When you see people in the gym, it often looks like they’re doing the same thing. Guys are standing around the squat racks, they’re benching and doing curls with free weights. To the untrained eye, it looks like they’re engaged in the same activity: lifting weights. But what might not be immediately apparent is that different groups are working out in different ways in order to achieve different end results. How you train will determine whether you end up bulking up and looking good or sacrificing sheer volume for actual functional strength.
Functional strength training has one goal and one goal only: to help increase the amount of weight you can move. It doesn’t care about aesthetics, it doesn’t care about definition, size, symmetry or anything along those lines. Strength trainers are interested in only one thing: improving how much they can bench, or squat, or whatever other exercise is their particular interest.
The way to strength train is simple at first, and grows increasingly complex the stronger you become. At first, all that a strength trainer needs to do is lift as much as they can with few reps. Thus a standard and classic way to approach improving your squat at first would be to do 3 sets, with each set comprised of 5 reps. That way you get to blast your muscles with a very high weight, but not so much that you fail and are unable to continue. This works for any exercise, and will result in rapid boosts in strength if done correctly.
The other way to train is to attempt to bulk up and look good. This is not nearly as simple as strength training, though it does mirror its techniques in various ways. Whereas strength trainers will focus on a small handful of exercise, people training for appearance sake will spend a considerable amount of time focusing on different parts of their body, seeking to nurture everything into an aesthetically pleasing whole.
This means that the trainee might have a wider circuit of exercises, focusing on blast individual muscles in an isolated fashion, will spend time trying to achieve symmetry by working underdeveloped sides or areas to greater effect than those that are already strong, and seek to build mass without focusing on strength per se.
Neither approach is more correct than the other; all that matters is that you be clear about your goals, and dedicate your time and energy to accomplishing them. In the end, it’s your body, and how you develop is up to you.
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