Strength is Important for Everyone
What’s Strength?
Strength is a physical attribute that allows you to live your life well. It is the ability to produce force on and interact with the objects and environment around you. It allows you to get dressed easily, go to work, do your job, make money, enjoy hobbies…virtually every activity that you do requires at least a minor level of physical strength.
If you’ve ever been really sick or very injured, you know this already: even something as benign as rolling over in bed can feel like it takes everything you’ve got in that situation. An irresponsibly low amount of physical strength is the reality for a lot of Americans. That reality poses serious threats to health and longevity in the future that will inevitably come.
It’s the start of a new year, and people are now beginning to set goals for their physical well-being. No matter what your goals are for your body this year, I firmly suggest that you consider strength training as a foundational pillar of your physical activity. Without strength, you can’t live.
Strength for the Overweight
According to the CDC’s National Center of Health Statistics, 40.3% of adults in America were obese between 2021 and 2023.(1) If you’re setting “New Year, Better Me” goals, there’s at least a 40.3% chance you’re aiming to lose body fat–as you should. It’s well-established by remote and recent studies that having excessive body fat is associated with dying early from basically every imaginable cause.(3) Unless you plan on meeting your maker prematurely, it would behoove you to lose fat.
Notice how I said, “lose fat,” and not, “lose weight.” When you reduce your body’s weight, the entire body reduces in size. Stated differently, when the scale drops, you lose both fat and muscle. Muscle is the tissue that contributes to strength. So if you aim to “lose weight” at any cost, part of that cost will result in a reduction of muscle mass and presumably some non-zero loss of strength. This is particularly true for folks who participate in fad and crash diets and avoid exercising. This is a problem. Strength allows you to live well and do stuff. So the objective for a person who is overweight should not be to “lose weight” but rather “lose fat.”
It's not uncommon for people to regain weight after a period of fat loss. In fact, it’s very common. In 29 weight loss studies, participants regained over 50% of their weight within two years, and within five years, they regained over 80%.(2) Those results suck. If you aim to lose fat, you want to do things that maintain that fat loss well beyond five years. This means you’ll have to play the long game. Just like the fable of the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady wins the race.
The cause of obesity is attributed to a lot of things. “It’s because you don’t work out.” “It’s because you eat too much.” “It’s because there’s <insert demonized food group here> in your diet.” But I think at its core, obesity is a habit problem. Modifying habits is not only really difficult, but it also takes a lot of time. Fortunately, there are some simple initial steps you can take to facilitate long-term success. The first step I’d suggest is getting stronger.
Getting stronger adds more muscle tissue to your body. (No, it doesn’t make you “bulky,” calm down.) Muscle is a living tissue and having more of it will burn more calories at rest.(4) Simply, the stronger you are, the more calories you burn doing absolutely nothing. Of course, the process of getting stronger counts as doing something, and doing things burns even more calories. Thus, strength training is a self-perpetuating cycle of being a calorie-using machine. If you’re overweight and looking to lose fat, start with strength training and work with a skilled coach to assess your nutrition habits or lack thereof. You can do this.
Strength for the Older Crowd
Before you were 30 years old and needed to feel better in your skin, you could just get to the gym or go running for a few months, cut out pizza and soda, and within a few months of white-knuckle discipline you were in the clear. Your pants fit better, bits didn’t jiggle while brushing your teeth, you had more energy, the whole nine yards. What nobody told you was that after age 30, human beings begin to lose 3-5% of their muscle mass every 10 years. After age 50, muscle loss starts to increase by 1-2% every single year. With this loss of muscle, your strength (and thus your ability to do stuff) declines as well.(8)
This is an issue, especially for parents and older adults. The loss of ability to engage in activity and the resultant sedentary lifestyle can lead to all kinds of issues including sickness, injury, and death.(5) For most busy Americans, their strength isn’t important until they suddenly lose it. If you’re not already immediately thinking of someone you know, ask an older family member. They’ve seen at least one friend or acquaintance who made the choice not to stay in shape and the gravity of loss that person endured because of their inaction.
Strength training is safe, effective, and encouraged for adults and older adults, even those with chronic conditions and disabilities.(7) Barbell training, a very effective form of strength training, is also safe for these populations, with some mild modifications for individual limitations notwithstanding.(6) My colleague Jonathon Sullivan is a physician and strength coach; his gym and online coaching practice specialize in barbell training with the older crowd. His client, John, is over 90 real-ass-years old. If you are younger than John and you perceive even modified strength training activities as dangerous, you are flagrantly incorrect.
Strength for the Athlete
Speed catches, strength kills. Athletes need to be strong.
As I said before, strength is the ability to engage and interact with the environment: this includes the field, the mat, and the opponents standing across from you. This is especially true with contact athletes. Getting hit by a human or by the Earth takes a toll on the body. Having thick muscular armor to protect yourself from impact, as well as the joint integrity and stability to dish out a preemptive or retaliatory attack, is very useful for winning. No one becomes an athlete with the intention of losing as long as possible.
Nuke the idea that getting strong makes you slow. Explosivity is a wonderful buzzword in sports performance circles. Everyone wants to be “explosive.” Explosivity is the attribute that governs the density and quality of nerve relationships to muscle tissue: it is genetically mediated. Of course, these improving force output (strength) and efficiency of that output (skill) can improve with targeted training: any jump coach would happily help you improve your vertical. Sadly, the upper ceiling and the potential for the magnitude of change in performance, without the development of strength and the refinement of skill, will have its wings clipped by genetics. If you want to be remembered at the GOAT, pick your parents well.
What you should focus on as an athlete is being disciplined and conditioned enough to attend practice regularly. If you skip practice, you suck; show up to practice. Second, if you’re fat and your sport or position does not reward being big without consequence, you’d be faster if you didn’t have to haul around extra weight. Fat is non-contractile, it generally does not produce performance. Finally, get strong and move fast. Power production, the ability to express your strength quickly, is highly trainable–much more so than the nebulous “explosivity” that clever marketing would have you seek out instead. Power is a mathematical function of strength.
Powerful Math
Strength is the ability to produce force. Force is an influence in physics that causes things to move. The formula for force is Newton’s second law of motion: F=mα. F is force, m is the mass of an object (i.e. a barbell, a person, or yourself), and α is the acceleration of that mass. In the context of strength and power, α is the “explosivity” component that is largely genetic.
Power is strength output as fast as possible. I contend that most people are referring to power when they say they want to develop explosiveness. It can also be defined using arithmetic: P=W/∆t. P is power, and W is “work,” which we have not explored with math yet but is fairly self-explanatory, even superficially. ∆t is the change in time, which can be improved not only with strength and genetic explosivity but also with practice and skill. Expressed for non-math people, being powerful means being able to do a lot of work, skillfully, in a short amount of time.
“Do the work.” Work, too, can also be defined with algebra. W=F(d). W is work, whereas F is force and d is distance. Distance, in the context of sport, is often a finite and repeatable amount as defined by the sport itself. Someone who is capable of doing a lot of work, then, is someone who is capable of producing a lot of force over those sport-specific distances. If combine all of our formulas, we can tie all these concepts together.
P=W/∆t. Replacing W with the equation for work would be:
P=F(d)/t. The relationship between force and power should be obvious but breaking it down further:
P=[(mα)d]/∆t. The bottom line for my non-math nerds follows:
To be powerful, you must be able to move things or people over a target distance as fast as possible. Since acceleration/explosivity is largely genetic, the athlete’s best option is to focus on their force production (strength) and their ability to execute plays quickly (skill). Go to practice, stay conditioned for your sport, get stronger. If you still think your strength training is making you slower, when was the last time you sprinted? …Exactly.
Strength for Everyone
We as humans are nothing more than sentient tapioca balls (brains with souls) piloting meat suits (bodies). The meat suit, the vehicle by which things get done, degrades as it accumulates mileage over time. Maintenance of the meat suit is a matter of proper training. For the healthy, unhealthy, young, old, athletic, and even the clumsy, strength is one of the greatest attributes your meat suit could have. The acquisition of strength can be simple or complex, depending on who you are, what context you’re coming from, and your level of psychological and emotional readiness to engage with training.
If you need help tuning up your meat suit, I would love to help you. I provide custom, individualized programming and rapid feedback within 24 hours on every workout through Barbell Logic and hybrid in-person+online coaching out of FitBodies Unlimited, Yorktown. FitBodies members, with any contracted membership, can receive a month of coaching and one private session completely free.
I never use contracts for coaching either: cancel anytime you like.
You have nothing to lose.
References
Emmerich SD, Fryar CD, Stierman B, Ogden CL. Obesity and severe obesity prevalence in adults: United States, August 2021–August 2023. NCHS Data Brief, no 508. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2024. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.15620/cdc/159281
Hall, K. D., & Kahan, S. (2018). Maintenance of lost weight and long-term management of obesity. Medical Clinics of North America, 102(1), 183–197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mcna.2017.08.012
Jayedi, A., Khan, T. A., Aune, D., Emadi, A., & Shab-Bidar, S. (2022). Body fat and risk of all-cause mortality: A systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies. International Journal of Obesity, 46(9), 1573–1581. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41366-022-01165-5
Nuckols, G. (2023, July 4). How many additional calories does each pound of muscle burn?. Stronger by Science. https://www.strongerbyscience.com/calories-muscle-burn/
Park, J. H., Moon, J. H., Kim, H. J., Kong, M. H., & Oh, Y. H. (2020). Sedentary lifestyle: Overview of updated evidence of potential health risks. Korean Journal of Family Medicine, 41(6), 365–373. https://doi.org/10.4082/kjfm.20.0165
Sullivan, J. M., Baker, A., & Taleb, N. N. (2016). The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After Forty. The Aasgaard Company.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 2nd edition. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; 2018.
von Haehling, S., Morley, J. E., & Anker, S. D. (2010). An overview of sarcopenia: Facts and numbers on prevalence and clinical impact. Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle, 1(2), 129–133. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13539-010-0014-2
