We’re here to PUMP YOU UP!

The benefits of strength training are quite profound for improving fitness, bettering performance, injury prevention, and long term overall health.

However, many people are given well-intentioned, but unnecessary barriers to initiating a strength training program, and these can often create a scenario of thinking “I can only start strength training if I have done x, y, or z”. While this advice can be well-intentioned for promoting safety, it can foster unnecessary hesitancy and daunting criteria to getting started with strength training.

One common barrier to starting strength training is that you need to first have “good” mobility or flexibility before you start, especially with any sort of added weight. This comes from the fact that most exercise or movement patterns have certain mobility requirements for proper performance. However, did you know that mobility can be trained at the same time as strength training?

This is done by adding mobility exercises to build your full range of motion. What’s critically important to understand here is to make sure you move through your full, available range of motion, and to not force a range that isn’t there yet. When you pair mobility and range-of-motion exercises, the foundational movement patterns of your training will improve, and your available mobility will continue to improve as well.

Another common misconception is that you have to move perfectly with body weight exercises before you are allowed to add external weights in order to prevent injuries and create bad movement patterns. Although there is some good thought behind this, it should not be generalized for everyone. While adding weight can potentially change a movement pattern to look worse, it can also add enough muscular cueing and engagement to make the movement pattern better.

At the end of the day, mechanics, form, and technique should be at the base of the training pyramid under volume and intensity. When you focus on sound technique and proper form, while applying resistance, all these individual pieces of strength training come together to enable you to continually build muscle endurance and hypertrophy (muscle size) for life.