3-Bullet Summary
You’ll benefit more from reading the article the whole way through. But, if you’re pressed for time, here’s a condensed version of What Is Resistance Training? How to Transform Your Body Fast:
- When people ask ‘what is resistance training?’ they’re bombarded with loads of unspecific results.
- These unspecific results can quickly be boiled down into a simple definition: resistance training is using time-tested resistance exercises, with safe technique, to take your muscles through a full range of motion until the near or at complete muscular failure.
- Understanding the four key pillars of this definition — resistance exercises, safe technique, full range of motion and near to complete muscular failure — is the shortcut to answering the ‘what is resistance training’ question and cutting through all the BS surrounding resistance training.
What Does ‘Go to the Gym’ Even Mean?
You’ve decided that it’s time to change your life forever.
No more insecurity or personal doubt; you’re going to start the journey towards becoming your ideal self: lean, defined and muscular.
However, your dreams are placed on hold because you’re instantly faced with a problem.
You don’t know where to start.
You’ve heard before that you should ‘go to the gym’ if you want to get in shape, but you don’t know what that even means. Get on the treadmill? Stretch in the corner? Attend a class run by personal trainers that all the yoga Mums go to?
You’re confused. So, you’ve started searching for answers online. You stumble across articles and videos telling you how to build muscle and lose fat, and they all seem to point in one particular direction.
Resistance training.
But what is resistance training? How do you even get started? One article tells you to do wall push-ups, the other to use resistance bands. Which one’s right?
So many questions; so few clear answers.
Introduction
“What is resistance training?”
This is the exact question I asked myself at the end of sixth form.
Let me explain.
You see, I was very insecure with my appearance. I’d stare at myself in the mirror with disgust. It turns out that eating Doritos for lunch and sitting at a chair studying for 8 hours per day hadn’t positively impacted my body composition.
So, like most people at one point in their lives I wanted to change the way I looked, desperately. This then led me down the rabbit hole of endless Google searches and YouTube videos for ‘how to build muscle and lose fat’, all of which told me to ‘go to the gym’.
To cut a long story short, I soon realised that this meant resistance training, not cardio or weird ab exercises. So, I then went on a journey to answer the very question you’re trying to get an answer for today: what is resistance training?
I sifted through masses of information (scientific and random internet nonsense), tried a whole bunch of resistance training programmes, and, inevitably, picked up a load of injuries. After two years, though, I developed a pretty solid understanding of what resistance training is. Once I finally grasped what I needed to do, I finally started making progress and seeing visual improvements in my physique. I dropped a lot of bodyfat, and gained a decent amount of strength.
I’m not a professional bodybuilder or strength coach. Nor am I (yet) a qualified personal trainer. But, if you’re someone who’s starting their resistance training journey and wants to reap the benefits that a healthy body has on all aspects of life (grades, health, performance, etc.), then I can certainly help you by going through the basics I wished someone had taught me.
So, let’s get down to business.
What is Resistance Training?
What is resistance training?
A lot of different media voices and content creators attempt to answer this question by showing you things to do. For example, you may have been told that resistance training involves pumping dumbbells or swinging kettlebells. Others might have told you that resistance training is lifting weights.
Technically, both aren’t wrong. Pumping dumbbells, swinging kettlebells and lifting weights are all valid examples of resistance training. But, these example still don’t give us specific advice. For example, they don’t tell us about how to pump dumbbells, swing kettlebells or lift weights. So, let’s clear this mess up with a definition, which we’ll then break down in simple terms.
Resistance training (for the purposes of building muscle and reaping its benefits on health and performance) involves using time-tested resistance exercises, with safe technique, to take your muscles through a full range of motion until near or at complete muscular failure.
Key Term 1) Time-Tested Resistance Exercises
Resistance exercises are essentially the movement patterns you take your body through under load in order to stretch, contract and grow your muscles.
For example, if you place your arm directly out in front of you with a locked elbow, drive your elbow back behind your torso, pause, and bring it out in front of you again, you’re performing a horizontal pushing movement. If you loaded this movement, like when doing a push-up, you’d be resistance training the muscles involved in horizontal pushes, such as the pectorals (chest), front deltoids (front heads of the shoulders) and triceps.
Therefore, loading movement patterns is essentially the main principle underlying resistance training. In the example above with the push-up, loading took the form of bodyweight under the force of gravity. But, there are many other tools at your disposal:
- Barbells
- Dumbbells
- Kettlebells
- Bodyweight
- Weight-training machines
- Resistance bands
- Sandbags
- A log from the woods
- Your dog (be careful, though)
All are great (except the last one). However, just remember that none are special because they’re all serving one purpose: to load a movement pattern.
Before moving on, there’s one more component of this key term we must address: time-tested.
See, before the advent of social media, resistance training was very simple. The exercises that were popular were safe, effective and built a lot of great physiques. I’m talking about basic variations of bench presses, overhead presses, dips, squats, lunges, deadlifts, rows and pull ups/pulldowns.
However, when social media arrived and people suddenly wanted to do whatever it would take to grow a big Instagram following, a lot of fundamental resistance exercises were quickly overshadowed by trendy (ineffective) ones.
Again, with the limited space in this article, being able to list all the good exercises you should do is impossible. So, to cut straight to the chase, this means that we need a filter to pass resistance exercises through. When assessing a resistance exercise to see whether it’s time-tested and effective, I like to answer these 3 questions:
- “Is this exercise safe and stable?” — The best resistance training exercises will have your feet firmly planted on flat ground and not put you at funny angles.
- “Do smart, strong people use these exercises?” — Some good sources of information include Jeff Nippard, Jeremy Ethier, Sean Nalewanyj, Layne Norton, Mike Matthews and Polarity Fitness. If these guys don’t have a tutorial on a resistance exercise, it’s probably not a good one.
- “Would people look at me like I’m an idiot if I did this exercise” — This one’s probably the best question. If you went into a gym and performed an exercise, if people would look at you as though you’re an alien, then that exercise definitely originated from TikTok.
Key Term 2) Safe Technique
Resistance exercises are great. If you do them right, then they can give your muscles an excellent stimulus to grow.
But how do you do them right?
Great question. Suffice to say, I won’t have enough space in this guide to tell/show you how to perform every resistance exercise on earth safely. I can, however, give you some general pointers that apply to every exercise you perform.
First, and perhaps most important, safe technique is technique that works for your body and causes you no pain. Every human being is built differently, meaning how we setup and perform resistance exercises will differ.
My favourite example is the squat. People with longer femurs (i.e., thigh bones), automatically lean further forward during the squat than people with shorter femurs. This is because, to keep the bar over the middle of the foot and balanced, the hips of someone with long femurs must shoot far back, causing forward lean to literally prevent the tall squatter from falling over.
Squatting is just one example. Many other exercises are impacted by anthropometry (i.e., how we’re built). Therefore, safe technique will differ from person to person. To find what works for your build, you simply must practice. Experiment with different setups for each exercise you perform until you find the Goldilocks zone.
The second aspect of safe technique is selecting an appropriate load. If you perform a resistance exercise with a weight that’s too heavy, you’ll skyrocket your injury risk1. (Read that again.)
One way to assess whether a load is too heavy, which is also the third component of safe technique, is via tempo. Tempo basically means the speed at which you perform an exercise.
When on the eccentric portion of the movement (i.e., the muscle is stretching and you’re ‘lowering’ it), you should always have full control. This means no divebombing or dropping of the load. 2–3 seconds of lowering for every rep of an exercise is a good guideline. When on the concentric (i.e., the muscle is contracting), you should be explosive but tight. This means you’re not slamming or throwing the weight you’re lifting around and losing stability.
The other way to assess whether a load is too heavy, which is also the final component of safe technique and the next key term we must unpack, is whether you’re using a…
Key Term 3) Full Range of Motion
Range of motion (ROM) refers to how far a muscle can stretch during a resistance exercise. Depending on your build and flexibility, ROM varies. This means that some people will be able to go deeper in whichever exercise they’re performing than others.
However, everybody has a full ROM that they can take their muscles through. In essence, everybody has a maximum stretching point they can take their muscle to safely and without pain. The closer you get to your maximum stretching point and the deeper into your full ROM that you go, the better. This is basically because deep stretches under load cause more muscle growth than ‘partial’ stretches under load (up to 2.6× more, in fact)2.
Let me give you a practical example to demonstrate full ROM in action.
Imagine you’re performing the barbell bench press. This resistance exercise is basically an inverted push-up performed whilst lying on a bench, with a barbell acting as resistance. Therefore, it’s going to mainly target the pectorals (chest), front deltoids (front heads of the shoulders) and triceps, like with a push-up.
A full ROM on the barbell bench press, and, thus, for your pectorals, front deltoids and triceps during the barbell bench press, involves you bringing the bar down to your chest, touching it, and completely locking out the elbows on the way up. Therefore, to resistance train using the barbell bench press properly, for every rep you’re going to touch your chest and lock your elbows.
I cannot understate the importance of this principle. Taking your muscle through a full ROM not only yields better muscle gains, but also improves flexibility3, and, when combined with the two previous key terms, pretty much eliminates your risk of injury.
At times in your journey, you’ll be tempted to cut ROM to chase strength. However, take it from me, this is counterintuitive to achieving your dream physique. To get a muscle to grow, you need to challenge it as much as possible. A full stretch and contraction will always be more challenging than a partial stretch or contraction. Therefore making sure to perform each rep properly will secure you more gains in less time.
Key Term 4) The Point of Near to Complete Muscular Failure
The final key term we’ll be covering in this introduction to resistance training is failure.
In life, we’re taught that failure is bad. We fear doing things that we’ll suck at. I disagree with this statement, as failure causes us to grow.
This principle is perhaps most applicable in the context of resistance training.
See, when we perform a set of a resistance training exercise, we do so for a prescribed number of reps (e.g., 1 set of 8–10 reps). The more reps we perform within a set and the closer we get to our target rep/rep range, the harder those reps get. These reps get harder because our muscles are fatiguing (i.e., having to produce more force than usual and work hard to stop the resistance from beating us), and we’re getting close to failure — the point at which we can no longer complete a rep of a resistance training exercise with safe technique.
As muscles fatigue and approach failure, however, something beautiful happens: they produce a signal.
What is this signal? It’s the growth signal!
What does this mean? Our muscles are going to get bigger and stronger (so long as we recover properly)!
The reason the body works in this way is rooted in evolution. The core purpose of a human being is to survive long enough to reproduce and raise a new generation. This means that the body does everything it can to keep you alive.
Now, your muscles don’t actually know what you just lifted in your resistance training session. To them, that set of squats you just performed could’ve been a tiger attack. (Believe me, it’ll feel like it.) But, because you’ve exposed your muscles to a survival threat, and the body wants to keep you alive, it does whatever it can to give you protection for a similar attack in the future and increase your chances of survival. This protection comes in the form of more muscle tissue to make lifting that same weight in the future less challenging.
Because bigger muscles are stronger muscles, this means that you’re going to have to increase the load you expose your muscles to throughout your resistance training journey. You typically do this with more reps or weight than you lifted last time.
This constant cycle (train to near or complete muscular failure -> recover -> build new muscle tissue -> repeat) is the principle of progressive overload: the key to your dream physique.
Before we finish this section off and conclude this guide, though, let’s do a quick rewind.
You may recall that the word ‘near’ appeared in the title of this section. It’s there because you don’t have to go all the way to muscular failure to ignite the signal for muscle growth and facilitate progressive overload. Studies have shown that being 1–3 reps shy of complete failure produces similar muscle hypertrophy (i.e., growth) outcomes to going all the way to failure4.
Because complete failure is so taxing, I’d recommend sticking with these guidelines. Rather than take every movement you do all the way to failure, leave 1–3 reps in the tank. You’ll see amazing results at a fraction of the recovery cost.
Final Thoughts: What Is Resistance Training?
Resistance training is perhaps the most important element in any personal transformation.
Not many pursuits enable you to sculpt your body, receive a whole bunch of performance benefits and eat more!
However, getting a simple answer to the question, ‘what is resistance training?’ can prove to be really challenging.
Fortunately, today, we’ve answered this question and broken down all the key components of what proper resistance training is. Specifically, we’ve learned that resistance training boils down to picking resistance training exercises, and, with safe technique, using them for multiple repetitions to go through a full range of motion until near or at complete muscular failure.
Armed with this knowledge, you’ll be able to attack your resistance training effectively and see fast results.
But, there remains one question. If we know why we’re resistance training and what it is, how do we do it?
That, my friend, is what we’re going to be covering really soon. I’ll be walking you through how to create a resistance training programme, as well as providing a free one that you can get started with immediately. (You can’t say I don’t care for you, right?)
In the meantime, why not pick up your *free* copy of The 10 Secrets of Strong Students? In it, you’ll uncover 10 science-based tips about how to optimise your student lifestyle, study more effectively and get better grades. Not a bad deal, if you ask me!
Additionally, why not hit one of the buttons below and share this article with a friend? If you get them hyped up to start resistance training and introduce them to it via this article, then you could start going to the gym with them and growing together! (How wholesome!)
Right, time to go knock out some push-ups — with safe technique, through a full range of motion and near to failure, of course.
Stay Strong,
Sam.
Founder, Strong Students.
