The Future of Strength Training
Army researchers assess the evidence on what makes you stronger, and speculate about new approaches that might work even better
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Getting stronger is simple: lift heavy stuff, put it down, and repeat. According to a new review led by researchers from the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, you should use heavy weights that you’re capable of lifting one to five times through a full range of motion, and repeat for two to three sets a few times a week. That’s it. The rest is details.
Of course, the details are sometimes interesting—especially if you’re really trying to max out your performance, or returning from injury, or deployed somewhere far from the nearest gym. That’s what motivated the new review paper, which is published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research by a team led by Barry Spiering, who was at USARIEM but has since moved on to a position as lead physiologist at New Balance’s Sports Research Lab. He and his colleagues tried to sum up what we currently know about how to get stronger in order to imagine how we might do better.
The opening section digs into root causes: what has to happen in your body in order to increase strength? Surprisingly, the first thing they identify is giving maximal mental effort. The bigger and clearer the signal your brain sends to your muscles, the more force you’ll produce. And that signal-sending capability is trainable. Back in 2021, I wrote about a fascinating study in which locked-down pro basketball players gained strength by doing six weeks of completely imagined strength workouts three times a week. Similarly, lifting a light weight while imagining that you’re lifting a heavier one—i.e. trying as hard as you can, even if you don’t need to—produces greater strength gains.
