The Best Type Of Strength Training

When I was 16 years old. I decided to hit the gym. I was a competitive distance runner, and I wanted to do everything and anything I could to give myself a competitive advantage. All of a sudden I found myself in a new, and interesting world. Dozens of weight machines, dumbbells, barbells and pull up bars. I thought to myself: “If these are here, they must be good, and I should do ALL of them.”

What ensued was 3, 3 hour gym training sessions a week where, between my running days, I would go around in the gym and use every strength training tool they had. I was guzzling whey protein every day, and within months, I put on some serious muscle mass.

But what were the other results of my training? Remember, my goal was to become a stronger runner, and become stronger OUTSIDE the gym from spending time inside the gym. Unfortunately, when track season started, what I found was that the exact opposite was true. My body had become sluggish, slow, and clunky. My coaches would comment on how “tight” and “muscle bound” I looked, and I felt more vulnerable to injury, not less. My experiment had failed, and I stopped lifting.

The Commercial Gyms And Traditional Strength Training

The commercial gym, filled with weight machines, dumbbells, and barbells, are designed for body builders who want to put on as much muscle mass a possible. To do this, bodybuilders attempt to isolate and strain individual muscles to stimulate maximal growth. That’s why bodybuilding works so well for hypertrophy.

The fallacy of bodybuilding and traditional strength training is the concept that bigger muscles will allow us to move better, be stronger outside the gym, and prevent injury. Here is why traditional strength training fails at these goals:

1. Traditional strength training attempts to isolate joints and muscles. Again, in order to stimulate growth, bodybuilders try to isolate muscles. This is great for hypertrophy, but this doesn’t result in bodies that know how to move better. This is because good movement involves many muscles and joints working together to produce efficient outcomes. Hence, if we want to train for better movement, many joints and muscles have to be stimulated to work together. It’s better movement and coordination across many joints that results in real life strength outside the gym.

2. Traditional Strength Training Neglects The Core. Let’s take the example of a dumbbell chest press. In a dumbbell chest press, the athlete lies of a bench, and then presses the dumbbell overhead. The problem with this maneuver is that your body was put in an artificially stable environment (lying on the bench) to accomplish this motion. The result is your core isn’t engaged much, but your shoulders are engaged a lot. Why does this matter? Well, all pressing in real life (i.e. when we’re not lying on benches) requires that we first stabilize the spine before pressing with the shoulders. In real life, the power of your pressing is actually limited by your spinal stability. Isolated your shoulders and removing your core from a press, like in a bench or dumbbell press, makes no sense when it comes to functionality. No amount of chest pressing will ever result in healthier shoulders.

3. Traditional Strength Training Neglects Primary Human Movement Patterns. Not only is the human body not designed to work one muscle at a time, but it’s designed to produce seven different movements and all their variations, which includes hinging, squatting, pushing, pulling, lunging, gait, and rotation. By not emphasizing all movement patterns, traditional strength training programs are leaving their clients with many missing links.

A Better Type Of Strength Training - Functional Training

So what’s the best type of strength training? How do we build bodies that aren’t just stronger, but smarter, better at moving, and far less injury prone? The answer is well-planned, functional training.

Ok, so the answer is functional training, but this means nothing unless we have a mutual understanding of what functional training means. Many people, including personal trainers and physical therapists, think that functional training is about replicating what we do in real life inside the gym. While this is an understandable interpretation of the term “functional training,” this is NOT what functional training actually means. In the following sections, I will describe what functional training actually means and how to do “functional training” for maximal benefit.

Understanding Functional Training.

So, if functional training isn’t about doing things in the gym that look like things we do in real life, what is it? Instead of doing exercises in the gym that look like what we do in real life, functional training is about enhancing the systems of movement that we use in real life. To illustrate the difference, lets take a look at the example of the MAX lunge using the Ultimate Sandbag:

In the MAX lunge, as the runner steps back the USB moves outside the lead leg. This creates a tremendous challenge to the obliques, all 3 gluteal muscles, and pelvis stabilizers to work together at an extremely high level, which is why it’s such a great advanced functional exercise. But here’s the point I’m making – At no time in real life have I EVER had to do any action that looks like the MAX lunge. As such, the MAX lunge isn’t trying to copy something I often have to do in real life. Instead, the MAX lunge is an exercise designed to teach me how to use my core stabilizing muscles and legs together. If I can handle the high demands of a MAX Lunge, I can handle the demands of anything life throws at me.

What Functional Training Actually Looks Like (Concrete Examples)

Now that you understand that functional training is about enhancing our system of movement and NOT about copying real life movements, let’s cover some basics of what a functional strength training program should look like, and why.

The bulk of any great functional strength training program will be all 7 primary human movement patterns. What are the 7 primary human movement patterns and why are they so important? The 7 primary human movement patterns cover all of the ways your body is designed to move. If you can masterfully move in each of these 7 categories (in all 3 planes of motion) you will have the best chance of maximizing your movement efficiency and avoiding injury. If you have a weakness in any of these categories, over time that weakness can result in inefficiency and injury. Below is a graphic showing all 7 primary human movement patterns.

It is important to understand that each of these categories has many variations, and within those variations are many loading positions. For example, lets look at hip hinging:

Here, we can see that one variation of hip hinging (lets call this variation #1) has 4 unique loading positions. As we move into more single leg hip hinge variations, each of those variations will also have many different loading positions. Hence, just one of the primary movement patterns can contain hundreds of unique exercises.

Corrective Exercises - The Other Cornerstone Of Functional Training

Functional training, however, includes more than just the 7 primary human movement patterns. It also includes corrective exercises. Why does it include corrective exercises? It’s simple, before you were a walking, squatting, rotating adult, you were a baby. You started off just trying to move your head, and then gradually started moving your arms and legs until you could roll over, crawl, and eventually stand up and walk. Each of these stages were crucial in your neuromuscular development. Sometimes, as children we don’t learn these skills as well as we should have, and that translates to movement problems as we stand up and start walking, squatting, etc. Other times, as adults we lose these basic connections and we need to strengthen them BEFORE we can practice primary human movement patterns.

So what do corrective exercises look like? Here are some examples:

Corrective exercises are the ideal way to improve your basic motor skills before attempting the 7 primary human movement patterns. For that reason, corrective exercises are the centerpiece of functional training warm up routines.

Power Training, Plyometrics, And Balance Training

At this point, you might be wondering about other types of training you’ve been recommended. You might be wondering how (or if) exercises like power training, plyometrics, and balance training fit into our functional training programs. Well, the answer is they fit right in. Here’s how:

Power Training – Whether an exercise fits the category of “power training” often depends on the speed we perform an exercise, or the speed demands of an exercise. Hence, we can turn our “functional training” into power training my manipulating time constraints or by choosing exercises that require more power.

Plyometrics – Learning to become more explosive through the legs and ankles with plyometrics can be a huge advantage for runners. The mistake most make with plyometrics, however, is doing them before basic conditioning as been established by practicing all 7 movement patterns. You have no business jumping until you can hinge, squat, and lunge for example.

Balance Training – When many people think of “functional training,” they think of someone balancing on one leg on an unstable surface, like a Bosu Trainer. The irony here is there have been studies that looked at the effectiveness of these “balance trainers,” and determined that they did NOT improve stability because they were too unstable of a surface. That said, we should include balance training in our functional training programs, but it should be in the form of becoming more stable on one leg with exercises like single leg deadlifts, squats, and lunges.

Functional Training Equipment

Another important aspect of how we strength train involves the equipment we choose. Barbells and dumbbells could be used to train all 7 primary human movement patterns, but just because they can be used, doesn’t mean that they’re anything near the best. In fact, I would argue that barbells and dumbbells should not be used due to they’re limited loading positions and symmetric weight distributions. That’s why instead I train clients with The Ultimate Sandbag, Kettlebells, and other tools as necessary.

Conclusion

The best strength training program is a functional training program that highlights all 7 primary human movement patterns and includes ample amounts of corrective exercise to address underlying movement deficits. In addition, care should be taken in choosing which equipment is used as some types of equipment, like Ultimate Sandbags and Kettlebells offer a variety of loading positions which can systematically be used to make exercise more impactful.

Furthermore, exercise selection is crucial. Just because one advanced exercise is greater a super athlete doesn’t mean it will be great for an older person trying to build general fitness or come out of an injury. Care and attention needs to be made to ensure that each person has an ideal fitness routine for their level.