How to Build Strength Quickly

Strength training encompasses a different strategy than a muscle building program. To understand how to implement the changes in your body, you should understand how your body gains muscle and conversely, how it builds strength. Because different methods of training obviously produce differing results, you need to understand the process of muscle growth and reparation.

Most bodybuilders employ methods of muscle building by working the muscles until failure. This breaks down muscle tissue and forces regeneration to occur. The idea behind bodybuilding is that when the muscle repairs itself, it will add a small addition of muscle onto the original. As time passes and this cycle continues, the muscle will add substantial growth and become bigger and more defined. Gaining strength uses the opposite methodology as bodybuilding. Here are some tips to building strength and muscle endurance quickly and effectively.

1.  Do not train until muscle failure. As discussed, muscle failure will force the muscle to go through the process of growth. When you are recovering, you cannot train your muscles for endurance. You have to let the muscle heal. The idea is to avoid failure in all of your resistance training by stopping your repetitions before you feel the “burn”. When you are building strength, you shouldn’t work so hard that you feel sore the next day.  

2.  Because the idea of strength and endurance training is to increase the amount of the resistance during training, focus on only performing 2 – 5 repetitions at a very challenging weight. The weight needs to be heavy enough to properly train your nervous system not to fail which consequently affects your strength. Your nervous system will become accustomed to sending stronger impulses to your muscles which will increase your strength and endurance.

3.  An effective strength building program will always factor in recovery time. Adequate recovery time is anywhere from three to five minutes in between sets to allow your muscles to regenerate and drain of lactic acid buildup for maximum endurance progress. You want your strength to grow therefore waiting the maximum amount of time between sets will make sure that you don’t fatigue your muscles.