What does it take to reach your strength potential? Get programs and advice for beginner, intermediate, and advanced stages.

BY GREG NUCKOLS



What does it take to reach your strength potential? And what do the steps to do so look like? I couldn’t find a complete, accessible overview anywhere, so I decided to make it myself. This article will be the anchor for the website. It’s a comprehensive framework, meant to get you caught up and ready to absorb the rest of the information on this site. Be aware that a more nuts-and-bolts guide is coming (how to actually plan out your sets/reps/exercises) as well. This guide is just meant to give you an overview of the important factors and principles in play. If you have any questions, if you think something is incomplete or confusing, or if you just plain think I messed something up, don’t hesitate to let me know how I can make this guide better.

This is something I’ve been wanting to write for a while, but I’ve been putting it off because, honestly, it’s a monster.

I could split it into a series, but I don’t want people to stumble across just the second or third installment and miss the context. However, be aware up front that it’s probably not one you’ll want to chug through in one sitting. Because of that, you can download it below as a PDF so you can read through it at your leisure, along with spreadsheets laying out multiple example programs showing how you can apply the principles in this article.

This article will cover what it takes for you to reach your strength potential, and how to do it in the most efficient way possible. It’s not going to dwell on specific topics in a ton of depth; its purpose is to give you an overview of the key factors in your journey from wherever you are now, to your ultimate potential. Resources addressing more specific topics will be linked, but the purpose of this article is simply to provide you with a comprehensive framework.

What does it take to be as strong as you can be?

1. Big muscles (duh). For anyone who needs more reassuring, this guide goes into way more depth on this subject later.

2. Mastery of the lifts you’ll be using to demonstrate strength.

Who was the strongest athlete of all time? Anatoly Pisarenko? Zydrunas Savickas? Andrey Malanichev? The fact is, there’s not a definitive way to answer that question because they competed in different sports, and strength is defined by the lifts you use to measure it. There is a very large skill component to mastering a lift: You have to get your muscles to work in a very powerful yet precise manner to lift heavy stuff as effectively and efficiently as possible. This comes with practice – the more specific, the better.

Because of this, practice aimed at mastering the lifts you want to use to express your strength is incredibly important. This guide will mainly be talking about the squat, bench press, and deadlift since I’m a powerlifter, and that’s what I know the most about, though these principles are applicable to any strength sport.

3. Healthy Joints/Connective tissue

The less wear and tear you have on your body, the more you’ll be able to lift, all other things being equal. Your tendons have to be strong enough to transfer force from your muscles to the bones they’re trying to move. They have a built-in “strain gauge” called the golgi tendon organ that sends a signal to your spinal cord, back to your muscles, telling them to stop contracting as hard, in an effort to prevent a tendon rupture.

Nerves called mechanoreceptors in your ligaments function similarly. And as you damage or wear away your joint cartilage, it generally heals slowly or not at all (depending on the joint), and once you’ve worn it away, you’re not getting any more. Over time, this can lead to osteoarthritis. Acute injuries to these tissues generally take a long time to heal (serious ones, at least), and excessive stress to your tendons over time can lead to inflammation (tendonitis), which can progress to degeneration (tendinosis) if left unchecked.

Both of these generally require quite a bit of time to recover from. What’s more, it’s not uncommon for a soft tissue injury to turn into a long-term headache and impact your training for a long, long time after the initial injury, as collagen generally repairs itself very slowly and often incompletely.

For these reasons, maximizing results while minimizing injury risk is of utmost importance. Worth noting here: pain and injury don’t always go hand in hand. That issue is beyond the scope of this guide, but if you’d like to read more, I’d suggest you start here to learn more about the biopsychosocial model of pain.

4. Age

There are three key advantages to being young:

Your nervous system is a bit more excitable and works a bit faster, meaning you can reach maximal muscular contraction faster. This is more important for power-dependent sports (like weightlifting) than maximal force dependent sports (like powerlifting), but it plays a role in all of them. Also, your nervous system is more plastic when you’re young, meaning you’ll be able to learn and master movements faster (and possibly to a greater absolute degree). You have a bit more of the protein elastin in your tendons, so they’ll be able to store a bit more elastic energy (giving you a more powerful “bounce” out of the hole at the bottom of a squat). You simply recover from hard training faster. You have higher testosterone levels, you sleep better and release more total growth hormone at night, and a multitude of other factors that help you be better able to handle high training volumes, recover faster, and progress quicker.

None of these are tremendously huge factors by themselves, but they all play a role. They all peak in your late teens, but don’t start dropping off in a big way until your 30s (neural drive) to 50s (tendon elasticity); the exception is neural plasticity, which peaks basically the minute you’re born, and drops steadily from there (which is why it’s easier to learn new things as a child).

If you can hit your competitive peak by your mid-twenties (some people peak sooner, but generally it takes quite a few years of hard training to build the requisite muscle mass), it helps take advantage of these factors. This is not to say that you can’t get very, very strong if you start later, but there are advantages to getting to your competitive peak as soon as possible.

What constitutes appropriate training?

This is an entirely context-dependent question. There are certain factors that are more or less universal (the training must be specific to your goals, there must be some type of overload applied, etc.), but once you get into the nuts and bolts of program design, there are several factors that determine whether or not a training program will be a good fit for someone.

Some of those factors are specific to the individual. Their background, strengths and weaknesses, specific leverages, preferences, their current diet, lifestyle, and sleep habits, etc.

However, there are some factors that will apply to most individuals in larger groups of people, based on their experience level, assuming their goal is to reach their strength potential (and be as competitive as possible, if that’s your aim) as fast as possible. I want you to keep two things in mind when reading the rest of this article:

I’m assuming your primary goal is to get as strong as possible, as fast as possible. If that doesn’t apply to you, then the rest of what I’m about to say isn’t too relevant for you because it’s not in line with your goals. BY NO MEANS am I saying this is the only possible way to get strong. That would be foolhardy. Simple observation is enough to tell you that there are many roads leading to Rome. So, if you’re tempted to retort, “so-and-so got so strong and they did it another way,” just know that you’re not going to get any arguments from me. Also, this means that if you are currently in a certain position and the way you got there differs from the one I recommend, that doesn’t mean you’ve screwed up. It just means you took a different path to get there, and that’s 100% fine.

With that out of the way, it’s time to really dive into the meat of this article. Remember, the four things we need to accomplish to get super strong:

Big muscles Mastery of the lifts Healthy joints Age/minimizing the time it takes to get there

Based on your experience level, you can use those four characteristics as your focal points to guide your training. 1 and 2 are where your sweet gainz are made, while 3 and 4 are overarching principles that determine how you train to make those sweet gainz and get from point A (wherever you are now) to point B (the strongest you can possibly be) as fast as possible, as safely as possible. Of course, safety and speed go hand in hand; nothing derails your progress faster than an injury.

Each phase of your training will be governed by a simple question: What obstacles standing between me and my end goal are hindering me the most right now?

This question helps give your training clarity. Until you’re as strong as you can possibly be, there will always be a multitude of areas where you could seek improvement. Asking what factors are hindering you the most right now keeps you from chasing 1,000 different goals at once (which gets you nowhere), and helps you make progress at the fastest rate possible by focusing you on winning the biggest battles that give you the highest rate of return.

For new lifters, those factors are:

Buy-in/habit formation Proficiency with the movements Body/muscular awareness Readiness to train and recover

For intermediate lifters:

Muscular size Continuing to increase your capacity to train and recover

For advanced lifters:

Proficiency becoming mastery Maintaining joint health Mastering the skill of competing

The New Lifter

Buy-In and Habit Formation

The first and most important factors are buy-in and habit formation.

No, neither are sexy, exciting topics, but they’re crucially important.

If you’re going to get anywhere as a lifter, you have to be willing to put in the work for years. A lot of years.

At this point, you may be thinking: “I’m ready to do it! I’m excited to see how far I can get in the next decade.”

However, most people who start an exercise program end up quitting within the first year, and I’m sure many of them were just as well-intentioned as you are. It’s unlikely that your initial excitement is going to get you very far.

At this point, we could redirect way off-course and talk about motivation, choice architecture, identity formation, and a bunch of other neat stuff that you probably don’t care to hear about too much in an already-long lifting article.

However, here are the key points:

You need to buy into the process. This means actually spending time and money investing in your results early on. Everyone values their time, and we assign value to things roughly based on what we’re willing to spend on them. If all you “invest” in lifting is $30/month in gym fees, and 2 hours of your week working out, then if you give it up, you haven’t lost much. It makes it easier to let go.

If you’ve been putting in an additional hour per day reading about lifting, and forked over some more cash on books and coaching, then it’ll automatically start mattering more to you. It’s called the “sunk cost fallacy.” The more you invest in something, the more you’re convinced that it’s an important thing to have or do, because you’re a rational person after all, and rational people wouldn’t spend so much time/money/energy on something that wasn’t important and didn’t matter to them personally. Put your mental biases to work for you.

You need to find a community.

In-person is best (either find someone who’s already a lifter to show you the ropes, or convince a friend or two to start lifting with you), but online communities still beat going it alone.Whichever route you go, the keys are accountability and support. If your training partners don’t hold you accountable if you start skipping a bunch of workouts (or if they’re the lazy ones), then they’re no good for you. If the people you lift with or the online community you find is permeated by negativity, it’s no good for you.

You need to enjoy your training. This is a key piece most people miss. Sticking with something is all about the things that make you want to continue outweighing the things that make you want to quit (motivation > obstacles). Motivations can be intrinsic (coming from inside you) or extrinsic (coming from outside factors).

Most people have some degree of extrinsic motivation when they start lifting (wanting to look better, wanting to lose weight, wanting to feel athletic, etc.), but almost by definition, it’s not very strong. It wasn’t strong enough to even get your foot in the door until you finally started training, after all. It’s important, but it’s not what you want to rely on; that’s a big mistake a lot of people make.

Because you can’t rely solely on your extrinsic motivation when you first start lifting, it’s very important that you simply have fun training! That gives you some more intrinsic motivation (genuinely looking forward to the workouts themselves) to keep you going while lifting becomes a habit.

You’ve noticed, of course, that we usually don’t have any problems finding time to do the things we really like doing, even if we know we probably shouldn’t be doing them (“I should really do something productive, but I’m sure I can watch one more episode. Damn you, Netflix”).

Most people miss this important fact and get way too hung up on the actual details of programming for new lifters.

When you’re first starting out, you’ll gain muscle and strength doing almost anything; the stimulus is so new, your body is simply going to respond strongly to it, even if it’s not the “optimal” stimulus. The most important thing is that it’s something you enjoy and can stick with, and that physiologically it’s “good enough.”

Coaches love to moan about “program hoppers,” and they love talking about how new lifters are shooting themselves in the feet by not following masterful training program to the letter. What they’re missing is the fact that when training new lifters, enjoyment matters just as much as progress.

If new lifters (with a higher need for extrinsic motivation) don’t enjoy a program, they won’t stick with it, and if they don’t start seeing the results they’re looking for, they’ll get demotivated and quit. If a coach fails in either of those dimensions (writing programs that work but that people hate, or writing programs that are fun but that don’t get results), they’ve screwed up.

The actual nuts and bolts of how effective-yet-fun programming looks varies person to person. Some people enjoy more variety (in exercises, set/rep schemes, etc.) and start dreading workouts that look exactly like the rest of the workouts they’ve been doing for the past month.

Other people love consistency, are wary of change, and enjoy being able to see steady and measurable improvements workout to workout, comparing their performance in one workout to what they did in the same workout yesterday or last week. A good program for one new lifter may be a terrible program for another, because what constitutes enjoyable training varies person to person.

Developing Proficiency

Moving on, the second most important factor is developing proficiency with the movements you’re using to express your strength.

How do you learn a new motor pattern? Practice. Specifically, frequent, purposeful practice. The more times you do something, and do it the way you’re supposed to, the faster your nervous system will master and store the pattern.

There are a few key takeaways:

The practice must be deep and purposeful.

You can’t simply go through the motions. Practice starts before the set. Visualize how the set is supposed to look and feel, trying to capture as many details as possible: how the bar will feel on your back or in your hands, how you’ll set up, how it will feel to move the load, etc. Initially you may not be able to capture too much in your visualization, but this is a skill that will improve over time. As you approach the bar, have one cue in mind. Don’t try to “think your way through the rep.” Just focus on one thing that will help your performance.

If it improves your performance, stick with that cue until you master it and can move on to another. If it doesn’t choose another cue. Be aware of how the reps feel as you’re doing them, but don’t obsess about it; use that awareness in the next step. After the set, analyze it. How did it feel? How did it look (again, take video if possible)? What could be improved upon, and what cue could help you accomplish that improvement? Repeat that process for each set.

Simply doing the movements helps, but to gain proficiency with the lifts as quickly as possible, practice needs to be deep and purposeful to cement the skills and keep bad habits from developing.

The weights you’re using should be light enough that you’re in control of the load and can focus more on properly performing the movement than on avoiding death.

However, the weights should also be heavy enough that it’s still the same basic movement (a heavy barbell squat is pretty dissimilar to an unloaded bodyweight squat). This generally means using a load between 60-80% of your 1rm. Of course, if you’re a new lifter, you have no idea what your 1rm is. So the basic rule of thumb is that you should use something between the heaviest weight that you feel very comfortable and confident with, and about 15% less than that.

You should stay a long way away from failure on your sets, at least early on.

The more you have to strain to complete a rep, the more your form will break down, at least until you’ve gained proficiency with the motor pattern.

Let’s say you’re doing sets of 5, and the first three are beautiful, flawless reps, the fourth is a little shaky, and the fifth looks distinctly different from the first three. You’re ingraining the proper motor pattern you want to learn with 60% of your work, and something else with the other 40%. That makes it take longer to gain proficiency with the proper technique.

You should stay at least 3 reps away from failure (to complete a lift) as a new lifter, and almost always stop your sets before (or, if you push a rep too far, as soon as) your form starts to change at all. At first, you won’t be entirely sure what that feels like, so it helps to either have training partners watch your technique, or record your sets (with the camera set up directly to your side between knee and hip height for squat, at hip height for DL, and 6-8 above bench height for bench) so you can compare how the lifts felt to how they looked.

That will teach you what it feels like to complete reps with good form, what hard-but-flawless reps feel like (often a lift will feel like you screwed something up, but look great on video), and what messed-up ones feel like. To get in enough work while avoiding failure and technical breakdown, multiple sets of low reps are your best bet. The fewer reps you do each set, the less fatigue you’ll develop from your first rep to your last rep, and the shorter the time you need to be locked in and focused on your technique will be.

Generally, training each lift 2-4 times per week will give you the best bang for your buck.

Why? Two reasons: 1.) You need enough opportunities to practice the movements. Practice is key for learning anything new. 2.) You can simply do more! You’d have to really crush yourself to get in as much work on a lift in one day as you could in three fairly challenging days.

So why cap it at 4? Quite frankly, for a new lifter, you’re probably not going to benefit from doing much more than that. You could practice the movements a *bit* more frequently, but probably not enough to make a tremendous difference. More importantly, muscle protein synthesis stays elevated for new lifters for quite a long time: 36-48 hours is pretty typical.

For more experienced lifters, that’s down to 12-24 hours (or less, depending on how hard the workout is). So with 2-4 sessions per lift, per week, you’re still spending quite a bit of time actually building muscle.

The next key factor is developing muscular and kinesthetic awareness.

Kinesthetic awareness is just a fancy way of saying “knowing where your body is in space.” Developing this ability helps you do two things:

Better understand when the movements you’re doing “feel” right or not. This feedback helps you make adjustments to perform the movements better. Help external cues work better. External cues are those that focus on the outcome of the movement (i.e. for bench, you may say “throw the bar through the ceiling,” rather than “squeeze your pecs”), and are generally more effective for enhancing performance. The better you understand how it feels for your body to move through space, the more sense external cues will make, the better you’ll be able to apply them, and the more they’ll help your performance.

The best way to accomplish this? I’ve found challenging bodyweight movements to be the most effective in teaching overall body awareness. Do I have a citation for that? Absolutely not, because that would be damn near impossible to test. But of all the people I’ve worked with, those with backgrounds in gymnastics and martial arts almost always learn new movements faster than anyone else, and “get” new external cues the quickest. I’ve also found that “weird” lifts help build this type of awareness too.

Here are some suggestions of bodyweight movements that can help (start with the ones you can do): push-ups (working toward single arm pushups), dips, inverted rows, pull-ups, monkey bars, planks, rolling of all sorts, single leg RDLs (weighted or unweighted), lunges and split squats (at a speed you can control), single leg balance drills, single leg hops, L-sits, suitcase carries, waiter’s carries, single arm overhead press, bent press, and single arm overhead squat.

There are certainly many more that you could try, but choosing 2-3 from that list per session, done for 2 sets of as many reps as you can manage at a controlled pace (not rushing through the motions) generally does the trick.

Now, I’m not saying that you’ll directly make sweet gainz from those exercises unless you load them up and train them more like the barbell lifts, but they help you develop the kinesthetic awareness that will allow you to learn new movements better (attaining a higher end degree of proficiency) and faster.

It’s also worth noting that this type of training usually doesn’t do as much for someone with a strong background in sports (especially if you are pretty good at them, and have played recently), because sports training usually helps you develop kinesthetic awareness. The people who usually benefit the most from it are folks who haven’t played any sports in a long time (or ever) and haven’t been challenging their kinesthetic abilities.

Muscular Awareness

The next piece is muscular awareness. I hate the phrase “mind muscle connection,” but it’s a common expression that gets the point across. Building this awareness accomplishes two major things:

It helps you identify your weak link in a movement if a particular muscle group isn’t “pulling its weight.” If you don’t know how it feels when a particular muscle contracts, it’s hard to pick it out as the culprit when a lift doesn’t feel right. It makes internal cues more effective. Internal cues are ones that refer to what a particular part of your body is doing during a lift (i.e. “squeeze your pecs,” not “throw the bar through the ceiling”). Though internal cues are generally less effective than external cues, they still have their place, especially if you’re working on correcting a weak link in a movement, and you’re trying to re-integrate a muscle group into a movement pattern where it hasn’t been pulling its weight. If a muscle has been weak and limiting a movement, your body learns how to get more out of other muscles to compensate. When that weak muscle gets stronger, focusing on it can help get it more involved in the lift again and fine tune that motor pattern.

How do you accomplish this? “Bodybuilding”-style isolation movements. The tool is relatively unimportant. Barbells, dumbbells, machines, and cables are all totally fine. The goal isn’t to move the most weight, but rather to feel the target muscle contracting to build that muscular awareness (or “mind muscle connection,” if you prefer).

Just like the movements to build kinesthetic awareness, the goal isn’t necessarily boatloads of sweet gainz (since compound exercises like squats, presses, deadlifts, rows, pull-ups, etc., do just as good of a job at building muscle mass, especially in new lifters), but rather to make it easier to learn the lifts you’re trying to build proficiency in, and to make it easier to assess problems and correct your lifts down the road.

Train Hard and Recover

The last key factor for new lifters is developing the ability to train hard and recover from training. This is often termed GPP (general physical preparedness), but most people only think of conditioning when they think of GPP. Though that’s important, there are a few other factors, so I prefer the more encompassing term “work capacity”:

Body composition.

A high body fat percentage generally goes hand in hand with poor insulin sensitivity, and for every pound of tissue gained, a smaller percentage of it will be muscle, and a greater percentage of it will be fat.

There are a few reasons for that. Higher body fat levels are generally accompanied by lower testosterone and higher estrogen levels in men (since fat tissue contains the enzyme aromatase, which converts testosterone to estrogen. It should also be noted that the causality here is bidirectional; with low testosterone, it’s easier to gain fat, and more fat further lowers testosterone); lower insulin sensitivity, especially in muscle, will mean more of the energy you consume is stored in fat tissue, and there’s mounting evidence that the low-grade inflammation associated with obesity can decrease anabolic (muscle-building) signaling and increase catabolic (muscle wasting) signaling in your muscles (and a second source).

Quite simply, you’ll respond better to training and recover better from training if you’re leaner. If you’re a male over 20% bodyfat, or a female over 30% body fat, getting down to the 12-15%/20-25% range will make it easier to train hard, recover well, and build more muscle and strength.

Aerobic conditioning.

I’ve already written a pretty in-depth piece on the importance of aerobic conditioning for strength athletes, so rather than rehash that here, I’d encourage you to check it out. The degree to which you need to do any dedicated conditioning work varies person to person (some people just naturally have higher aerobic fitness), but a general rule of thumb is that if your resting heart rate is in the high 50s or low 60s and you’re under 200lbs, or it’s in the mid 60s and you’re over 200lbs, you probably have a sufficient aerobic base for powerlifting.

Nutrition.

This is also a topic that is impossible to address in a single paragraph. I’d highly suggest the book “The Renaissance Diet” by my friend Dr. Mike Israetel for an in-depth treatment of the subject.

Lifestyle factors.

This primarily means sleep and stress management. Lack of sleep and increased stress decrease how well you can burn fat, build muscle, and recover from training. I’ll address this is much more depth at the end of this article.

How you work toward the goal of being able to train harder and recover better depends largely on where you’re at right now. If you’re portly, then you should try to lose fat ASAP, whereas if you’re already lean, you shouldn’t try to lose any weight. If your nutrition is in line, but your baseline conditioning is poor, then you should work on improving your conditioning. If your conditioning is good but your sleep habits are atrocious, then you’d benefit most from getting more high quality sleep.

A word of reassurance if you’re overweight to start with: You really don’t need to worry about how losing weight will impact your initial strength/muscular progress. Though new muscle is most easily added in a caloric surplus, it’s entirely possible to gain muscle and strength while losing fat. This is especially true for people who are both new to lifting and overweight to begin with. If you set your calories to lose about 1% of your bodyweight per week, consume enough protein (about .82g/lb, or 1.8g/kg), and train hard, then you should have no issues gaining muscle and strength as you lose weight.

How Long Does This Phase Last? A major mistake new lifters make is sticking with beginner programs for too long. Your two most important objectives are to buy into the process and make training a habit, and to become proficient with the movements. The third objective (building kinesthetic and muscular awareness) helps with the second objective, and the fourth (ability to train hard and recover well) sets the stage for future training to be more productive. Once you’ve gained proficiency with the lifts, there’s no point in dilly dallying with beginner programs any more. A lot of people will run a beginner’s program entirely too long until they plateau multiple times and wind up frustrated. Most of the strength gains you make on a beginner’s program come from neurological improvements – your nervous system learning the lifts you’re performing. When you first start lifting, you may have enough muscle to squat 300lbs already, but you can only squat 135 because your nervous system doesn’t “understand” the lift yet; you haven’t built that proficiency. Over the span of a few months, you should be able to add weight to the bar at least weekly, and your squat may skyrocket into the 300s. Your muscle mass may have only increased by 10-20%, but your squat went up to a much greater degree because your nervous system adapts to stressors much faster than your muscles do. When you hit a wall and your lifts stop going up as quickly, it’s because you’re finally bumping up against the limits of how much you can lift with your current muscle mass.

To continue getting stronger, you have to gain more muscle. And simply put, a beginner training routine optimized for learning the lifts isn’t optimized for gaining a ton of muscle mass. Hypertrophy training generally involves training with accumulated fatigue because the main driver of muscle growth is training volume, but movements are best learned when your muscles and nervous system are both fairly fresh (another reason volume per session shouldn’t be too high, and sets of your main lifts shouldn’t be pushed close to failure). When you hit a wall for the first time on a beginner’s program, it’s time to shift training styles. Otherwise, you can only continue to get stronger as you gain muscle, and you’re stuck with a training routine that’s adequate for gaining muscle, but not optimized for it. So, how long should you be on a beginner’s routine before shifting to an intermediate routine? It depends on the person. Simply stick with it until you’re having a hard time adding weight week to week without grinding reps. That lets you know that the easy strength progress you get from gaining proficiency with the lifts is about to run out, so it’s time for a change. In general, this may take you anywhere from 2-6 months. Also, it can happen for different lifts at different times. Is your bench progress slowing, while your squat and deadlift are still shooting up? Then change your bench training, but keep training your squat and deadlift the same way until they too are topped out. Further reading for new lifters Avoiding Cardio Could Be Holding You Back → Gender Differences in Training and Metabolism → In Defense of Program Hoppers; DUP Revisited → The Belt Bible → Succeed Every Day: A Complete Guide to Habit-Forming →

Intermediate Training