The ￡10m Experiment: Max Strength Gains In A Year!

You're just going about your usual business in the gym when someone approaches you and says "My company are sponsoring ten powerlifters for a full year. The person who gains the most on their total will win ten million pounds, but you'll be payed one million pounds just for entering. In addition we'll cover all costs of any strategies that you wish to use to help you in your quest to build as much strength as possible. The only rule being that you must comply with strict drug testing, all over the counter supplements are allowed but any WADA banned substances can't be used."

I got thinking about this when I was daydreaming in my car and it's a bit of fun to think about the strategies that you might use. It's also relevant to how you go about your usual training because it's just a case of amplifying the factors involved in maximising your strength potential which may well be viable to improve upon in your current situation. If that doesn't make sense I think it will do as you read the article.

How Would You Adjust Your Training Program

The way that you currently train is likely the way that you feel gives you the best results (at least I'd hope so if your goal is building as much strength as possible). Of course you might be a bit pushed for time in which case without that constriction you might do a bit more overall work but what I'm getting at is that your training system probably isn't going to change too much in most cases. For instance if you have had the most success training with heavier weights and relatively lower volumes you probably aren't going to be in a rush to lower your intensities and ramp up your volume. Debating the 'best' training method would be an article (and then some) in itself and the conclusion would be that there isn't one best training strategy but there are certain principles that are probably worth focusing on.

In any case I want to skim over which actual training system you'd use and give a broader overview of the training stress as a whole. Namely that it makes sense to create a stimulus for strength adaptation as often as you can recover from - and when I say recover from I'm meaning to optimally adapt to the training stimulus and roll into the next training session ready to hit it hard and make more progress.

This whole process revolves around enhancing recovery. Now that you have unlimited time to train and unlimited resources to help improve your recovery as well as enhance psychological aspects that may also help performance you'd expect to make huge strides in strength gains. Below is a breakdown of how this might be achieved. I'm sure there are other things that I haven't discussed which could also play an important role so feel free to drop anything I've overlooked in the comments section.

Enhancing Recovery

The two big hitters here are nutrition (plus supplementation) and sleep with stress management following closely behind.

1) Nutrition & Supplementation. For a start I'd be getting myself a personal chef who could plug in the nutritional information I gave them to create really tasty meals. That probably isn't doing anything to enhance recovery but it would be amazing so I'm throwing it out there.

There are a few questions to ask yourself here, and these are questions that you could also ask yourself right now. Sure you might not have the same resources but I'm sure you could apply a toned down version of what you would do.

Would you make sure that you're in a calorie surplus? Well yes for sure. There are no stipulations on bodyweight and we all know that gaining weight whilst training hard is beneficial to strength gains. If it wasn't we wouldn't bother with weight classes.

Would you be in a small calorie surplus or a larger one? Personally I'd err on the side of a little too many calories than I estimated I'd need to maximise muscle growth but not so many that I started gaining tons of body fat. The reasons for this are two fold for me but you may only have one of these problems - 1) I have the appetite of a small girl so ramping calories up too quickly would kill my appetite not too long down the road. This would happen anyway but it'd take a fair bit longer if I progressively increased my calories as I went and I'd end up gaining more muscle per unit of weight gained. 2) Gaining too much girth around my stomach eventually kills my deadlift so I'd want to limit this to some extent.

Would you include a good hit of all macronutrients or would you limit yourself by choosing a keto style diet or similar? There's no way I'd not include a hefty amount of carbs if my goal was to get as strong as possible. I believe there are benefits to the increased intramuscular fluid retention plus even though 1RM attempts have low glycogen requirements a lot of work performed to build more muscle is in higher rep ranges which do utilise more glycogen as an energy substrate. There's also the problem of low glycogen stores compromising calcium release which in turn compromises force production which isn't ideal for a sport that revolves around maximal force production.

Would you bother trying to maximise the health benefits of the diet as much as possible? I think this is super important. Obviously eating in a continuous calorie surplus isn't healthy and would have the longevity crowd up in arms but I think putting some thought in to improve general health and wellbeing is extremely important. After all if you're sick then you're not in a position to maximise training adaptations and I don't think it's controversial to state that a healthier body tends to function better which includes the rates of training related adaptations. Chronic inflammation and nutrient deficiencies aren't your friend here. I'd be getting blood tests to assess where everything is at before taking measures to correct anything out of range (or that isn't optimal) and continuously reassess. Diet wise you're looking at a wide variety of vegetables, some fruits, herbs and spices, plus covering essential fatty acid needs as well as DHA and EPA (which are essential in all but name).

Would you use any supplements? Yes of course, anything that I thought would give me an edge performance wise, recovery wise, or to cover any deficiencies as mentioned above. For drug free athletes I think a good quality whey protein, creatine, and caffeine would be at the top of everyone's list. I'd then have a play around with the supplements that might not have such hard scientific backing and see how they played out (well they'd be free so as long as they aren't going to potentially be detrimental health or performance wise it makes sense).

So I'd be eating a wide range of foods, consuming plenty of protein (>2.2g/kg), getting in any supplements that could provide even a smidge of assistance, with calories consistently high enough to maximise muscle gain. All cooked up and delivered exactly when I wanted them by my personal chef.

2) Sleep. Sleep extension has been found to be effective for performance of athletes with high levels of training stress. I think this is a bigger factor than most people realise, or more than they would like to accept anyway because going to bed earlier is no fun at all for most people. For general training I think the shift from averaging six hours or so per night to getting seven or more hours is pretty much a game changer as far as rates of progress go, at least I know that's the case for myself. Extending sleep beyond eight hours or so for your regular strength trainee might not be a guaranteed way to progress faster because their training stress might not be high enough to require or benefit from the extra sleep. However if you're trying to increase training stress then I think a shift towards getting more sleep would be a big factor. Personally I'd be getting a solid 8-9 hours per night with a nap in the early afternoon. If the training stress was high enough I'd expect to be able to get to sleep just fine doing this.

This seems to be a hard sell to anyone. In fact I remember hearing how sleep researchers struggle to find subjects for sleep extension studies but have no such issues with sleep deprivation studies. So on the whole it seems people are more up for missing out on some sleep than they are to get more sleep than they currently do which is definitely not ideal for athletes. If you're not buying it then look at rates of lean tissue loss in a calorie deficit with sleep deprivation compared to normal sleep - weight loss is compromised of much more lean tissue loss and way less fat loss if you aren't getting enough sleep. There's also the effect on actual performance which might not show after a bad nights sleep but it will if you string a few together.

3) Stress Management. The fact that you can now live the lifestyle of a professional powerlifter and just concern yourself with making the biggest gains possible will probably take most of any stress away anyway. It's definitely an area that I'd get a professional involved though and actually develop the skill of meditation, breathing exercises, and such like. I don't want to dwell on this point as it's a bit boring so to sum it up chronically high stress levels are bad for gains so managing this stress a bit better will help improve your gains.

Do NOT Get Injured

If you're aiming to put as much on your total as possible in a year then you don't want to spending any of it on the side lines due to injury. Every time you perform a set in the gym you're putting yourself at risk of injury, especially heavier sets of multi joint exercises which you'll be aiming to do more of now that you're recovering faster. There's no getting around this and worrying about it will be completely unhelpful but there are strategies that you can use to minimise injury risk.

Being careful with your programming and understanding the risks of training hard in a fatigued state, ensuring that you're well hydrated, and executing everything you do in the gym with focus and precision will go a long way in reducing these risks but it's not totally optimal. To reduce the risk further I'd want to have daily access to physio which would help massively because you'll prevent an accumulation of damage from building up. Most people who train develop adhesions (scar tissue) which are fibrous connective tissues that forms over a damaged area as the body attempts to repair the damaged tissue. If it's just left unchecked these adhesions can increase your risk of injury so staying on top of this as well as general movement and you're cutting the risk of injury dramatically. The general movement work will help keep your joints moving in a good range but you don't want to get too carried away and end up sacrificing the necessary joint stability for heavy lifting.

Performing some aerobic based work also seems to be helpful in preventing injury risk and may bring with it other benefits as far as the ability of your body to transport nutrients and clear waste products from your muscles. Too much aerobic work will almost certainly be detrimental to maximising strength gains so a couple of low intensity moderate duration bouts of cycling would be my suggestion. Plenty of general daily movement (eg walking) and getting out for a hike every now and then would also be useful I think.

Psychological Aspects Of Training

Having a good sport psychologist in your corner would likely be beneficial for most people, especially if you tend to get fearful of heavier attempts. I know plenty of people who've developed 'mental blocks' to lifting a certain weight or even lifting heavy weights in general due to fear of injury.

In these instances and even just to give yourself an edge such methods would seem to be worthwhile. I'd even look towards hypnosis to help me out. You've only got to look at the placebo evidence to realise that our brains can often be the limiting factor in physical performance which could leave a lot of the potential gains on the table.

Other Recovery Modalities

Here I'm thinking about cryotherapy, the use of hot/cold therapy, and such like. My current thoughts are that these are methods that I'd look at implementing during a recovery or deload week but wouldn't be staples in my general training. I think the main issue is that they're centred around reducing inflammation which might not be a great strategy during phases of hard training. We want the acute inflammation initiated by the training session as it's a signaling pathway for adaptations to occur.

I'm sure there are things that I've overlooked but this has taken longer to write out than I expected so I'm going to have to leave it there and actually get on with some 'proper' work. I hope it's given you some food for thought as to what you might be able to adjust to improve your rate of strength gains (right now, without the opportunity of winning the ten million).