Can I get stronger while lifting less weight?
When I was a teen and in my early 20’s, I LOVED lifting and loved seeing “gains”. I always made sure I worked as hard as I could and lifted as much as I could to get “stronger”. I wasn’t training to be a bodybuilder or powerlifter. Football was my true passion and motivation for all the hours spent training. I wanted to be the best athlete I could possibly be and recognized being bigger, stronger and faster, would give me an advantage. I felt good about myself when I saw my squat, clean, or bench numbers going up. I felt like I was making progress and “getting better”. Like many people, I fell into a trap of being hyper focused on weight.
Now don’t write this blog off as a mundane rant on form and technique. Yes, form and technique are important, but there is more here than just making sure you don’t hurt yourself during training.
People are goal or task oriented. If you give them something to accomplish, people will accomplish the task many different ways to achieve the goal. With that being said, training and the weight room is no different. The primary goal of the weight room may be to get stronger. That‘s fine. That may be what a particular athlete needs. But when this goal is constantly quantified by the resistance or weight lifted, the athletes will link getting stronger to lifting more weight.
A threshold of difficulty exists for every movement or exercise, that if crossed, forces the individual to compensate for movement which becomes counterproductive, or negligible at best. Too often, minute compensations occur in postural alignment and control of the pelvis, lumbar, thoracic spine, and scapula to help the athlete control the resistance and perform the exercise. This may be a slight anterior tilt or IR of the scapula, rotation or lordosis through the lumbar, an anterior tilt of the pelvis, etc. In consequence, they will not effectively utilize the proper chain of muscles and train an improper movement pattern. People will resort to positions where they can generate more power/strength when they are forced to in order to achieve the goal of the activity.
The athlete should be able to “feel” the targeted chain of muscles. More so, we want this feeling to become a motor engram so it becomes natural. Select difficulty of exercise based on the athletes ability to control the movement and also appreciate the sensation of the movement. If they have something that is too difficult due to weight or stability requirements, they cannot appreciate the sensations of the afferent and efferent neural loops. Exercise must engage and enhance neural processes to have any beneficial carry over.
Rather than defaulting to increasing weight or throwing a balance pad or bosu under someone, force the athlete to maintain correct postural alignment throughout the entire body. This requires myofascial rigidity to produce a foundation to move from. Maintaining proper postural alignment, maintains proper joint space, reduces stress on the passive structures and places load on the myofascia. Thus, by removing the mechanical advantage provided by the passive structures, we force athletes to coordinate and recruit more muscle fibers, while significantly reducing the stress transmitted to the joints, ligaments, capsules, etc.
Additionally, consider the tempo at which the concentric and eccentric phases of the movement are performed. In a previous blog, I outlined the importance of training deceleration. Challenging athletes to move slow and controlled through the eccentric phase of a movement, helps promote the ability to effectively decelerate. This should be a load the athlete feels confident they can control, and additionally, reverse into a powerful concentric contraction for acceleration.
By changing the measurement or assessment of strength and power from weight lifted to sport specific, functional tests, athletes will be less inclined to compensate in the weight room. In fact, they will be free to devote more attention to performance of movement biomechanics and control. This change in perspective can help an athlete become stronger, demonstrate better functional carry over, and promote injury prevention and safety simultaneously. Shouldn’t that be the basic “duh” of all training?