By: Chris Gates

The concepts of training for size (building muscle) and training for strength (lifting heavier) are often lumped together.

I’ll occasionally hear someone say, “I want to get stronger,” when in reality they don’t care about how much weight they can add to their squat, bench press, deadlift, or any other exercise. They just want to build muscle.

Conversely, I’ll occasionally hear someone say, “I want to build muscle,” but what they’re really after is adding more weight to the bar over time. It’s just assumed that more muscle is needed to lift more weight.

And honestly, there’s crossover between the two.

Yes, adding more muscle will help you get stronger. And yes, getting stronger will help you lift more weight, which leads to a greater stimulus, and in turn can lead to greater muscle growth.

But we can narrow each one of these concepts down even further to identify what it means to maximize your training for either strength or size, and that’s exactly what we’ll do in this article.

This is the first of a series of articles targeted to help you learn how to build muscle or build strength, and set up a program that works you towards your lifting goals. Be sure to check out future articles on how to structure your training for muscle growth, how to structure your training for strength development, and how to prioritize recovery between training sessions.

Today, we’ll define what it means to train for size and train for strength. Understanding the differences between the two can be extremely helpful, even if your goal is to be as big and strong as possible.

Training for Size

Between the two, building muscle is probably the more popular goal, so let’s start there. What does it mean to train for size?

Overall training volume — the amount of sets and reps and weight you lift each week — is going to be the primary driver for muscle growth. If you’re just getting started, or even if you’ve been lifting for years, you should probably find yourself within the following volume recommendations:

• 10-20 hard sets per muscle group each week
• Those sets should fall within the 5-30 rep range

Doing heavy singles, doubles, triples, etc. isn’t going to help you build very much muscle. There’s a certain amount of stimulus your muscles need to encourage growth, and most research seems to point to at least five reps per set to accomplish that.

You may have heard, “the 8-12 rep range is for building muscle and the 1-5 rep range is for building strength.” Personal trainers have been operating on that guidance for years, and honestly it’s a pretty darn good place to start. Over time, you can stretch that 8-12 rep range to fit different exercises and push your training volume up.

And let’s touch on the “hard sets” recommendation. What does “hard sets” mean?

That’s going to be specific to each individual, but generally speaking it means we’re getting relatively close to failure, or potentially hitting failure occasionally. You don’t need to go to failure on every set — in fact, I’d recommend against doing that — but regularly getting within 1-2-3-4 reps of failure with your sets is going to encourage your body to grow.

“Hard” means legitimately training hard. Your training sessions shouldn’t be easy. You should leave the gym feeling like you put in an honest effort. As with anything, some personal accountability and commitment to the process is going to be important in order to grow muscle.

And most importantly, you should progressively train harder over time.

Your main focus for training to build muscle should be to get a ton of stimulus on the muscles you’re targeting. The weight you’re using is less important than hitting the target muscle groups with sufficient training volume. Within each exercise, you want to feel the target muscles working — contracting at the top, stretching at the bottom, and controlled throughout each rep — to get high quality work in.

We can use training the biceps as an example. If you’re doing biceps work, you’ll want to use an appropriate amount of weight. It’s pointless to curl 50-pound dumbbells if you feel it just as much in your shoulders and back as you do in your biceps. You’d probably get a much better stimulus for muscle growth by scaling the weight back down and focusing on form and technique.

Choosing a weight that’s appropriate and allows you to progress over time will lead to muscle growth. You’d be better off starting with perhaps 20 pounds and doing 3 sets close to failure, followed by making progress in the following ways:

• Over time add reps to each set.
• Over time, add additional sets (going from 3 sets to 4 sets, 5 sets, etc. for a given exercise).
• Over time, progressively add weight to the movement (once you’ve progressed via adding reps and adding sets, you can experiment with adding small increments of weight to a movement at a time. E.g. 5 pounds).

While accomplishing each of the bullet points above, do so while maintaining the same level of form, technique, and stimulus on the muscle (controlled reps and muscle contractions). That would be a clear indicator of progress, as opposed to adding weight session to session just for the hell of it and compromising form and technique. Chances are if you’re not focusing on form and technique, you’re recruiting other muscle groups to perform the movement, which takes away stimulus from the targeted muscle group.

Hopefully from this breakdown you can see that building muscle is all about focused effort and precision — direct stimulus to the muscles you’re training.

Now, let’s dive into what training for strength is all about and how it differs from training for size.

Training for Strength

Some of the same principles apply here, as training for strength requires working hard, applying a stimulus to the body, and paying careful attention to form and technique.

However, the stimulus that causes your body to get stronger is notably different than the stimulus for training for size.

When training for strength, you’re primarily training your body’s central nervous system. The gains you make are due in large part to neurological changes in your body that allow you to lift more weight over time.

The goal of training for strength is to add weight to specific exercises. It’s not about accumulating greater training volume over time. In fact, your training volume should often be much lower when training for strength, and you should be very specific in your exercise selection in order to maximize performance.

Improving strength is largely done in the lower rep ranges (1-5 reps) for barbell movements like the squat, bench press, and deadlift. Most strength-based workouts will focus on prioritizing those barbell movements, and once the strength-based work is complete there may be a few accessory exercises to complete in a higher rep range.

You don’t get stronger because you can do more and more sets and work over time. You get stronger by lifting heavy, which primes your body’s central nervous system to accommodate lifting heavy. This allows you to add weight to the bar.

You also get stronger by practicing the specific movements you want to improve your strength on, and doing it over and over and over. If you want to get good at a skill, prioritizing it, practicing it, and perfecting it is how you improve. The repetition and constant work on improving form and technique helps develop neurological adaptations that train your body to recruit muscles to participate in lifting the weight.

We can use the squat as a good example for strength training. After warming up, a training session would likely begin with squatting heavy — give or take 80% of your one-rep max for that movement — for sets in the 1-5 rep range, depending on the goal for that day. Then you may strip some of the weight off the bar and continue squatting, with a focus on form and technique. Often, this form and technique work will target a specific aspect of the movement, such as tempo, bar speed, or some other variable that can progress over time and improve strength.

Then you may perform a select number of exercises related to the squat to promote muscle growth and further work on technique before the workout is complete.

As you can see, there’s much less overall work being done in a strength-based workout than you would perform in a workout to build muscle (at most, you’re hitting the 10 hard sets guideline, but the repetitions for many of those sets are far lower).

Recovery time for strength-based workouts is going to be much different than when training to build muscle, and that’s because the demands of lifting such heavy weight necessitates more recovery time. In short, these workouts are exhausting, and part of the reason why overall workload is limited to just a few exercises each session is because the recovery demands of strength-based work are very high.

In Conclusion

So, let’s summarize some general takeaways to remember from this article…

Training for Size	Training for Strength
Direct stimulus to the intended muscle groups.	Stimulus delivered by load that trains the body’s CNS to create neurological adaptations.
Increases in training volume over time via sets, reps, and/or load.	Training volume remains largely static over time, with increases in load to prioritized strength movements.
Work performed in the 5-30 rep range.	Strength work performed in the lower rep ranges (1-5 reps per set).
Approaching failure, and sometimes reaching muscular failure, is appropriate.	Rarely, if ever, is hitting failure appropriate (aside from maximal strength attempts).
Form and technique should be prioritized to target each muscle group directly.	Form and technique should be prioritized to be as efficient as possible at each strength movement.
Training legitimately hard is required to make progress.	Training legitimately hard is required to make progress.

If you work out in a public gym, take a look around next time you’re in there. You’ll probably be able to see these differences in training for strength and training for size playing out in real time.

In most cases, the biggest people in the gym — those with the most muscle — are going to be found doing a lot of sets, reps and exercises. But the biggest people aren’t always also the strongest people in the gym.

You’ll probably find individuals lifting very heavy weight, but doing it for only a handful of reps and taking long periods of rest in between sets, and they can out-lift everyone.

There’s a distinct training style for training for size, and training for strength, and to do one or the other optimally requires focusing on one training style versus the other.

In the coming weeks, we’ll take time to focus on what designing a program looks like for training for size, and training for strength, and outline key points you can use to guide your own training if one of these is your goal. To cap things off, we’ll dive into proper nutrition and recovery techniques that help promote the gains you’re after.

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Thank you for checking out this article! I hope you found it helpful. If training for size or training for strength is something you’re interested in, and you want coaching and guidance to put the right program in place to make progress, definitely check out my coaching page. I’d love to coach you through the process. And feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Talk to you next time!

CGF