by Michael Plank
Getting strong is so valuable. It helps you keep physical capacity as you age. It builds bone density. It decreases injury risk. It makes you more capable. I’ve never met someone who was sad about getting stronger.
Here’s how to do it:
- Eat lots of protein. Somewhere between 0.8g and 1g per pound of your bodyweight is a good place to start. (Bump that up to 1.2-1.5g if it’s plant protein, which tends to be less bio-available than animal protein).
- Be patient.
- Be consistent.
That’s about it.
You can get into concepts like tempo training or periodization, you can talk about time under tension and progressive overload, you can talk about eccentric vs. concentric loading, or dynamic vs. isometric training. There are literally volumes and volumes of material on strength training.
But it doesn’t actually have to be particularly complicated. I just hit a new personal record on pull-ups this week. At 40 years old. After 15 years of dedicated training. You know how I did it?
My coach told me to accumulate 50 strict chest-to-bar pull-ups over the course of the day one time each week. That was the whole plan. That’s what I did. After about 2 months of that, I started to see how many I could do in a row. First it was 5. Then a few weeks later it was 6. Then eventually it got to be 10.
That plan was not magic. There are a million plans. And almost all of them work.
What was magic was that I did it every week for months. I was consistent. I was patient. And I found the results I was looking for. No plan, no movement, no loading, no coaching beats protein + patience + consistency.
Where most people struggle when it comes to strength training is the patience. Protein helps your muscles grow and most of us know that. Consistency is easy when you’re seeing results. But with how many things we can get RIGHT NOW in 2024, it can be hard to wait for weeks, or months, or even years to see the strength results we want.
But it’s not complicated. And you know what? The time is going to pass no matter what.
So eat your protein. Show up every week. Be patient. And you can get very, very strong.