4 Top Tips For Building Strength

Building muscle strength can benefit athletes involved in a huge range of sports and is something many of us strive towards.

While gains can come quickly and without a lot of thought or effort at first, it is common to plateau. 

The good news is that with the right approach, you can keep getting stronger for many years to come. Here are four top tips for building strength.

Decide What Exercises To Target

Having a measure of your strength is a key way to keep track of progress, and the most common way of doing this is to monitor your one-rep max. It’s hard to build your one-rep max across all exercises, so a better way to channel your energy is to focus on one or two particular lifts. For example, if you’re aiming to build lower body strength you might focus on improving your squat, and other exercises like leg pressing become about developing your main lift.

Lift With Speed

Using maximal force when lifting will help you maximise strength returns. Focus on driving through the concentric part of the lift quickly. Although you can’t train with maximal loads all of the time because it will put too much stress on the body and you won’t be able to recover properly, you can lift with maximal force by focusing on the speed of your lift.

Let The Strength Come To You

Patience is crucial when you have a really big fitness goal and you want to see what your body is capable of. You can’t build massive strength overnight. It takes years of consistent training, making small marginal gains to realise your potential. You need the right mindset to stick at it, not necessarily forcing improvements but letting the progression come to you while trusting the process.

Sleep More

The majority of muscle regeneration and repair takes place overnight while you’re sleeping, so getting enough quality rest is an important part of a training routine. You don’t want to stress about not getting enough sleep because it will simply place even more of an overall load on the body, but developing an environment and lifestyle where you can easily get enough rest and recovery will help in the long term.