Articles - Strength, Muscle & Athletics
By Brian Copeland
- Neurological Strength Development
- Intensity vs. Volume vs. Density vs. Fatigue
- Size & Strength Training Reps/Sets
I received a question from a client and avid reader of my newsletter that spurred me to write this article, his question below...
Question: hi brian-i like this news letter so much better with the format. could you review certain rep ranges and weight for strength training and true muscle building? ralph
Answer: Indeed I can... but it can be a very complex topic so I'll try to cover some advanced concepts and then distill them into simple applicable information.
Strength is a nebulous term. Your typical gym rat may ask, "how much do you bench press?" But what does a big bench press do for a high jumper or sprinter?
In fact, maybe strength is different for every single athlete...
To a powerlifter it is their 1-rep max in the bench press, squat and deadlift.
To an Olympic weightlifter it is their 1-rep max in the snatch and clean and jerk. 
How about to a sprinter? It is ability to produce force to propel their body forward as fast as humanly possible.
What is strength to a long-distance cyclist? The ability to climb hills without draining too much stamina, perhaps the ability to pull out all of the stops and haul-ass in the last stretch of the race.
For someone doing Yoga it might be the ability to hold a certain position for a period of time, or the ability to transition from one pose to the other without struggle.
For more complex sports such as football, martial arts, etc. there are many aspects of strength that may be important.
- Grip Strength
- Grip Endurance
- Explosiveness
- Joint Stability (the ability to resist being moved in each joint) important for injury prevention
- and more
So if you are a non-competitive athlete and want strength, what do you really want?
You probably want a type of general strength that has the greatest carry-over to other activities, right?
- Helping friends move furniture and being the strongest person
- Opening the jar that no one else can
- Wrestling around with someone and being able to man-handle (or woman-handle for you ladies) the other person
For the purpose of this article I am going to assume people want a type of strength that allows a 1-rep max lift of their chosen exercise.
This will be a short "duh" one right?
Well maybe. You see size of muscle tissue can come about from a variety of means. It can be from slow twitch or fast twitch muscle fibers.
 Slow twitch or red fibers are filled with mitochondria, have a slow contractile rate and deal with lactic acid very well. Basically they are weak but can keep going.
Fast twitch fibers or white fibers are capable of much greater force of contraction but get fatigued faster.
So, it is important that for 1-rep max, explosiveness (or power) that we focus on fast twitch fibers.
Yes there are types of fast twitch fibers that are in-between and share some of the characteristics of slower twitch fibers so they last a little longer but don't produce quite as high of force as fast twitch but more than slow twitch... don't worry about it. Just train for your sport, or train for what you want to be able to do and your body will develop the proper muscles fibers.
So our focus for this article will be on the development of the muscle fibers that produce, greatest contractile force, and a degree of sustained force for short periods.
When considering strength it is important to realize that nearly every adult human, man or woman, has enough muscle in their body to lift a car!!
So why can't we? Well we have all heard of stories of mothers lifting cars off of their children, in fact about 6 months ago I heard in the news about a guy who saw a teenager trapped under a car. He stopped and lifted the car off of the kid who ended up with a few busted ribs, nothing serious. The family invited the guy over for dinner to thank him and asked if he could lift the car again, he tried 10 times and couldn't budge it a centimeter.
I routinely tear a deck and a half of poker cards but about a month ago my body was fighting some allergies taxing my immune system. In the process I was trying to open a jar... I had the darndest time trying to open that jar! Mister Grip felt weak as a kitten!
Why can certain circumstances make us stronger and others weaker?
Well it is well documented that the average person can voluntarily contract about 25 to 30% of their muscle mass. Now imagine the heaviest thing you can lift one time and realize that is about 25 to 30% of your potential!
World champion powerlifters who squat 1,000+ lbs have been shown to use around 45% of their muscle fibers in that record setting 1-rep max!
Have you ever seen a guy full of muscle who for  some reason just wasn't that strong?
Or how about a wiry guy who seemed way too strong for his size?
The wiry guy is using a higher percentage of his muscle fibers while the bigger guy, with more muscle, is using a smaller percentage and possible less overall fibers.
Now you take a big guy and teach them to use a high percentage of fibers and you get World's Strongest Man competitors!
Now you can see why a chimpanzee half your size is about 5 times stronger than you... they are using a higher percentage of their muscle fibers.
This is the neurological component of strength, how many muscle fibers can you voluntarily contract, as opposed to what most people think of which is muscle size alone.
In the event of rescuing a loved one from under a car your brain can supercharge your central nervous system allowing you to access a greater number of muscle fibers. The same thing happens under the Fight or Flight (or freeze) response to danger, your brain gives you more strength to fight or flee.
Why can't we just access 100% of your muscle fibers all of the time you ask? Because you have enough muscle to literally tear yourself apart! Someone in the electric chair, for the first and last time in their life gets 100% muscle fiber activation. That is why they have heavy duty straps. They literally shatter their own bones they are so strong!
We don't want to go to 100% obviously, but 30% is lame. Moving closer to 45% is nice! Maybe one day we will break that human potential gap and get to 60% but I would bet that injury rates would increase... so we don't want to get too strong because our bodies can't take it.
The cool thing is that you can learn to use a higher percentage of your muscle fibers through practice... this is what all high level athletes have done. But what type of practice is the question.
Stick with me, we are getting there.
So when we say strength training, what are we talking about?
Both neurological gains (increasing the % of fibers we can voluntarily contract) and muscle fiber gains (increasing size and type). There is one more component which is decreasing neural inhibition but I'll save that for other articles, because frankly if you do a lot of quality Z-Health mobility at all speeds in every single joint and safely, progressively lift weights you will take care of most of these neural inhibitors which limit the amount of fibers you can voluntarily contract.
So, in short, training for strength is teaching your brain to recruit more muscle fibers.
This is skill training.
So as Comrade Pavel Tsatsouline would say, "strength IS skill!"
The variables you should play with in the pursuit of strength, at least as far as lifting weights is concerned are intensity, volume, density and fatigue.
Let's explore each further...
Not how hard you feel like you are working but the Soviet definition... the proximity to your 1-rep maximum. In other words 100% intensity means your 1-rep max. If you are lifting 12 reps and the last rep you fail and fall to the ground in a pile of poo... you were below 100% intensity... WAY below, perhaps only 50%.
So if you can military press 70 lbs for a 1-rep max then that is 100% intensity. A 62 lb kettlebell would be roughly 90% intensity, a 53 lber would be about 75%, etc.
Generally speaking, people who train too often close to 100% intensity burn out quick. But if you train too far from 100% intensity you are not going to recruit sufficient muscle fibers to really do much.
As far as intensity goes, let's make it a little easier than using percentages for now.
Moderate Intensity = a weight that allows you to do 8-10 reps and do sets of 5 reps perfect reps. I would call this moderate intensity.
High Intensity = a weight you can lift 1 to 3 reps with clean form.
Low Intensity = a weight that allows you to pause, fix whatever is wrong with your technique, correct it and then keep going.
Most of your time training should be spend in moderate intensity. This is the range that recruits a significant amount of muscle fibers without burnout and allows perfect form. Perfect from being super important because sloppy form will ruin the map in your brain that is responsible for recruiting more muscle fibers. And remember, strength is skill... the skill of your brain (central nervous system) learning to recruit more fibers.
You should work in the high intensity range a maximum of once per week, most people will do better at less than that.
You should visit the low intensity once per week as well to work on improving form even more and other specialty drills that are beyond the scope of this article... hint, various speeds!
There are numerous definitions for volume, I'll give the simple one. How many reps you did for a particular exercise in your training session.
Last Friday I did 13 sets of 6 reps and 4 sets of 5 reps then that total volume is 98 reps. Guess which intensity I used? Moderate of course.
Volume builds size. Volume as long as all of the reps are perfect does a great job of educating the brain to use more motor units.
To give you some perspective, the research shows that elite level athletes have put in somewhere between 100,000 to 300,000 perfect reps in their training, many of them in the millions!
All those reps build what we call mapping. Maps in the brain recruit muscle fibers... get it yet? The better your maps the stronger you are.
Many people have put in that many reps but not that many perfect reps!
No discussion of strength would be complete without mentioning perfect reps. If you don't have them, seek out a coach... if you think you have them... seek out a coach because you don't!
Density is the amount of time it takes you to complete a given amount of volume. So if you did 20 pullups last week spread between 4 sets of 5 reps and it took you 10 minutes then that is your density. To beat that density you could decrease the rest between sets so that your total time is 9:45mins. Even if you still did 4 sets of 5 reps but got done sooner then your density is improved which means you are stronger.
So, decreasing density is a great way to improve fitness... although I usually use it more for strength-endurance such as kettlebell snatches, it can be used for that high rep military press we looked at earlier in the volume section
Speaking of density... the bodybuilding standard has usually been about 60 to 90 seconds of rest between sets, that is because they are going for fatigue in the muscle. The powerlifting standard has traditionally been 3 to 5 minutes of rest between sets because they want to minimize fatigue to allow them to lift the most weight possible with the cleanest form.
For strength rest like a powerlifter, for size with less strength rest more like a bodybuilder. That is the norm. I would recommend something in between for the person after strength but wants size too.
Rarely discussed from the perspective of controlling it... is fatigue. Most people say push to failure or push through fatigue... well for someone seeking strength that is about the stupidest thing you can do!
When you are fatigued how good is your technique?
Strength is about improving the mapping in the brain right?
So what are you doing to the maps in your brain with sloppy form?
Screwing them up!
Go tell an Olympic javelin thrower to train to failure or fatigue in their throw... next year they don't make the Olympic team... whoops!
Check the ego at the door and get in as many clean reps as you can, minimize fatigue.
I remember watching some videos of Olympic weightlifting champions from the Soviet Union practicing their lifts. These guys would take a moderate weight, lift it over head in whatever lift they were doing that day. Their faces looked like they were bored. They would drop the weight... walk around, B.S.with someone, walk back to their weight, repeat. They would do this over and over getting in tons of perfect "easy strength" reps as Pavel Tsatsouline would say.
Want to be strong, minimize the fatigue.
I've told you enough, what do you want free programs?!!
My recommendation, look through the products page and see which one fits your goals and rock with it.
 If you are seeking a huge Kettlebell Military Press, my personal preference, then I recommend Kenneth Jay's great book Perfecting The Press How to Maximize Your Performance in the Military Press . Kenneth a former Master RKC and current Z-Health Master Trainer outlines how he achieved 11 reps with the 106 lb Beast! and a one-armed military press with 2 x 70 lb kettlebells in one hand!
It is a great book that will take your strength in the kettlebell military press to the highest levels and pack some size on at the same time!
Plus you can apply the principles in the book to any exercise.
Brian Copeland
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