“Will I get stronger when I’m lifting weights?”
“No, you won’t.”
“Then how do I get stronger?”
“Do a weight lifting program.”
“You just said I don’t get stronger when I’m lifting weights!”
“That’s because you don’t.”
“But I want to get stronger.”
“Then do a weight lifting program.”
“But YOU just said..............ABBOTT!!!!!!”
I have to admit, in the beginning I felt more like Costello than Abbott. Getting weaker while lifting weights was hard to wrap my brain around. But it’s true.
Lifting weights makes us weaker.
Then why would we ever want to hang out with our new steel and iron friends?
I mean, come on, they’re not that fun.
The real truth is, lifting weights breaks our muscles down and makes us weaker. Then we get stronger over the next 1-3 days.
This happens by the process of Stress, Recovery, and Adaptation.
Stress is the workout, recovery is your reaction to it, and adaptation is the result.
It’s like a construction crew tearing up a cracked, pot hole ridden road to make a new one. The tearing up is the stress, the laying of the new road is the recovery, and the relaxing, smooth ride is the adaptation.
Barbell weight training is the best stress to kick start meaningful recovery and adaptation.
The best way to recover from the stress of a workout is to:
1- Get a full nights sleep.
2- Eat more high quality protein foods.
3- Drink Water.
THIS is the part of weight training that makes us stronger. Eating and sleeping, then doing the entire cycle again:
Create a calculated stress, then Sleep, Eat, Drink, and Repeat.
How easy is that?
In my post, Short is Sweet, we talk about the small fraction of time you’re actually lifting weights. It’ll blow your mind, check it out.
It’s almost too good to be true that recovery and adaptation will make up the vast majority of your program.
How do we recover? Not by laying around all day.
Here’s where rest becomes a double edge sword. Resting without a previous stress dwindles us down to pathetically weak individuals.
Instead of being 2nd 50 strong, we become 2nd 50 - gone.
Ditch the advice that if you’re tired a lot, you should rest more. That will kill you, and I don’t want you dead.
Average Aging Americans decline because their brains think their external environment is so easy, they don’t need a strong body, healthy organs, or a sharp mind to survive it.
You start wasting away, because your body won‘t feed what it doesn’t need.
BUT, if you make your brain think you had a hard day finding food, building your home, and protecting your family - through weight training - your body will make sure all of that is easier for you next time.
By building you up to more than you were before.
Get a good 8 hours of sleep. Nothing recovers you from physical stress better than sleep. If you have a problem sleeping, you need to fix that.
For active people, short naps are great. I grab them when I can.
Keep moving, and enjoy the changes in your new body. But don’t overdo it. If you weight train, and then play back-to back-to back tennis matches, you won’t recover from your workout.
Consistently cycling through weight training, recovering, and adapting will transform your life like nothing else.
If there was a more accurate, useful, or effective way to change us for the better, I’d be doing it.
So would Abbott and Costello. Or maybe, they would just keep arguing.
Get strong as hell,
Coach Ken