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Sometimes you may find yourself in the position of wanting to perform an exercise that is too difficult for you.  For example, suppose your goal is to perform 10 consecutive chinups.  If you can already do 5 then it shouldn't be too hard to figure out a plan of attack - do 2 or 3 in a row many times a day, or max out (do 5 reps) for 3-4 sets at a time 2-3 days a week, depending on how you want to gain strength.  But what if you or someone you're training can't do any? 

There are lots of progressions you can use to build up to doing a movement.  Basically, you need to start with some related movement that is similar enough to your goal movement but that you can do for an appreciable number of repetitions (I'm going to say at least 5 - it's awfully hard to progress with something you can't do at least 5 reps with).

For some great examples of progressions check out this link or this link, both courtesy of lean&hungry fitness.  Or check out Beast Skills.  If you want to design your own progressions for another movement, think about these modifications (in no particular order):

• Do negatives only.  For example, if you can't do a pullup, you might still be able to jump up into the top position (chest to bar) and lower yourself under control.  This probably isn't a great choice for, say, handstand pushups, as when you fail you'll come crashing down on your head, but it will work for a lot of other things.
• Use a band or machine to reduce your effective weight.  For example, attach an elastic band to the bar and wrap it under your knees so it pulls up with you when you do the pullup.  You could imagine a similar setup for any other movement which you can do under a bar or stand.  Tthere are machines that push up on your knees when you do pullups or dips that you can find in many health clubs.
• Change the angle.  For example, instead of doing pushups of some sort or another on the floor, elevate your upper body, gradually decreasing the angle as you get stronger.  This is my current plan for one-arm pushups.  I'm doing them on my stairs, and I plan to drop down one stair at a time until I can do them on a flat floor.
• Get a partner assist - also called "forced reps."  This is better in some ways than using bands or a machine because a good partner can adjust the force of their assistance to match your weak portions of the movement - that is, push harder in your sticking point and less hard where you are already strong so you get a more thorough workout.
• Do a different movement with overlapping effect.  If you want to do dips, mastering pushups isn't a terrible idea - there are some muscles used for dipping that you can't work in pushups, but those sets aren't mutually exclusive.  Getting stronger in the pushup will make dipping easier.
• Use a shortened range of motion or isometric holds.  For example, when I do handstand pushups I do half reps, trying to get deeper into the range of motion with each workout.  Or you could do holds in whatever part of the range of motion you can handle - for example, holding yourself in the top position of the pullup bar for time.

These are all I can think of right now.  If you have any other favorite ways to regress the difficulty of a movement let me know!

Progressive resistance is the key to strength development of any kind.  Without getting too technical, progressive resistance means you have to make your exercises harder if you want to continue to make gains in strength.  If you've ever seen someone go into the gym and do the same routine week after week, year after year, you've also seen someone leaving the gym for years without getting any stronger or fitter.

Progressive resistance is pretty easy to manage when you're lifting weights.  Doing the bench press?  Add a couple of plates to the ends of the bar and you'll have made the exercise harder.  You can also increase the number of reps completed per set, the number of sets, the time under tension per set, and decrease the rest between sets to increase the difficulty.  Not all of these technically change the resistance, but they all get the job done to one degree or another, at least within certain limits (increasing reps past a certain point just turns the exercise into endurance training and won't increase strength).  If you're using kettlebells, you've got fewer increments to work with, but you can still go up a half pood or a pood to increase the resistance (I like the word "pood."  Don't know why).

What about the poor trainers who aren't working with weights?  Well, if you're focused on basic pushups and crunches then you'll find a real ceiling to your strength gains.  Like I said, once you get past a certain number of reps you're doing endurance training, not strength training, and you just won't get any stronger.  Check out the world record holders for consecutive pushups - they're not that big or strong.  So what can you do?

Lucky for us there are plenty of ways to make non-weightlifting exercises more difficult (that is, requiring more tension).  I'll write down a few of my favorites, in no particular order.

• Do the exercise more slowly so momentum can't help you through the sticking points.
• Pause at various parts of the range of motion for a brief isometric contraction (karate dojos do this a lot with pushups - pause near the bottom, then push up halfway, pause, then lock out, etc.)
• Add resistance with a partner or a weight vest (someone you trust could stand beside you and gently press down on your shoulders, for example, when doing pushups, gradually increasing the added resistance as you get stronger).
• Do the exercise in an altered position with poorer leverage.  For example, do pushups with your feet elevated or your hands farther apart. 
• Do the exercise with fewer limbs (one armed pushups or chinups).
• Work a progression of related movements (see Beast Skills for some great examples). 
• Do the exercise in an explosive manner, like clapping pushups or jumping squats.
• Shift your routine around.  For example, if you normally do pushups at the beginning of your workout, do it at the end, when (presumably) your triceps and pecs are already tired. 

When you can do 10 one arm, one leg clapping pushups (I think I'll call these Zen pushups) with your single foot up on a chair while wearing a 75 pound weight vest you will have pretty much gotten as strong as you probably want to be.  Until then, you can't complain that pushups are too easy.

For the record, I can do exactly no Zen pushups.  Next week maybe I'll write an article on making exercises easier.

Good training.

First, a quick recap.  To develop stronger movements you can improve either your technique (the coordination of your movements) or your strength (how much force your muscles can generate) or both.  I have little or nothing to say yet about improving technique.  To improve muscular force you can either increase the amount of muscle through hypertrophy (growing muscle tissue) or by increasing fiber recruitment, i.e. training the nervous system to more effectively use the muscle tissue you already have.

To stimulate hypertrophy work the muscles to failure or close to failure for anywhere from 1 to 12 sets, more or less close together.  This damages the muscle (you might feel sore).  Then rest for anywhere from a day to a week while the muscle grows.  To stimulate fiber recruitment train with high tension (high force) but do not go to failure - stop far short of it.  Then repeat as often as possible, but with plenty of rest between sets.  Do this as often as you can stand it. 

For either choice, you have to continually increase the resistance by either lifting heavier weights or doing movements with poorer leverage (like putting your feet up on a chair for pushups) to get stronger.  Progressive resistance is the only thing we all agree on.

Phew.  That was as simple as I could make it.

Now for the trickier part.  I'll assume that you're interested in increasing your strength.  I'll assume that you have a general plan - that is, you have an idea of how often to do strength work, and how hard to make it.  If you don't, consider a mixed hypertrophy/ recruitment where you focus on one type of training for 2-3 weeks, then switch.  That's an okay start, and you can experiment with other periodization schemes as time goes on.

Having established all that, which exercises should you do?  Which style of exercises?  There are lots of choices - bodyweight, powerlifting, olympic lifting, kettlebells, traditional conditioning, etc.  Should you do lots of bench pressing?  One handed pushups?  How can we tell?

I'll start with some basic guidelines.  As a martial artist you are not primarily interested in looking better.  You are primarily interested in being able to generate more power in your techniques.  What's the difference?  Well, certain exercises will make you look bigger but won't contribute much to your technique.  Others will have the opposite effect.  Let me explain with one example.

Compare the bench press to the pushup.  On the face of it, they look very similar - they both seem to work the pecs, anterior delts and triceps, just that the pushup is upside down.  But for a martial artist there are a lot of advantages to doing some version of the pushup instead of the bench.  When you bench, your back is on a stable surface.  Your arms are equally loaded.  Almost all the work is done by the pecs, delts, and tris - very little else is involved. 

On the other hand, when you do a pushup, the entire middle of your body has to work hard to stabilize you (keep your pelvis from falling to the floor).  You have to work dynamically to control your body, working the core muscles (the stuff between your ribs and your pelvis) right along with your pecs, delts, and tris.  Do them offset (hands at different places) or one-handed and your midsection has to work even harder to stabilize your body.

Now think about punching.  When you punch, you don't just stick your arm out.  You drive with your legs, twisting the hips to generate power, and your core contracts very powerfully to transmit that power to your upper torso.  If you don't believe me,  throw a hard punch while touching your belly with your other hand (I know, that's not proper form, but bear with me).  Or throw a hard punch while your abs or back are really, really sore.  You'll get the idea.

Which exercise will improve punching power more?  Both pushups and the bench press will work the delts, pecs, and tris, but only pushups will really involve the core muscles that transmit power from your hips to your fists. 

Overall, imagine there's a line through your knees and another one through the bottom of your ribs.  I find that the bulk of your attention should be focused on the muscle groups between those two lines.   If you want to do some dumbbell curls or grip work or handstands, that's great, but strengthening the hip muscles in the four major planes (extension, flexion, adduction, abduction) and the core muscles of the waist will be much more important for your performance. 

How do we choose exercises that work those muscles?  Some of it is obvious - squats (weighted or non-weighted), deadlifts (regular, sumo, or my favorite, Romanian), crunches, "supermans" (lie on your belly and lift your arms and legs into the air - not sure if there's a real name for these) are clearly good hip/belly - working choices.  Some choices, like leg extensions or leg curls, may work a prt of the hip/belly core, but in general it's better to work these muscles in groups than one at a time (it's certainly more efficient and it may help you get better at recruiting them in groups), so stick to things that don't isolate muscles so much.  

What else?  Well, lots of other exercises will activate the hip/belly core if you do them a certain way.  Imagine you're doing dumbell presses (dumbells in each hand, start at your shoulders, you push them overhead, while sitting on a bench).  Your abs will contract to keep your body upright, but I doubt anybody ever got sore abs from dumbell presses.  How can we activate the core more?  We could do these standing, so you work harder to balance.  Then we could do one arm at a time.  Since the body will be unbalanced laterally, your core muscles will have to contract like heck to keep you upright.  Now use a kettlebell instead of a dumbell.  Since the weight won't be centered over the wrist, you'll have to work extra hard to balance it, so... boom!  More recruitment of stabilizers, more useful strength.  After all, you're trying to develop strength that you can use against a struggling opponent - you want a resistance that's fighting you every step of the way.

You can find suitable exercises with weights, with your bodyweight, or with kettlebells.  You should make those choices depending on your personality, finances, and access to training partners (for example, don't do Olympic lifts unless you've got someone to teach you how - you could really hurt yourself trying to learn them out of a book).  I can see no reason not to rotate through the various training modalities - in fact, it's probably beneficial to do many different movements over the course of your training year to avoid overuse injuries.

Now my point is that the bulk, or core (let's just go ahead and overuse that word) of your strength training should be aimed at that hip/belly area.  Having said that, if you have a weakness or a specific need, you have to address that as well.  For example, if you're a grappler, I would think you'd do a lot of grip training and upper back training (probably more than a striker would need).  You might want to do work on the external rotation of the shoulder to prevent injury.  You might want to do some neck work or some curls so you look good at the beach.  No problem.  The problem is guys who go into the gym and do curls and machine presses and go home thinking they're developed useful strength - they're wrong.  Do your curls after your pistols or deadlifts, not before, and don't focus all your energy on them.

For example, I do some training specifically to enhance flexibility.  I do isometric stretching (which is really a strength developing exercise) for my hip adductors and Romanian deadlifts for my hamstrings specifically to make those muscles stronger in the stretched position so that they will become more flexible.  Those are isolation movements, but they're pretty useful, and I really need greater flexibility in those areas to get the kicks that I want.  Be sure that I also do plenty of squats and ab-related stuff.

There are plenty of specific routines on the net, though I'd be happy to see what I can come up with if anyone wants me to design something for them.  Send an e-mail or post a comment.

One last word:  I don't really understand strength-endurance, what it is or how to train for it.  This is something I'm struggling to piece together right now.  If anyone has any good resources to point me to, please let me know.  In the meantime, good training.

I wanted to add a few errata to what I wrote about strength the other day.  I'm working on a sequel all about diet - lots of breaking nutrition down to simple terms.

First of all, strength and hypertrophy training aren't mutually exclusive.  I believe that most people, especially people who are not already elite athletes, will make gains in both regardless of what they're training for.  Doing a "strength" oriented workout will pack some muscle on most people, again, especially if you're not an elite athlete.

Second, the whole issue of training the nervous system and improving muscle recruitment is somewhat contentious.  Some experienced trainers disagree with the idea that nervous system gains can be made beyond some short term adaptations - that is, after a few weeks of training you're just not going to get any further improvement on that side of the strength equation.

I've been listening to crossfit live - the crossfit podcasts - and loving every minute.  Tons of great information.  More than worth your while.  I also really like Karate Cafe, but KarateKast is not as good.

I'll have more in a few days. 

I've been reading Pavel Tsatsouline's The Naked Warrior the past few days and really enjoying it.  The guy is very convincing, no-nonsense, and is really good at imparting information without using a lot of jargon.  He also helped me crystallize my understanding of strength and hypertrophy training as it relates to the martial arts.  I thought I'd share.

Martial artists need to be strong for a variety of reasons.  As a practitioner of a predominantly striking art I'm going to use examples from striking, but if you're a grappler you should be able to think of plenty of reasons why strength is helpful.  Strength means the ability to generate force.  The more force you can generate the faster you can move your limbs or your whole body.  The faster your strikes, the more kinetic energy they have (KE = 1/2 mv²) and the more damage they do.  Also, the faster your strikes, the more likely it is that they will connect, since your opponent has less time to either block or get out of the way.  The stronger you are the faster your blocks, counters, and tai sabaki will be as well, so overall, strong is good.

So what goes into, for example, a strong punch?  A lot of things, and it helps to distinguish them so we know what we're talking about exactly.  I'm going to do an initial breakdown of a strong punch into technique and muscular strength.  By technique I mean the coordination of the body and muscles that goes into a strong punch.  Take someone who might have strong muscles but punches by simply straightening the arm - no movement of the body or hips.  If you could show them how to rotate the hips into the punch they could throw a much stronger punch in a matter of minutes.  Their muscles aren't stronger, but more muscles are being used.  For another example, think of someone trying to lift a heavy weight without bending their knees.  If they did bend their knees, they could lift a lot more weight without really improving the strength of individual muscles.

By muscular strength I mean the force generated by the individual muscles that are part of the punch.  If the person in the above example (to use a simple example) worked out a lot and greatly increased the force generated by the muscles in their chest, shoulder, and arm, their punch would get even stronger.  The extra force would make a faster punch, and faster is better (all else being equal). 

What I'm not going to do right now is talk about improving technique.  That's what martial arts instructors are usually good at teaching.  They're often, however, not as good at teaching people how to develop the muscular strength side of things.

Muscular strength is produced by different components.  Muscles are bundles of fibers that contract.  When you flex a muscle your brain sends a signal to the muscle that makes some of its fibers contract.  I say some - you can't contract all of the fibers in any muscle in your body at once.  Your nerves just aren't strong enough to make that happen - if you want to fully contract a muscle you have to deliver a strong electrical charge to it.  Get struck by lightning, or sit in an electric chair, or grab an electrified fence.  That kind of contraction is strong enough to rip out your tendons, break your bones, and generally do bad things to you.

Even given that none of us can contract all of our muscle fibers at once, some people are better at contracting muscles than others.  Powerlifters train for years to get stronger contractions out of their muscles, which is why many light powerlifters can lift more weight than, for example, much more massive bodybuilders who do not train to maximize the force of a contraction. 

So there are two ways muscular strength can increase.  The nerves can get better/ more efficient/ whatever you want to call it - you can learn to make more of the fibers in an existing muscle contract at once, resulting in greater force (greater muscular strength).  Or you can increase the size or number of the fibers in a muscle, so that even if you still only contract, for example, 15% of a muscle, it generates more force (I really don't want to get into an argument over whether you can really increase the number of muscle fibers or just the size of the existing ones - it's just not important for this discussion).  This is called hypertrophy.  These two methods of increasing strength are not contradictory - you could increase both of them.  The training for each, however, is not the same. 

The nervous system gets better with use.  To increase the efficiency of your nervous system, you have to practice.  A lot.  Even all the time.  The more often a pattern of neurons work together the stronger their connection grows.  So to get stronger, you should make the muscles contract as hard as you can as often as you can.  To get the punching muscles stronger, maybe punch a heavy bag as hard as you can all day long, or throw punches with a weight in your hand or an exercise band restraining your arm.

Except there is a problem.  If you try to exert maximal muscular force all day long your nervous system might be getting better and better, but you will be tearing down your muscle tissue at the same time.  Trust me - you'll get really sore and find yourself getting weaker and weaker.  When you make a muscle contract forcefully a bunch of times in a row it gets tired and damaged.  Then, to prevent further damage, your body will try to not only heal it but increase its size, so the next time you train it you won't hurt it.  This adaption takes energy and time (resting time), so it won't happen if you work the muscle again (cause serious fatigue by generating lots of force a bunch of times) before it's had a chance to heal and adapt (grow). 

If you want larger muscles, this is the way to do it - work them until they're exhausted, in sets of more than 8 reps, then rest them until they've healed and supercompensated.  This will increase the amount of muscle tissue.  Unfortunately, it might not be the best way to train your nervous system.  Your nerves need more frequent practice to get really good at what they do.

To train your nerves to "get" more force out of your existing muscle tissue you have to do a lot of high tension movements - movements that make the muscles work very hard.  To be able to do this frequently you have to avoid damaging the muscles - because the damage interferes with the practice you need to do.  So pick a movement that is very hard, one that you can do only, say, 8 or 10 times.  If you do it 8 or 10 times, that is, go to or near to failure, you will damage the muscles quite a bit.  They will grow, but you won't be able to repeat that kind of tension generation anytime soon.  So instead of doing 8 or 10 reps, just do 4 or 5.  You'll accustom the nerves to inducing high tension in the muscles without damaging the muscles much, or at all.  Then, after you've rested, do it again.  Your nerves will get trained and better at firing the muscle but the actual muscle tissue won't get broken down much.

You won't get much bigger this way, but you should get stronger.  Once you can do the movement 15 or 20 times max, you need to increase the resistance by adding more weight or by changing the movement so the leverage is less advantageous.  Just upping the reps will bring you into the zone of fatiguing the muscles again, causing damage, and not training the nervous system.

You might still get some muscle hypertrophy with this method, but it will be more of a side effect than a primary outcome.  And what's so wrong with hypertrophy?

Well, nothing.  But total strength is more important to a martial artist than hypertrophy.  You want to get the most force out of your existing muscle tissue as opposed to just increasing your muscle tissue mass, because the more force you can get out of what you have the faster you will be.  Doubling force and mass at the same time results in the same acceleration.  If you can double force while keeping mass nearly the same, you double the acceleration.  And don't forget, adding muscle to your chest and shoulders makes it harder to move your body from side to side but doesn't add any force to your lateral movements.

One last thing about hypertrophy.  Adding muscle, even if it slows you down, might help a martial artist.  The more muscle you have the better able you are to take a shot without getting hurt or knocked aside, the more stable your stances will be, and the stronger you will look (which might help you avoid a fight altogether).  All of these points are debatable - being slower might cause you to get hit more often, more than making up for the improved ability to take a hit.  But strength without hypertrophy, or getting the most out of the muscle mass you have, is unequivocally good.  Low rep, high tension frequent training should be the best way to achieve that.

I've been doing some sort of strength training, on and off, for over twenty five years.  It started with the basic desire to have arms that didn't look like toothpicks, which led to picking up more than a few issues of Muscle and Fitness off the magazine rack at the newstand, and lots of sets of barbell curls done in front of a rickety weight bench my parents must have bought at Sears.  I can't say I've ever actually gotten very strong, but I'm a lot stronger than I would have been without working out, so I guess I've accomplished something.

Most people who want to get stronger, martial artists and civilians alike, tend to start doing a basic bodybuilding routine, the kind you can find in any of the muscle or fitness magazines in print.  Bench presses, military presses, curls, pulldowns, leg extensions, all done for three sets of ten after a brief warmup.  There are variations on these themes, but if you go into any commercial gym you can probably find dozens of people doing a workout like this in some form or another.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this workout, and one thing that is inherently good.  If you haven't done any (or hardly any) strength training, then you can get a lot stronger than you are doing just about any routine, even a bodybuilding oriented routine taught by your trainer at Bally's.

The downside is that most people won't get very far towards their own martial art goals using a system like that.  Why?  Because these kind of isolation exercises don't develop strength in the areas that a martial artist needs most. 

For example, suppose you try to improve punching power by bench pressing a lot.  It might help, by developing strength in the arms and chest, but bench pressing doesn't develop the muscles in the abdomen, hips, and back that we use to transfer power from the legs into the punch.  Unless you can bench press a whole lot of weight you're not going to get better results than you'd get from properly utilizing the legs and hips in punching. 

Strength training for the martial artist should focus on the weak links in the chain of muscles that provides power to our techniques.  For example, many people have trouble maintaining deep stable stances because their adductors and quadriceps are weak.  Deep squats (with or without weight), adductor flyes, and side lunges will help them a lot more quickly and completely than endless sets of leg extensions and leg curls.  People who need greater hamstring flexibility can get a lot more benefit from stiff legged deadlifts than from leg curls - the stiff legged deadlifts will develop lower back strength at the same time as hamstring strength and will work the hamstrings in the most important part of their range of motion, the stretch position.

There are lots of forms of strength training with all different kinds of equipment.  If you want to do well in martial arts, you'll do exercises that focus on hip and abdomen strength and that force you to use many muscle groups in conjunction.  You won't look like a professional bodybuilder, but you'll be a much more effective martial artist.