Increasing your strength will depend a lot on the muscles you have. If you need to increase your strength, you will need to focus on your muscles.

Let’s find out how you can increase your strength by focusing on the muscles.

Lift heavy

To increase your strength, you will need to lift heavy. Here, heavy mains greater than 90% of your one rep max. It will help you by using high threshold motor units. The muscle fibers associated with such motor units have the highest potential for increasing your strength. Lifting the maximum is important in case of multi joint exercises such as squats, presses, deadlifts and pulls. To recruit faster twitch muscle fibers, you will need to move the heavy weight as fast as possible.

Reduce the volume

A very common practice for building more muscle and strength is to use 5×5, which means you perform five sets of five reps. but if you are focusing more on strength, doing 2 to 3 sets will help you more. Your focus should be less on the volume but on moving the weight quickly because that will improve your strength even though it may not increase your muscle mass. Also reducing the number of training sessions in a week will help you to recover better during two strength focus training sessions.

Contrast training

Contrast training can help you to build more strength. It uses heavy strength training with polymetric training in a single workout. This method focuses on the physiological mechanism called as post activation potentiation. In this method, you start your workout with a heavy strength training exercise which you can do for five rep max. Then you take a break for 3 to 10 minutes and perform a similar polymetric exercise for about 5 to 10 reps. For example, you can do back squats and then tuck jumps. This method will help you to develop more strength and power.

Focus on the weak links

If you want to increase your strength, it is very important that you focus on the weak links. Prime movers i.e. pecs, quadriceps, glutes, deltoids, lats, hamstrings etc. are the major muscle groups which are necessary for traditional exercises. You need to focus on the behind the scene muscles which include rotator cuff, serratus anterior gluteus medius, abdominals etc. If you include exercises to strengthen these muscles, will help you by reducing muscle imbalance and will also reduce your risk of injury. If you are able to use these muscles and strengthen them, you’ll be able to increase your strength tremendously.

Use more simple strength training

Simply using more simple strength training will help you to increase your strength. Keep your strength training programs very simple. Fine stable ground and focus on proper form while performing strength training exercises instead of trying to show off with a new exercise. Rather than that, you can take a look at how much recovery period you are allowing so that you are recovering properly. It is important because it will fuel your progress. Without that, you might simply be wasting your time on something which does nothing towards your goal of increasing your strength. Fine this simple strength workout routine for yourself and follow it for at least three months and then change it after taking the right suggestions from the right expert.

References

1. Maximum Strength
2. Resistance training “ health benefits
3. Resistance training for strength: effect of number of sets and contraction speed.