3 Best Principles For Strength Gains || WBWL 103

As we age, maintaining strength and muscle mass can become a challenge, but it’s absolutely achievable with the right approach. In this episode, I discuss:

🔑 Consistency: The foundation of any successful fitness journey. Discover why showing up for yourself is crucial.

🔑 Intensity: Learn how to layer intensity into your workouts for optimal results without risking injury.

🔑 Proper Form: Understand the importance of technique, especially as you increase weights, to support your strength goals.

Whether you're a busy professional, parent, or athlete, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you unlock your potential and become the best version of yourself.

If you find this episode valuable, please consider sharing it with your friends and family. Together, let’s inspire each other to embrace a healthier lifestyle!

Transcript

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Welcome to the Won Body Won Life Podcast. Hi, I'm your host, Dr. Jason Won Lifestyle physical Therapist. I love teaching busy professionals, parents and athletes worldwide, how to not just get rid of pain, but also how to get stronger and become the best version of themselves. Today I want to talk about something very important in my own life, which are the three key principles for progressive strength gains. We know that after the age of 30, we tend to lose. Significant amount of power outputs as well as strength and muscle mass as we get older. However, that is only relative to how we live our lives Now. We can accept age, we can accept being 40 years of age and just saying I'll never sprint again. I'll never do these things again. Or we can decide and we can have the willingness. To actually get stronger as we get older. I look at people like Joe Stockinger, if you don't know who that is, I believe he's 93 to 94 years of age. And I think that because of his work ethic, and I'm going to break down the three principles, I think define him also myself. Is that at 93 years of age, he's still lifting 405 pounds off the floor. He's still bench pressing, he's still squatting significant amount of weight. I believe he's in the 300 still and he's 93 years of age. So I wouldn't consider maybe him an anomaly. I think that many people can achieve this with the right strategies and with the right proper principles. So let's go ahead and dive into those three principles right now. And so these principles are something that I have told time and time again to probably my last 15 clients. All right, so whenever I get onto an evaluation or whenever I'm coaching someone, I have been starting off with these three principles and I'm going to leak that out now. So hopefully if any of my clients are watching right now. Hopefully you guys have heard this. Hopefully that's another light bulb in your head saying yes. Thank you for the reminder. So the very first thing that I think is the absolute brutally most important for strength gains is, number one, and we've heard this word before, is consistency. Now when we look at. When we look at being on a health and fitness journey, is that a lot of things don't come easy. Now, maybe when you're, when maybe when in terms of other aspects of life. Now, whether this is you. Now consistency is divided by repetition. Consistency is also defined by frequency and consistency in general is just by doing the work over and over again and showing up for yourself. So if you are starting off your health and fitness journey. Is that maybe you're expecting quick results, maybe you're looking for quick fixes. And in general, we are a very quick fix society. We are an instant gratification society. We expect things to be given to us at a very fast rate. This goes into some of the research on the brain where the brain. S, the brain secretes dopamine. Dopamine is essentially our pleasure signal. So when we have, let's say, Instagram reels, when we have Amazon shopping and things are given out to us the same day, we have GrubHub, we have DoorDash, we have all these different things that immediately give us gratification is that I believe it's tricked us. I wouldn't say tricked us, but it gives us a sense of lack of patience. We're not patient enough to do the same thing over and over again. I'll tell you in my own life, when I was growing up, at the age of maybe 17, 18, I started actually exercising relatively consistency. At this level of my life being 36 of years age, my consistency is at an all time high. And I'll continue to try to one up myself. But back in the day, I was not that consistent. I wasn't squatting on the same day. I wasn't deadlifting on the same day I wasn't progressing in the right way. So I'll tell you a little bit more about progression and how to do that as well. But there was a reason why I wasn't seeing results, but not just that one of the exercises, namely the deadlift, was an exercise that I was tweaking my back on every couple weeks. Was this due to lack of muscle mass maybe? Was this mainly due to the fact that I wasn't consistent? Consistency amongst everything is the absolute most important when it comes to strength gains. So if we have you on a three day plan. We expect you to be on a three day plan where you are not missing days. Okay? You can try to level it for consistency over and over again. So take, let's say Monday to Sunday. That Monday to Sunday you're looking at a three day span, which is either Monday, Wednesday, Friday. My opinion, when clients join my program, it's about Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Monday, Wednesday, Friday, become a non-negotiable. Non-negotiable. You want to imprint that into your calendar. You want to show up for yourself specifically if you can. You wanna show up for a specific time. So if I say I'm going to work out at 8:00 AM you expect to be there. Imagine if you were, let's say let's say you, you're on a Zoom call with for work, a Zoom call at 11:00 AM So when you are on a Zoom call for work. Do you just not show up? Especially if it's a mandatory meeting, mandatory meetings, if we don't go, we'll get fired. We'll get penalized. And so when we're doing stuff for ourselves, we tend to put ourselves last. We tend to put ourselves last in terms of our kids and other things around us. But if we continue to perceive that our fitness is less important, that is less important than a work meeting or a client meeting. Now, what are we doing for ourselves? What type of ownership for ourselves are we showing? What type of responsibility are we giving to ourselves, but also the people around us? So I perceive that consistency is the most important because not necessarily are you going to see quick results. There are a lot of times where maybe you'll start to feel better, you'll start to feel more energized. The euphoria of just getting in the gym and sweating. A lot of people start to change their emotions, which is great. But the long game is whether you are willing to see those results later. Now, if your goal is to, be back to 10% body fat, or your goal is to have less low back pain, I think that string training is indeed a great solution for that. But are you willing to stick it out? Are you willing to see it not just over weeks or even months, but even over years? Start off small, obviously, but the consistency is the most important factor here. Okay, so once you are consistent, so I go in like sequential steps. I would say that clients often have to prove. To me and to our team that you are being absolutely brutally consistent. We actually track that. So the great thing about different apps but not just apps on the app store where you can actually track your workouts, but actually our app actually, we show exact video demonstrations how to do the exercises. There are exact set, exact repetitions. And if we say, Hey, we're going, you're gonna do leg day Wednesday, we imprint that into your calendar. If we don't see that you're doing the work, we can actually see that from our end and we can call you out on it. Okay? So we oftentimes will see like a hollow circle, right next to their leg day. And we can see if they skip workouts. And this is part of the accountability factor. But once you start to check the boxes and you're creating a rhythm, a pattern for yourself. The next important thing after consistency is intensity. Intensity. When it comes to intensity, it is the how effective or how aggressive you are going at the actual workout. Research does actually show that if you want to make significant strength gains, you need to be one to four reps shy of contractile failure. A lot of us walk into a gym, we go through our workout, and let's say you're, you've been going consistently over and over again, and I appreciate that. But if you're not progressing anything in terms of the actual workout or in terms of each individual exercise. Then potentially you may be wasting your time and not seeing the results that you want. Intensity is this. It's basically increasing repetitions. It's increasing weight at a very predictable manner. What I mean by predictable is that you actually track your workouts, you track the data. The same thing goes for some of our clients that come in and they're like, I haven't seen results, or My body's in pain, is that they start to relieve their pain and they start to see significant strength gains and muscle mass when they're actually logging their workouts. And when they actually click into another workout, let's say they've done one workout one time and they're doing the same exact workout the next week, they actually see for each individual workout what their data is. What is the exact reps, the exact sets, what is the exact amount of weight, what were the exact rest period parameters. When you actually look at that math, you are able to definitively and concretely and objectively. Increase the repetitions, which comes in the form of volume, which actually makes it workout overall relatively more intense. And also you're able to increase the actual intensity, which is the weight itself. Okay, so intensity done in a very predictable matter is yielding those results. You can have the simplest workout, I can think of, squat, deadlift, lunge, that's it. Three exercises for your legs and then for your upper body, you're thinking. Bench press, overhead. Press, then some sort of lap pull down and then some sort of horizontal row. I, I say those exact, maybe like seven exercises because you do those seven exercises consistently and you will see results. Skip the accessories. If you just stick with seven exercises and do it repeatedly over months and years, you will see results. Your lots will grow, your quads will grow. Your body will feel better because you have more muscle mass around, around your joints. So overall, that is as simple as it gets. But like I said, consistency is where you have to start. We don't really progress the intensity really until you're actually seeing the consistency first. So the consistency in all aspects, whether it's just showing up to the gym, okay, not even just track your workouts, but actually just showing up. What about your mobility exercises, how consistent you are. At doing mobility through the day so that your body is prepped to work out. Some people expect that their body is going to feel totally fine after sitting for eight to 10 hours and expect that their body is super mobile and that it's ready to go, ready to make strength gains in the gym. You need to be doing mobility consistently throughout the day so that your body is abt. It's more malleable to the demands of putting your body through an overhead press, which requires. A lot of range of motion for your shoulders, your upper back, and many other areas. Okay? So intensity comes with time as well, right? So being consistent followed then by secondly, layering the intensity in. Because if you're not taking things one to four up shy of failure, if you're not hitting a rate of perceived exertion by at least a seven to a nine every single set that you do, you're not going to see those results. And I've seen the greatest results. Putting a lot of these science back principles over the bla probably the last three years of my life, seeing all of my numbers go up more significantly than I've ever seen in my entire life. And all you gotta do is put the science back into it. All right, so lastly number three. Number three is form a technique. Now a lot of people get this twisted. They think that formin technique is like the first thing, like in physical, in traditional physical therapy. It's like you can't do a barbell squat until you've mastered the air squat. Okay. In my professional opinion, I think otherwise, I think that if you actually add weight, maybe in the form of a kettlebell, maybe in the form of a barbell, and you know their capacity, so you've done, you've actually evaluated them, you get a good baseline of your strength and mobility. A lot of times the weights is what actually keeps them more centered. A lot of times you put weight onto someone and their form actually gets better. Now, as you progress though, when you go from consistency, you're progressing intensity, and then you go into form and technique. Form and technique does come into play when the weights gets significantly higher because if not learning how to, let's say for a squat, you're not bracing properly. You're not knowing how to you don't know the proper bar path. You don't know the proper bar speed. You don't know how to engage your lats properly to stabilize your spine. These are all things I love to teach. And so a lot of clients, they'll just simply, before joining our program, they'll be just holding the bar randomly if they watch a YouTube video and they're not knowing if they're even doing it correctly. So a lot of times they'll end up having knee issues or low back or shoulder issues after doing a barbell squat. So that's why I said that. You're one doing it consistently, so automatically, potentially, even without coaching your but co, your body's already becoming more mechanically efficient at doing that specific task. Then with intensity, you're trying to grow the musculature. You're trying to improve mitochondrial density and muscular endurance through just, not just the consistency, but actually layer layering on more volume. And also more weight at the same time. But as the weights get heavier, is that if the muscles are not adequately prepped or have the conditioning or capacity to manage that task at that given intensity or weight, then that is where muscles may give out. That's where results not, I'm sorry, not results, but that's where injuries may occur. Or even just straight up tendons, right? So we have muscles, tendon, and bone. Many people will get quad tendonitis or they get tendonitis in different places because either they're jumping the gun too quickly, ongoing to intensely or again their performance technique can be much more optimized. Okay? So that's what I got for you guys today. You gotta go with consistency. Then intensity and then form a technique. And I think amongst everything that kind of rounds off. These entire three principles is make sure to again, track your workouts. This is why every single one of our clients that we onboard is that immediately after evaluation, we are teaching them exactly how to input it into the app. And a lot of people are like, I don't want to use an app at the gym, or yada. That's cool if you're gonna at least do anything, is to track it on a piece of paper or track it in your Apple notes or whatnot. But tracking is one of the most important things. That I think I push the most, almost from almost anyone. If you don't track your workouts, my favorite quote that I say is What? Can't be measured, can't be managed. Not managing and looking at the numbers is going to make you second guess what you're gonna do, the next workout and your emotions, whether you're happy or sad, depressed, anxious, whatever it is. A lot of times negative emotions will often downplay how much we can actually lift versus when we're happy we'll tend to overdo. And you know that too. You're happy, you're like, oh my gosh, I feel good. And you like put on way more weight than you can actually do it. Results in an injury. Same thing goes is that maybe you are really sad and depressed and you go into the gym expecting, I'm going to go into the gym and crush this workout. You don't know what you did the next week and therefore you probably do maybe even less. Than what you anticipate. And therefore, again, you're just going through these cycles of doing the same workout over and over again at the same frequency, the same intensity, the same volume, and you don't make progress for months and years on end. In my opinion, that's very scary because that means that you're just wasting your time, you're just getting older. So if anything, you're just gonna get weaker in the long term. Okay, so again, consistency, intensity, form and technique and lasting track your workouts. Alright, so that's what I got for you guys today. If you found that helpful, definitely leave us a a but also a review. Five star reviews go. A tremendous way when it comes to growing this brand, but also letting other people know the value and the tips and the things that we show on the Won Body Won Life Podcast. So whether you're on Spotify, Google, apple, we genuinely appreciate not just giving us a but also leaving a five star review. I am trying to. Get us up to at least 10,000 subscribers by the end of 2025. So I greatly appreciate supporting this channel as well. If there's anything that else that you'd like to know, definitely email me, jason@flexwithdoctorjay.com. Feel free to email me, let us know how the podcast is going for you, whether you found it helpful. I. Or whether there's other topics that you want to hear from me and from any other guest that we may have on this podcast. So I'll leave you always with this last quote. We only have one body, one life. Make every action you take. Be one that makes you a better version of you. Take care and have a beautiful rest of your day.