not going to create resounding success story any more than one bad session is going to obliterate your entire lifting career. It’s easy to get a bit emotional when things go wrong, but do your best to ground yourself when you inevitably have a bad day. If things are looking shitty at the start of your session, keep your head on to make the best of the rest of your session.

Once the dust has settled, use these low quality sessions as an opportunity to learn. What contributed? Life stressors, distractions, excessive fatigue, poor sleep, poor nutrition, low focus, negative training environment, etc? If there is something in there you can improve, control or prevent next time, brilliant. It’s less likely to happen again now. Move on and approach successive sessions ready to prove your ability to yourself once again.

The exact weight and number of sets/reps that you do (specifics).

You’re not going to overtrain if you do 42.5kg instead of 40kg and you’re not going to plateau if you do 9 reps instead of 10. What matters is the difficulty of your sessions overall/long term and that you’re recovering adequately to get through successive training. Don’t get caught up in the specifics and instead ensure that you’re training with a clear objective in mind and that every rep is executed in alignment with that objective. If you’re working on some element of your technique, make sure you’re nailing that with each rep. If you’re working on growing a specific muscle, make sure you’re creating sufficient tension on that muscle. If that takes 15 reps or 12 reps, it doesn’t matter. General alignment with objectives > specifics.

What you eat before and after training.

What you eat before and after training is valuable, don’t get me wrong. But it matters significantly less than what you’re doing with your diet overall. If you’re getting sufficient calories and protein in throughout the day and week, you’re cognisant of micro-nutrition and actually achieving positive health outcomes, then you can focus on nailing your pre- and post-workout nutrition. Until then, address your diet as a whole first please.

Before training, easily digestible carbs are key. Think bananas, sports drinks, bread, cereal and honey. These will be available as fuel for exercise quickly, without sitting in your stomach too long and causing discomfort. After training, same deal. Get some carbs in to commence the recovery process.

Protein around training time is important but whether it is before or after is less important. If you can train comfortably after eating both protein and carbs, get some protein in both before and after. If not, after, sooner rather than later is fine.

Train early in the morning? If you can comfortably train with food in your belly, then that is great. If you’re more comfortable training fasted, that’s okay. Just get some protein and carbs in as soon as possible after training. Better to be able to train hard because your stomach is not in agony than to get just the right nutrients at just the right time and bringing them up as soon as your belt is on.

Training frequency.

“I can’t make four sessions per week. I can only get to three. Is that enough?” Of course. One session per week is significantly better than none, two is better than one, three is a little better than two, four may be marginally better than three, five may be better or worse than four.

Up to a point, training more frequently enables us to get more work in. Once you’ve found the maximum training dose you can recover from though, additional sessions in a week simply allow for your training to be spread out further to help foster recovery so that you can approach your sessions with more pizazz.

Since more training isn’t necessarily better, it’s important to be attentive to when your training is taking a turn for the worse. There is nothing to be gained from stubbornly training more and harder to prove how committed you are. Perhaps the fifth session tips you over the edge. That extra session may be the difference between enjoying training and feeling like it’s all you do. It may be the difference between enough or not enough sleep; the ability to socialise or not. Be cognisant of when more training makes you feel worse or makes your training or quality of life suffer.

Importantly, don’t not pursue lifting because you can’t train four days per week. You can make epic gains if you consistently train 1-2x per week with good session quality and overload over time. Consistency > perfection.

Being present in your sessions.

Okay this actually matters. You can make steady progress just rocking up and ticking the boxes, sure. But you can make considerably better progress by thinking about your cues, approaching your set up carefully and meticulously, reviewing last weeks training and making the required changes, etc. You can get strong training sloppily. But bringing attention and mindfulness to your set up and execution will really set you apart.

Sleep and adequate recovery.

It’s between sessions that the growth and development occurs. If between sessions you’re not eating enough, you’re not sleeping enough, you’re getting lit and/or you’re stressed to the eye balls, I’m sure you can see that your recovery and ultimately your improvement is going to be hindered. Conversely, if you’re getting enough sleep, eating enough food, managing your stress levels and generally looking after yourself, your body will be in a better position to allocate resources to repairing and building muscle. Training more and more and recovering less and less is not productive; no matter how tough or bad ass it looks to onlookers.

Your diet as a whole.

Calories are required to build new muscle tissue. So, you can imagine if you’re not eating enough to support your body in general, you’re sure as hell not eating enough to support the building of big new muscles. Conversely, if you have plenty of fuel available, your body can spare some towards building new tissue.

When it comes to diet, getting in “superfoods” is not important. What matters is adequate energy (calories), adequate protein and carbohydrates and adequate micronutrients for good health. You don’t need to eat solely “clean” foods and eating “dirty” foods won’t lead to fat gain. Eat protein, eat your veggies, eat enough and nail that consistently for a long time. The importance of that coupled with consistent strength training can not be understated.

That your training is hard enough.

This sounds obvious but it is seriously under-appreciated. If you want to get stronger, you need to provide your body with sufficient stimulus to produce a neurological +/or muscular response. If you only train with loads and volumes that are very comfortable for you, your body has no reason to adapt and improve. Now, this is not to say that you need to train to failure every set of every day. That is unproductive and will almost inevitably lead to excessive fatigue and injury. But getting close to failure in your exercises that are in your program for the purpose of strength development or hypertrophy is imperative.

If you’re not sure if you’re close to failure, go there once safely (with a spotter/safety rails/etc). That way you know what it feels like to get close.

Overload.

Assuming you’re training hard enough, you’re going to get stronger over time. Therefore, weights that you found challenging when you were starting out are likely (hopefully) not that challenging for you now. Therefore, you need to continue to ramp up your training to continue to provide sufficient stimulus for growth and strength development. You can’t squat 40kg forever and expect you’ll get stronger. When 40kg is easier, you need to lift more, or complete more reps. Keep making your training hard enough. When you get stronger, your training needs to get heavier and harder to keep pushing you forward.

The general trend of your training.

In the same way that a single bad session won’t derail the entire trajectory of your training, neither will a bad week. What matters significantly more is the general trend of your training over time. If things are honestly trending downward over a period of weeks and months, that is certainly a nudge toward needing to change something. However, if you’ve just had a couple of not so great sessions, it’s probably not worth getting upset about. Use these as an opportunity to learn. Reflect on what made these sessions “bad” — life stressors, feeling distracted, excessive fatigue, poor sleep, poor nutrition, low focus, negative training environment, etc. If there is something in there you can work on or improve, brilliant. Hop to that and carry on. Odds are, a total overhaul isn’t necessary but a small tweak may be valuable. If your training is generally trending in the right direction, continue pushing the needle. Find what works and repeat that for as long as you’re being rewarded for your efforts.

Consistency.

If you followed an okay program with okay attention to detail and okay recovery but did so consistently 3-4 days per week for 10 years, you would make tremendous progress. Nothing else matters if you are not showing up and putting in the work on a consistent basis. Commit to what you can actually commit to long term — no more. If that’s two sessions per week and average nutrition, great. Repeat forever. Again, nothing matters if you are not showing up and putting in the work on a consistent and regular basis.

“The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom”

— James Clear