The Journey: A complete Strength Training Guide by Greg Nuckols

• What does it take to be as strong as you can be? Big muscles (duh). Master of the lifts you’ll be using to demonstrate strength.
• There is a very large skill component to mastering a lift: You have to get your muscles to work in a very powerful yet precise manner to lift heavy stuff as effectively and efficiently as possible. This comes with practice--the more specific, the better.
• The less wear and tear you have on your body, the more you’ll be able to lift.
• Simple observation is enough to tell you that there are many roads leading to Rome.
• Remember, the four things we need to accomplish to get super strong:
• Big muscles
• Mastery of the lifts
• Healthy joints
• Age/minimizing the time it takes to get there
• Each phase of your training will be governed by a simple question: What obstacles standing between me and my end goal are hindering me the most right now? This question helps give your training clarity.
• The first and most important factors are buy-in and habit formation.
• Most people who start an exercise program end up quitting within the first year.
• You need to enjoy your training. This is a key piece most people miss.
• Sticking with something is all about the things that make you want to continue outweighing the things that make you want to quit.
• When training new lifters, enjoyment matters just as much as progress.
• If new lifters don’t enjoy a program, they won’t stick with it, and if they don’t start seeing the results they’re looking for, they’ll get demotivated and quit.
• The second most important factor is developing proficiency with the movements you’re using to express your strength.
• The more times you do something, and do it the way you’re supposed to, the faster your nervous system will master and store the pattern.
• Simply doing the movements helps, but to gain proficiency with the lifts as quickly as possible, practice needs to be deep and purposeful to cement the skills and keep bad habits from developing.
• To get in enough work while avoiding failure and technical breakdown, multiple sets of low reps are your best bet.
• Generally, training each lift 2-4 times per week will give you the best bang for your buck.
• Practice is key for learning anything new.
• A high body fat percentage generally goes hand in hand with poor insulin sensitivity, and for every pound of tissue gained, a smaller percentage of it will be muscle, and a greater percentage of it will be fat.
• If you’re a male over 20% body fat, or a female over 30% body fat, getting down to the 12-15%/20-25% range will make it easier to train hard, recover well, and build more muscle and strength.
• If your conditioning is good, but your sleep habits are atrocious, then you’d benefit the most from getting more high quality sleep.
• If you set your calories to lose about 1% of your bodyweight per week, consume enough protein, and train hard, then you should have no issues gaining muscle and strength as you lose weight.
• A major mistake new lifters make is sticking with beginner programs for too long.
• Most of the strength gains you make on a beginner's program come from neurological improvements--your nervous system learning the lifts you’re performing.
• When you hit a wall and your lifts stop going up as quickly, it’s because you’re finally bumping up against the limits of how much you can lift with your current muscle mass. To continue getting stronger, you have to gain more muscle.
• Hypertrophy training generally involves training with accumulated fatigue because the main driver of muscle growth is training volume.
• When you hit a wall for the first time on a beginner's program, it’s time to shift training styles.
• Increasing your work capacity is of the utmost importance because, as previously mentioned, training volume is the #1 driver of hypertrophy. You’ve got to handle high training volume to grow, so you need to be able to recover from that training volume.
• A bigger muscle, all other things being equal, is a stronger muscle. There’s no way around it; past a point, you simply have to grow.
• Our bodies aren’t actually built very well for lifting heavy things. When you compare humans to comparably sized animals, we tend to be far weaker.
• Because muscles attach so close to joints, small variations can make a big difference.
• Proficiency/mastery comes with practice.
• I’d just like to point out that training with a focus on gaining mass to dominate at powerlifting is directly supported in the literature.
• If you stay the same size, you have a cap on how strong you can possibly get.
• The primary goal of intermediate training is to get into the highest weight class possible, as fast as possible, while still being fairly lean and protecting the joints as much as possible.
• Get the bulk of your training volume from accessory lifts for all major muscle groups, with sets of 6-15 reps, training each muscle/movement 2-3 times per week for 4-6 sets (or 40-70 total reps) per session.
• Periodization isn’t overly important for hypertrophy, but varying your training a bit simply helps keep workouts feeling fresh.
• Split your training into bulking and cutting phases. This generally allows you to gain muscle at a faster overall rate than attempting to gain it with minimal body fat fluctuations.
• A major reason to make your training more “bodybuilding-centric” during this [intermediate] phase is that bodybuilding-style training has an astonishingly low injury rate.
• Remember the importance of maintaining joint health over the long haul.
• You can absolutely build a ton of muscle doing more heavy powerlifting-specific training as long as you’re doing enough sets.
• Training volume is the #1 driver of hypertrophy.
• There’s actually a surprising amount of neural coordination that goes into lifting really heavy stuff.
• Periodization plays a larger role in advanced, purely strength-focused training, as it contributes more to strength development than muscle hypertrophy.
• Proper nutrition, sufficient sleep, and stress management all play just as big of a role as proper training, if not bigger. You don’t get stronger in the gym.
• Most people don’t stop to consider this basic fact. At the end of a workout, you’ve accumulated some fatigue and you’re weaker than when you walked into the gym. You get stronger outside the gym.
• It’s not the training itself that makes you bigger and stronger. It’s how your body RESPONDS to the training that makes you bigger and stronger.
• Your body adapts by responding to what it perceives to be a threat.
• Two of the most important threats that keep your body from responding well to training are lack of sleep and chronic life stress, such as a stressful job, a bad relationship, financial worries, etc.
• Chronic stress literally doubles how long it takes you to recover from lifting.