What are your gains when you lift?

I went into detail on how, with the correct programming, doing regular cardio in your weekly training routine will impact your gains minimally. But what are these “gains”? Is there more to weight training than just the widely pervasive goal of looking buff? Does cardio affect each of these gains differently? I aim to address the first two questions here first.

Sure, there are the benefits of stronger joints, denser bones, and better hormonal balance, among others, allowing you to age gracefully but, I’m not talking about them here. I might go into them in another post, though.

Depending on the reps, the weight on the bar, and the intent with which you lift you could be training to progress in maximal strength, power, or muscle mass. How are these different? By the way, you’re better off training across this entire spectrum if you’d like to reap the health benefits mentioned above.

I guess most people would be familiar with the “training to build muscle” side of resistance training where the focus is mostly on bodybuilding. Here, the training goal is to lift a moderate weight for usually 6 to 12 reps for a specific muscle group for 3 to 4 sets. The muscle fiber increases in size through a fluid volume increase, and this fluid helps fuel your muscles for repeated lifting efforts. This is not to say that there is no increase in strength but it’s just not the main adaptation you’re putting your body through, so the strength increase is likely to be moderate to slightly high depending on the weight lifted.

This leads to training for maximal strength development. Here’s where you lift heavy weights, subject to your starting strength, of course, for fewer than 6 repetitions. The heavier the weights, the fewer the repetitions. Imagine a powerlifter working so hard to lift 300 kilograms off the floor that it could be done just once. Unlike the bodybuilding adaptation above, the muscle adapts by becoming denser - the muscle fiber packs itself with more filaments that help it express more force onto external objects i.e., strength. There’s a neural component that needs to be discussed because when you’re training with weights, it’s not just your muscles working. Your brain sends signals through the nerves innervating your muscles at a certain strength and frequency. The greater the strength and the higher the frequency of this signal, the greater the muscle contraction and force development. The higher the force developed, the greater the strength your body expresses. Visual or aesthetic changes to your body aren’t as obvious as with bodybuilding training but when you train both strength and bodybuilding concurrently, you’re training your body to make good use of both function and form.

Speaking of form and function, power training is another piece of that pie that’s going to help you add more function to your form. When you train for power, you’re essentially training to move a certain weight as fast as possible. Think of the Olympic lifts, a sprinter, a wrestler tossing their sparring partner or rival like a rag doll, or a boxer generating enough power to deliver a knock-out punch. You get the idea. It’s about training your muscles to generate maximal force in minimal time and that quality is trained by implementing specific workouts in your program like clapping pushups, weighted jump squats, or Olympic lifts (keep in mind that Olympic lifts are a sport in themselves and involve training skills specific to Olympic lifts making them somewhat complicated. Unless you’re an Olympic lifts athlete you could be using that time for something more practical or sport specific).

The power training repetitions overlap with strength training repetitions but with significantly lighter weights so that you can train your body to generate force explosively.

Now, the last piece of the pie is training for muscular endurance. Think of it as an extension of hypertrophy/bodybuilding training except the repetitions are much higher, and the focus is on adapting your muscles to perform for extended periods like in an endurance sport.

To finish things off, here’s a repetition continuum for different goals to make it easy to understand. However, the repetition continuum is just that - it’s a continuum, meaning the adaptations overlap across these rep ranges to a degree.

Recent research¹ suggests that the hypertrophic adaptations are similar across hypertrophy, strength, and endurance rep ranges, but when you train for hypertrophy along the endurance rep ranges it’s going to be very time consuming, and when you’re training for hypertrophy along strength ranges you’d need to workout for several sets which can stress your joints a lot so you might as well stick to the specific rep ranges for your training goals.

If you need help training across these variables concurrently, contact me on Instagram or through [email protected].

References:

1. Schoenfeld, Brad & Grgic, Jozo & Plotkin, Daniel & Van Every, Derrick. (2021). Loading Recommendations for Muscle Strength, Hypertrophy, and Local Endurance: A Re-Examination of the Repetition Continuum. Sports. 9. 10.3390/sports9020032.