"Why am I not getting results with strength training?
As a Healthcare provider, we constantly get questions about people's aches and pains, but we often get questions about progress in the gym. All of these topics are very welcome and we encourage everyone to ask any questions they may have about health, wellness, strength and conditioning, and obviously pain. Remember, if you have a question about it...someone else probably has a similar question! Feel free to drop us a line and we'll get back to you about it as soon as we can.
A former patient sent me this message several days ago:
"I've been weight training now for about six months and am getting a TINY bit frustrated when seeing zero definition in my back/shoulders/arms. Any suggestions?"
Very common question and glad she asked. There are two key things for having improved "definition": improving muscle size and having a low enough body fat % to show off that muscle. We need to provide enough load to the muscle to stimulate growth which research suggests is greater than 60-70% of your 1RM. In general, novice weightlifters tend to not provide enough load to stimulate growth and they tend to use a load that is about 10-20% too light to stimulate this growth. There are several ways to determine the load you need to use to stimulate growth. The best way being finding your 1 RM (repetition max) which is the amount of weight you can do 1 time and 1 time only. Here's a good calculator to safely help estimate that. Another way, although not the best, is to take your 3 sets of 10 and make sure you cannot perform anymore than 10 repetitions. If you can do more than 10, add more weight until you can only do 10. This is estimated at about 75% of your 1 RM and should be enough load to help improve your strength.
The other part of the equation is having a low enough body fat to see the muscles you've earned. Good nutrition is imperative to making this happen. Depending on if you are trying to lose fat or gain muscle your nutrition will be different (and also too involved for this blog, however if you are interested in this aspect send us a message and we'll write a blog about it). However, if there is 1 thing that can give you the best results towards either goal is....consistency! There is no quick fix for this, no fad diets, no magic weight loss pills, no wrap that is going to change this. Having a solid nutritional plan that is consistently implemented is the way to make it happen.
For the majority of the people, a few simple changes can make a world of difference: lift heavier and eat better!
