Strength Training
Building muscular strength will increase your quality of life. With more lean muscle mass, injury rates decrease and your body’s ability to complete physical tasks with ease becomes limitless. When one sets a goal of increasing strength, certain variables need to be utilized appropriately to increase strength specific to the goal. Sets, repetitions, weight, tempo and rest periods can all be used to increase muscular strength, power, hypertrophy (muscle size increase), and endurance.
For any strength exercise, the table will be applied. If the goal is to increase muscular endurance for cycling using squats, the person would be working to increase muscular endurance. More repetitions with lighter weight and shorter rest periods will be the most appropriate. If the person wanted to specifically increase power, then lifting a moderate heavy weight with faster tempo and a longer rest period would help get to the goal.
The strength training continuum is a great tool and should be applied for every strength exercise to ensure the type of work is specific to the goal.
