Strength Training

We have an occasionally strained relationship with strength training research. On the one hand, it’s useful to check that one isn’t, to use a scientific term, pulling one’s claims out of one’s arse. On the other, it can sometimes feel like research merely validates things we’ve been doing forever. Some personal trainers go so far as to mock strength training researchers as “exercise historians rather than exercise scientists.”

But as always, the truth is in the middle. While
it’s not necessary to produce ten peer-reviewed studies every time you want to
bench press, it is important to try and stay ahead of the curve.

With that in mind, here are three pieces of strength
training research that may surprise you.

1 – Training The Lower Body With High Reps Makes The Upper Body Bigger and Stronger

On the surface this makes little sense. Surely
you train biceps to get bigger biceps, you train calves to get bigger calves.
If you want a bigger back you wouldn’t start doing calf raises, would you?

Well, researchers took 20 trained men and split
them into groups.

One group did high intensity training for both
the upper and lower body. In strength training research, “intensity” refers
solely to how heavy you are lifting relative to your maximum. So this group
stuck solely to heavy weights, around 90% of their max, for sets of 4-5 reps.

The other group used mixed intensity. Their
upper body lifts were still in the 4-5 range, while their lower body exercises
were much lighter, around 65% of their max for about 12 reps.

The second group fared much better. They made
far better progress in terms of strength, power output, muscle gain and fat
loss.

Why did this work? We could speculate that the
higher rep ranges on the lower body movements led to greater release of growth
hormone. Another possibility is that their recovery was better. Heavy lower
body lifting is extremely fatiguing on the nervous system. We can only speculate.
But for now it seems like higher rep leg work is the way forward.

2 – Training One Side of The Body Makes The Other Side Stronger Too

Injuries are incredibly frustrating. You know
how it is when you’re making great strides and suddenly slip on the ice or fall
down the stairs or get a paint can to the face puts you out of action (all of
these examples are drawn from Home Alone, if you hadn’t guessed already). But
what if you could still train while injured? Well you can. And even better, it
will still help the injured area, even if you don’t train it specifically.

It’s called the crossover effect. Let’s say you
break your left wrist and can’t hold a dumbbell for six weeks. If you continue
to train your right side as normal, the injured side will continue to make
strength gains, or at the very least preserve your current strength and muscle
mass. You can enhance this effect by doing “imagined contractions” on the
injured side. Literally imagining the muscles of the injured side mirroring the
non-injured side’s movement will help preserve muscle mass and strength. No
brain no gain.

3 – Decline Bench Pressing Works Your Upper Chest

This seems like gym heresy, surely incline
pressing trains the upper chest while decline works the lower part. This has been
repeated as strength training fact since time immemorial, or at least since
Arnie was heaving shit around in the 60’s. But what happened when they actually
tested it?

15 men were wired up while bench pressing to
test electrical activity in their muscles. It turns out that while incline
presses induced a tiny bit more upper chest activity on the concentric phase
(while the weight is moving away from the body), decline bench pressing induced
more stimulation on the lowering phase, which is in fact the most productive
part of the lift. What’s more; decline bench presses blew inclines out of the
water in terms of total pec recruitment.

Does this mean you should never bench press? Of course not. But considering decline pressing has fallen out of favour, maybe it’s time to put it back in rotation.