How To Get Strong (Simply Explained)

Summary

In this engaging video, Mitchell Hooper breaks down the essentials of strength training in a simple and relatable manner. He compares the brain to a general making strategic decisions for sending messages to the muscles, akin to commanding troops in battle. Emphasizing the role of the nervous system, he highlights the importance of both the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems in recovery, advocating for good sleep, stress management, and nutrition. Mitchell also delves into the significance of heavy lifting for building strength, the need for neural adaptations, and the importance of varied training cycles. He wraps up with practical tips for structuring training routines effectively to maximize strength gains while preventing burnout.

Highlights

• Understanding strength starts with how your brain communicates with your muscles. 🚗🧠
• Proper recovery involves a cooler, dark room and avoiding screens before bedtime. 🛌📵
• Training heavy and with high intensity is key to recruiting all motor units for strength. 💪
• Regularly change your workout routine to keep making progress and avoid burnout. 🔄
• Fundamental movements are essential: Push, pull, carry, overhead press, hinge, and squat! 🏋️‍♀️

Key Takeaways

• Your brain commands your muscles like a general leading troops into battle. 🏋️‍♂️
• Balance your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems for optimal recovery. 💤
• Heavy lifting is crucial for strength, but switch up your training routine to avoid burnout! 🔄

Overview

Getting strong isn't just about lifting weights — it's a strategic game involving your brain and muscles. Mitchell Hooper compares this process to a general deciding which troops to send into battle, illustrating the complex but fascinating dynamics of strength building. The brain’s role in selecting muscle groups, or 'motor units', for different tasks is crucial to maximizing strength potential.

Recovery is often an unsung hero in the journey to getting stronger. Hooper emphasizes the importance of balancing the body's nervous systems — the sympathetic ('fight or flight') and parasympathetic ('rest and digest'). This balance is achieved through proper sleep, stress management, and nutrition. Creating an environment conducive to recovery, such as a cool, dark bedroom devoid of screens, is highlighted as essential.

Training effectively is about more than just lifting heavy weights. Hooper encourages viewers to focus on training volume, load variations, and structured breaks to avoid burnout. A well-rounded strength program should incorporate fundamental movements and adapt over time. Mitchell also notes the importance of adjusting your plan based on experience and goals to continue progressing safely and effectively.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Getting Strong The chapter 'Introduction to Getting Strong' explains that the process of getting strong may seem complex but can be simplified by understanding the role of the brain. The brain is depicted as the source of all commands sent to the body, similar to an ignition key necessary for starting a car. Just as a car needs the gas pedal to move, the body relies on brain signals to initiate and perform physical actions.
• 00:30 - 01:30: The Brain and Motor Units The chapter discusses how the brain controls motor functions differently than a centralized system, like a car with wheels. Instead of sending signals to all muscles simultaneously, which would cause spasms, the brain selectively activates groups of muscles, similar to a general choosing the right group of soldiers for battle. This selective activation ensures effective and precise movements.
• 01:30 - 03:00: Nervous System and Recovery The chapter titled 'Nervous System and Recovery' delves into the role of the brain in coordinating movement through motor units. It explains that the brain doesn’t have specific motor units for individual muscles like the bicep or quad. Instead, it utilizes a learning process to master specific movements such as bicep flexion, knee extension, and hip extension. This learning enables the brain to effectively choose the right muscle groups needed for strength exertion, likened to selecting the best soldiers for battle. The chapter emphasizes the importance of this neural process in achieving physical strength.
• 03:00 - 06:00: Training for Strength and Muscle Growth The chapter delves into the functions of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. It explains the sympathetic system as responsible for 'fight, flight, lift, train,' and handling life's stresses. In contrast, the parasympathetic system is associated with 'rest and digest.' An analogy is used involving a glass of hot water and a glass of cold water, suggesting that when combined, they neutralize each other, illustrating the balance and interaction between these two systems.
• 06:00 - 09:00: Structuring a Strength Training Program The chapter discusses the importance of balancing the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems in the context of strength training and recovery. It emphasizes that overusing one system can lead to a suboptimal performance or a poorly functioning nervous system. The key to effective recovery and optimal nervous system function involves three essential components, with sleep being the first critical element. Tips for improving sleep quality include maintaining a cooler room temperature and minimizing light to create a dark sleeping environment.

How To Get Strong (Simply Explained) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 getting strong can feel complicated and it is sort of come with me to the gym where I'm going to teach you how to get strong as simply as possible first we have to start with the brain the brain is where all the messages to your body originate and without that it's like having a car without an ignition and frankly you just won't get very far when we send a signal from the brain to the body it's like pushing a gas pedal to move the car
• 00:30 - 01:00 of course that's an oversimplification so let's talk about how the body is a little bit different now of course we can't work like a car and send a message to all of the wheels or all the muscles in our body because we were just set up in spasm so let's pretend we're in battle this is the brain and these are muscles or this is the general and these are the soldiers once you want to perform a movement or send into battle the general has to choose which group of soldiers are we going to send in if he comes over here and sends in this group and it's the wrong group they're going to lose the battle same thing if we were over here now in the same way our brain
• 01:00 - 01:30 when we're performing a movement has to think what muscle or what muscle groups are we going to be able to use to perform that movement these are called motor units now our brain doesn't have a bicep motor unit and a quad motor unit all we have is a learning process by which we learn bicep flexion we learn knee extension we learn knee flexion we learn hip extension and we have to learn all of those individually the ability for your brain or the general to choose the group of muscles or the group of soldiers going into battle is going to be the most potent way to get strong
• 01:30 - 02:00 now we have the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system sympathetic is fight flight lift train all of our life stresses and parasympathetic is our rest and digest let's show this with glasses of water here we've got a glass of hot water and a glass of cold water if you put these together well we don't have hot water and cold water we have neither hot or cold our sympathetic the nervous system
• 02:00 - 02:30 works the same way where parasympathetic and sympathetic can't be on at the same time if you try to use one too much it's just going to wear out and you're going to end up with lukewarm water or just a shitty firing nervous system when it comes to the nervous system in recovery there's really only three things you need to make sure you're recovering your absolute best the first one is going to be sleep now to sleep well we're going to need a cooler room we're going to need to shut all the lights off and make the room as dark as possible
• 02:30 - 03:00 and for the hour before bedtime there's going to be no phones I wanted to talk to you the office is a giant mess managing life stress is number two number three is establishing proper nutrition making sure you get not only your Macros but your micro with your fruits and vegetables and natural food sources is going to make sure that you're recovering as well as possible if
• 03:00 - 03:30 you're nailing all those three and you're still not recovering properly well it's now time to get your blood work done to make sure everything is going okay personally I use blokes off the back of this you get a consultation with a doctor and they'll prescribe you hormones and peptides based in your blood work to make sure you are healthy ready to recover and ready to perform now in terms of training to get strong of course you're going to need more troops more troops going to win bigger battles the most important thing that we need to look at with muscles is the cross-sectional area or the thickness of
• 03:30 - 04:00 the muscle the thicker the muscle the more motor units you're going to have to recruit and the more potential you have to increase strength but it's not as simple as that because with more muscle comes more responsibility now that responsibility is to fuel and repair those muscles to repair you're going to need your protein for fuel there's two ways we get our fuel one is creatine supplementary creatine no questions asked number two is going to be your carbohydrates creatine provides the energy in the first 5 Seconds of movement then
• 04:00 - 04:30 carbohydrates stored as glycogen in your body is going to provide the energy for the next 30 to 60 seconds which is how long a set will normally take in the strength world now let's tie this all together for your training when it comes to your nerves there are really three things that we can rely on to be able to increase the nerve potential one is increasing the nerve conduction velocity that's a positive adaptation to training and is also correlated with lower body f at percentages next increased nerve size is
• 04:30 - 05:00 actually another positive adaptation of training that allows a message to be sent faster why is this useful well faster messaging means that your brain to your body connects at a faster rate and you'll be able to perform the movements without a leg in time between sending the message and Performing the movement this might be a matter of micros seconds but those are extremely important when it comes to recruiting all of your motor units at the same time for a powerful coordinated contraction now how do we improve those qualities well we need to train volume and we need
• 05:00 - 05:30 to train fast now the volume has to be at a relatively High load for you so that we build strength and we recruit the proper motor units it's possible at lighter loads to use different motor units that are less fatigue less able to fatigue but much less powerful and that's why we have to lift Heavies now that group of motor units will become more and more refined your movements will become more refined and if we think of something like a squat it's going to take a long time to be able to coordinate calves hamstrings glut quads
• 05:30 - 06:00 your core muscles really your whole body to be able to perform the movement well contrast that with something as simple as a bicep curl and you can realize how much practice actually goes into doing these things well internally when we're structuring a program the vast majority should be done at heavy load or fast depending on the time of year now this is only for strength you'll notice that strength and growing muscle is not necessarily the same thing now I offer resources for both of these I'll pop those the link in the description but there's a muscle building program
• 06:00 - 06:30 there's a powerlifting program and the real difference between these styles of approaches is that building muscle relies on either High mechanical tension High muscle stretch or high intensity any combination of those should get you good results so long as you are training somewhere close to failure and relatively hard when it comes to building building strength we need to be training the nervous system at very low volumes very high loads so that we're able to carry that through to be able to get a new one rep max but remember what I said before you can't train any individual component it too much or else
• 06:30 - 07:00 you train the soldiers and the muscles too hard and they're just not able to do the work anymore conversely you train the general too hard or you train heavy strength training too hard and the messages just won't get sent very well in this we've got a chunk of training let's call it four to 6 weeks and then we're going to have one week of D Lo this gives your nervous system time to recover it also lets your soft tissue catch up and you're much less susceptible to injury if we allow all that to happen you should be able to progress fairly well over the long term next one block into the next block
• 07:00 - 07:30 should not be directly related to each other now they can be similar but you need to have some sort of change to be able to not burn out that stimulus over time has to go from either strength to power strength to hypertrophy power to strength but the the training objective has to change slightly this is why professional strong men can only Peak once or twice a year same thing with powerlifters because it takes so much time energy and attention and then so much recovery on the back end to be able to get the most from your body when we look at one week of training we have to
• 07:30 - 08:00 think first how many days a week you're going to train when training for strength this answer might surprise you the more trained you are and the closer to your genetic potential the less often you can train now this both refers to chronological age and to training age where the longer you train the closer you're going to get to that potential and the more likely you are to have sympathetic burnout as a guide those who are very experience close to one rep max maybe a little bit older three times a week is probably the best recommendation for that person
• 08:00 - 08:30 then the vast majority of people after that fall into 4 days a week as the optimal training volume you have some people who can tolerate 5 days a week and some people like myself who just prefer to come to the gym more often because we love to train but it might be at the detrim of becoming as strong as you can be after we have those days we can start to break it down into what we should actually do and first you got to cover the fundamental movement patterns if you want to be strong and robust those are push pull carry overhead press hinge and squat those six movements have to be encompassed in any program looking
• 08:30 - 09:00 to make you strong personally I like to break those up in a 4-day split as one hinge day one squat day one overhead day and one horizontal day where the overhead day is pushing and pulling up above the head and the horizontal day is pushing and pulling straight towards you after you get your M movements covered your accessory movements should cover your weaknesses in those areas the exact set and rep scheme can vary from person to person and it's too much for the scope of this video but I've covered that in those PDFs below along with the
• 09:00 - 09:30 education on why it's structured the way that they are hopefully you guys pull something from this video and learn a little bit about how to get strong hopefully my analogies landed let me know in the comments if you have nothing else to say leave a moose dropping and if you'd like to support the channel check out the programs or the merchandise which is linked in the description as per usual lift heavy be kind and we'll catch you in the next one [Music]