From Desk to Dumbbell: Mastering Strength Training Amidst Work Challenges
Introduction
Importance of strength training
What comes to mind when you think about strength training?
An absolute beast of a human lifting an absurd amount of weight?
Screaming and shouting whilst someone is training?
A ram-packed, testosterone-filled gym?
Strength training is what it says on the tin: training to be strong(er). Strength is relative to the person. For an 80-year-old lady, being strong could be lifting a case of tins overhead; for a 22-year-old man, it may be being able to do five pull-ups. For you, it might be a mixture of things. Being strong translates to outside the gym more than inside; you need strength for most tasks in life.
Strength training helps facilitate the ability to do demanding tasks in life and improve body function and body structure (physique). You may be aware that strength training increases the size and strength of the muscle. It also helps improve the density and strength of your bones, which reduces the likelihood of breaks and arthritis, as well as improving the strength of your tendons and ligaments, which are found around your joints.
Struggles of balancing work and training
Life gets more complex as you get older due to different things such as family, work, responsibilities and all the other fun stuff of being an adult. With most of my online coaching clients, the main issue they face when trying to get into the gym is fitting it around their work schedule.
They find that they need more time to train when work has finished. This may be a similar feeling for you, too. It's not easy building up the motivation to train at 18:00 along with the rest of the 9-5 working world who also want to improve their strength.
This article aims to help give you ideas and tips to help you improve your strength and build a routine around your working life that does not wear you down as you progress through the week.
Set the foundation
Assessing your strength
Before getting into the nitty gritty of building your routine around work, let's discuss how you can find out your current level of strengths and how you can use these markers to see if you are progressing objectively.
Being strong does not mean you have to be able to lift a car over your head. So, your way of assessing your strength does not require you to lift an extremely heavy load. You can use weights to determine your strength, but you would need to have some experienat to ensure that you are lifting with good technique, queue which will allow you to exert your strength best, as a lack of technical ability can limit how much weight you can lift.
Here are examples of some movements you can do to assess your strength:
Push-ups- How many full-body or kneeling push-ups can you do?
20% body weight squat till failure- Grab a weight that is 20% of your body weight and see how many squats you can do until you can not do any more.
Pull-ups/chin-ups- How many pull-ups or chin-ups can you do (If you can do ten, then look to add a 5kg resistance and try again).
Hollow hold- How long can you hold the hollow hold position?
Single-leg calf raises- How many single-leg calf raises can you do?
All these movements require a level of strength. They are not the most glamorous movements you can do, but they all require good levels of strength and are easy to perform to see roughly what your body can do.
Identifying your goals
Next, you would like to identify what you want to improve. I always recommend online clients be clear and specific on their goals as it will be the main point of motivation when motivation is fleeting. The difference maker between you and achieving your goal is if you build a connection to it.
The goal must mean something to you rather than a vague goal of ‘I want to lose fat and get strong’. There is no ‘why’ behind this goal.
Dive deeper into this goal
why do you want to lose fat?
why do you want to get strong?
what do you want to be strong for?
what will fat loss help you with?
Being specific with your goal helps build that internal buy-in to what you are doing rather than having external motivators like the scale weight or pictures.
When setting these goals, you should look to phase them at different stages rather than trying to achieve everything simultaneously. For example, if you struggle to make it to the gym, that should be your first focal point before getting nutrition right, getting gym clothes, and buying supplements. From my experience, when people try to do too much at once, they start well, but it lasts up to a month.
Sticking with the theme of strength, an example goal could be to perform five full-body push-ups within the next four months, and the reason behind this goal could be that you have never been able to do push-ups before, and you have always wanted to.
Each highlighted point specifies why that goal will get you further than a generic one. So that you know, I did not make the aim to be able to do ten push-ups because it is not realistic. It's all well and good wanting to achieve 10, but what can you achieve in that time frame?
Setting an unrealistic goal with an unrealistic time frame can lead you to disappointment when you inevitably fall short of the goal. Using the motivation to achieve a realistic goal pushes you to keep progressing and improving.
Planning your routine
Identifying your week's layout
Once you have assessed your current level of strength and created a goal you want to achieve, you can now look at how you will fit these sessions into your working week. Assuming you work Monday to Friday , you can have a mixture of sessions within the week and on the weekend.
When setting sessions, I advocate 2 to 3 sessions a week, With four sessions a week being the ideal.
Office worker
If you are in the office five days a week, the only realistic session you can do is before or after work and on a weekend.
*TBW= Train Before Work *TAW= Train After Work
Work From Home (WFH)
When you work from home, you have much more freedom than you can train. I know some people reading this are not working the whole 8 hours when they are working from home. I am not encouraging it, but if you are sitting around with minimal to do, you might as well get a session in. I bet it is better to train and get it done rather than wait till the evening, which can make it seem like a chore.
You may think that you can’t do this because you won't have enough time, but then that comes down to how much time you spend in the gym and what your session involves—in the decide your training split and building split and building your session.
WFH=Work From Home TBW= Train Before Work TAW= Train After Work TDW= Train During Work
Client example
A Prime example of someone working a busy job and struggling to train was Martyna. She worked shift work as a bus driver, working 12-hour shifts at times, morning and evening starts, and working on the weekend.
Martyna came to me because she knew she needed a change and was willing to sacrifice some time on her days off or sometime before starting her shift to do a session. We went through many lifts as Martyna's goal was more physique focus rather than strength, but she saw her strength fly up, especially around the hip thrust.
When we first started, she was just about doing 50 kg for ten reps; towards the end of our time together, Martyna was hip thrusting 120 kg for 12 reps and three sets. How did we do this? Weekly increments in weights alongside training over lower body movements have a knock-on effect on her hip thrusts.
We did not increase every session as there were times when Martyna would turn up, and she wasn't mentally clocked in or had a rough night and wasn’t feeling strong that day. But she still turned up and moved, which, at the start of the session, felt like a chore, but by the end of it, she felt great and was happy she came in the first place. Alongside the gains in her strength, she made incredible physical changes.
Deciding your split
Your training split is how you train your body; there are different splits you can do. There is no wrong split, but you want the training style to be manageable and suitable to your lifestyle. Each training split has pros and cons, and you need to decide which training style works best for you.
Bodybuilder split
This training involves focusing on specific muscle groups each session i.e. a c, i.e. a chest day, a back day, a shoulders and arms day,: An excellent means to focus on muscle groups and you can see a lot of growth in the the muscles.
Con: If you can not train much in the gym, hitting all your muscles becomes hard, and you start to build significant imbalances.
Upper and lower split
This split focuses on training the full upper body on one day and the full lower body on another day. You can bias specific muscles each day if you want more development in a particular area.
Pro: You can see good physique and strength gains as you can tailor the session to be compound/big lifts predominantly.
Con: As you train big muscle sections, you can have soreness for extended periods, which you may find very uncomfortable.
Full body split
This split is designed for you to train the whole body each time you go to the gym. Similar to the upper and lower split, you can bias a specific part of the body if you want to develop it more, i.e. if you're going to grow your legs, then you can put in more lower body movements in comparison to the upper body.
Pro: Similar to the upper and lower split, this is a great means to train if you are limited on time and see significant increases in your strength, as the session can be structured to have more compound lifts.
Con: You need a level of training experience to do full body sessions as the intensity can be high, and there needs to be a level of movement competency to perform the lifts safely whilst fatigued.
Push, pull, legs split.
This training split focuses on specific movement patterns to create the session. For push sessions, you perform movements that follow a pushing pattern (bench press, squat, deadlift, etc). For pull sessions, you perform movements that involve pulling (barbell row, lat pull down, tricep extension, leg curl, etc.). And for legs, it is what it says on the tin.
Pro: This training style allows you to work compound movements still and add isolation exercises to get a good amount of strength work and physique gains.
Con: This training style requires you to train six days a week, which may only be doable for some if you are working and have other responsibilities outside of work, such as a family or someone to look after.
Building your session
Once you have decided what training split works best for you or if you would like to try it out, the next phase is for you to build your session. When designing your session, you do not have to add every exercise you can think of; the session does not have to be over an hour.
Your Working Warm-up
Importance of a warm-up
I have always advocated for having a warm-up or some form of a warm-up routine in your training session. Many people I come across in commercial gyms say that they do not have time for a warm-up, but they need to fully understand why a warm-up is crucial and how you can effectively warm up in a time-effective manner.
A warm-up is a means to prepare your body for the activity or session you are about to do. A couple of arm and leg swings are not an effective warm-up as you are not increasing the blood flow to the muscles, you are not preparing the tendons to take on a load, and you are not getting the central nervous system primed and ready for the upcoming hour of work.
A warm-up should:
Increase heart rate
Increase body temperature
Make muscles pliable
Increase breathing rate
It does not have to do all of these to an extreme extent as that will take a longer time, and as we are both aware, time is
of the essence.
Time-effective warm-up example
Here is an example of a time-effective warm-up I like my online clients to do before they start their session.
Increase heart rate: 3 min ride on a bike or fast walk on the treadmill for 3 mins
Increase muscle pliability: World's greatest stretch 8es, quadruped T-Spine reach through x8es
Prime nervous system: Pogos x20
This warm-up takes around 5-6 minutes to complete. If you walk to the gym and don’t need the pulse raiser, it will take roughly 3 minutes to complete. They do three movements that target the whole body and can get into their session.
When setting up your warm-up, look at effective movements you can do and fit them into the categories of pulse raiser, increased muscle flexibility, and nervous system primer.
*All movements are hyperlinked
Main Session
Your strength assessment should help you decide what your main lifts are, as well as help you better understand what other areas you may want to focus on to help you achieve your goal.
Your main lift will be your heavy work to keep the reps and sets for this low; 1-3 sets x 3-6 reps is fine. If you are new to training, you can aim for a higher rep range of 8-15, as you can still achieve strength gains alongside improving your technique by repeating the movement.
Your main lift does not have to be a compound movement like a squat, deadlift, or bench press. Strength is your ability to exert force against resistance. Yes, you can lift much more weight and exert high force when doing a compound movement, but you do not have to include them in your session if you don’t want to.
When programming for online clients, I include some form of compound lifts, and then we cycle through periods where they have them and periods when they don’t, and they still see significant gains in strength.
Example
Someone who wants to improve their leg strength because they can not kick the ball as far as their teammates on their local football team.
This person has tried doing squats and deadlifts to help, but they do not like the movement and feel awkward on the body. Instead, they can make the Bulgarian split squat their main movement in the session and then work on other exercises that will help specifically focus on strengthening the quads, hamstrings, and glutes.
When deciding what your other exercises should be (accessory lifts), you can perform exercises that will help improve your main, exercises that will help with any niggles and aches, and exercises that will increase the size of particular body parts purely for physique purposes. How many exercises for each component is entirely up to you, and you can go through phases where you bias one section more than the other.
Time effective
Earlier in this article about strength training, I mentioned that your session does not need to be an hour long. Just because you are in the gym for 60 minutes does not mean you get a more effective load through your muscles.
Being a working individual is a challenging task; therefore, why make things harder for yourself by spending hours in the gym? 45-60 minutes is the ideal amount of time you need to spend in the gym; the minimum I recommend is 30 mins.
Making your session time effective will make training much more enjoyable. What I mean by having a time-effective training session is to have movements in your session that will either directly improve your strength goal or work on an area you want to improve.
Following this structure will allow you to have 4-5 exercises within your session that would not take up more than an hour.
Key focal points of the session
Keep the focus on the main lift.
Work at a high intensity when lifting and rest when you are meant to.
Make sure the form and technique are correct before increasing weight.
Don’t be in the gym for hours on end.
Recovery & Rest
Importance of Rest
Resting is a vital part of your strength training journey. When you rest, you allow your body to adapt and recover from the stress placed on it during your training session. Step away from the mindset of feeling like you are doing nothing when you are resting. You may not be doing much physically, but physiologically, your body is putting in a shift. I recommend your rest periods fall between 90-130 seconds, but you can rest longer if necessary!
Alongside your recovery, you should focus on your nutrition and ensure that you consume adequate protein throughout. A general rule of thumb is to consume 0.7-1g protein per pound of body weight.
Example
If you weigh 170 pounds, you should aim to consume 119-170 grams of protein daily. If you struggle to hit 170 grams daily, you should always have a threshold between which you fall.
Recovery strategies
People tend to overcomplicate recovery and think they need to invest money into massage guns, ice baths, bath salts, etc. However, the best strategy for recovery falls under three pillars.
Sleep
Eat
Hydrate
It's important to remember that blood carries oxygen and nutrients that help muscles function and develop. When you sleep, your body enters a stage of recovery, not just for the muscles but also for the brain. Your blood is circulated to areas that need more focus than when you are awake because the muscles ring during the day, which will require more blood flow.
Consuming good levels of carbs and proteins will help with muscle growth and development. Protein aids the muscle repair and building process, while carbohydrates help supply the body with energy to function in daily activities.
You want to remain hydrated as water carries oxygen, which is transported around the body via blood circulation to the muscles. A lack of water in the system in severe, dehydrated cases can lead to catabolism, anabolic resistance, and muscle wasting, as well as improved muscle contractile capacity (Lorenzo et al., 2019)
Things To Remember
Form/Movement Competency
Strength is the name of the game, and you want to improve on the metrics you have set for yourself. But one crucial aspect that should be noticed in your form when lifting form is to see massive improvements in your strength by being at the movement.
Muscular coordination has been linked to improvements in strength due to the body working on an intramuscular level to contract at the right time and allow the right muscles to work when performing a lift. A study by Pichardo et al. (2019) looked at strength metrics among adolescent males and found a correlation between strength increase and being a competent mover. You most likely are not an adolescent but the same, but the same can be true for you,ovement competency to a high standard and seeing increases in your strength movements.
Progressive overload
Going to the gym and working on a movement to help you get strong is all good. But after a while, your body gets used to the movement, and there w will be no need for it to adapt and change anymore because it knows it can handle the weight/movement.
This is where you want to introduce progressive overload. Progressive overload is where you gradually increase the demand for an exercise over time. This could be done by performing more reps and sets or increasing the overall weight lifted. Since you have a time restriction, I would suggest you focus your progressive overload on the increase in weight and increase in reps (within the recommended ranges)
You can increase weight weekly or biweekly, with increases occurring at a 2.5-5kg increment. You will find that this may only sometimes be the, and that tha,t is okay if you feel you can not increase the, lookk to increase the oveny reps you are doing. Aim for the upper end of the rep scheme, and once you can do that, reduce the sets, increase the weight and see how you do.
It is essential to remember that in some sessions, your weights will fly up; there are other sessions where your working set will feel like it is the heaviest thing you have lifted in your life. If that is the case, feel free to decrease the weights for that session or take a longer rest period to allow your body to recover?
Conclusion
Key point recap
Being a full-time working adult is hard enough; there is no need for your training to become a chore when it should be a tool to help elevate you to do more, move better, and live healthier. Proteins and carbohydrates will be two key elements to aid your process of getting stronger and fuel your body for not just your sessions but also everyday life.
You can figure out what you want to improve and focus solely on that rather than trying to tie in 3+ oth, which other, which makes more complicated than needed.
Figure out what it is you want to get stronger at.
Decide how many days you can commit to achieving this.
Decide your training split.
Keep the focus on your form and progressively overload weekly or biweekly.
Rest and recover on the days you are not training.
Call To Action
Discover your goal, design your session, break down your weekly structure and then email me to discuss your plan in a free consultation.
I hope this helped,
Myles!
