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THE JOURNEY: HOW TO REACH YOUR FULL POTENTIALThe Complete Strength Training Guide for Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced LiftersGreg NuckolsRatio free at http://www.strengtheory.com/complete-strength-training-guide…Quote:FINALLY new content coming tomorrow on Strengtheory.HUGE guide giving a pretty thorough overview of what it takes to reach your strength potential, and the factors that will make the largest difference for beginner, intermediate, and advanced lifters.It’s clocking in at ~12000 words with three of Lyndsey Ruble Nuckols’s bawse infographics, and six example programs to illustrate the principles in the article. Since that’s a long read for one sitting, it’ll be available for download as a PDF as well.If this one goes over as well as we’re hoping, we’ll give the same treatment to several other major topics: the nuts and bolts of program design, recovery factors, squat/bench/deadlift technique and training, nutrition for lifters, injury prevention (though I’ll probably shop that one out to someone who knows better than me, and possibly/probably the nutrition one as well), sex difference, and age differences.Since I know some people will skim and not read all the way to the end, I wanted to post the last section here, because it’s probably the most important part:”Final notes and anticipated questionsI want to point out something I didn’t state explicitly. Beginner, intermediate, and advanced are defined in this guide by the primary factors limiting performance, NOT arbitrary strength standards. How much you can lift at the end of each of these phases is mostly dependent on how well you chose your parents (the genetic hand you were dealt). This isn’t a guide for breaking world records. It’s a guide for reaching your own strength potential.This guide has focused primarily on training. However, I want to reiterate that training doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Proper nutrition, sufficient sleep, and stress management all play just as big of a role as proper training, if not bigger.You don’t get stronger in the gym.Most people don’t stop to consider this basic fact. At the end of a workout, you’ve accumulated some fatigue and you’re weaker than when you walked into the gym.You get stronger outside the gym.So what do we do with this information?It should make you look at training from a slightly different perspective.Rather than looking at training with the perspective of “I’m going to do this because it will make me bigger and stronger,” you should look at training thinking, “I’m sending my body a message, and I would like it to respond to that message by strengthening and growing.”It may seem like a semantic difference, but it’s an important one, because it helps put the entire training process in perspective.You see, it’s not the training itself that makes you bigger and stronger. It’s how your body RESPONDS to the training that makes you bigger and stronger.Your body adapts by responding to what it perceives to be a threat. When you work out, you’re sending your body the message that being forced to lift heavy weights is a “threat” (via stress to your muscles, bones, and connective tissues) that it needs to respond and adapt to.That’s all well and good when lifting is the only major threat your body perceives. It will generally have no issues adapting to it.But what happens when you throw more threats at it? And what are these threats? Anything your body perceives as a significant stressor.When your body is trying to respond to multiple threats at the same time, it doesn’t respond quite as well to any of them. You can think of it as multitasking. If you’re trying to read a book, play a video game, and work on a project for school or work simultaneously, you won’t retain much of what you read, your kill:death ratio will be horrendous, and you’ll certainly do pretty lousy work on your project.Two of the most important threats that keep your body from responding well to training are lack of sleep and chronic life stress, such as a stressful job, a bad relationship, financial worries, etc.Without going too much into the nuts and bolts of your body’s stress response, it meets these threats by making sure you have plenty of energy floating around your blood stream, available for use to keep you more alert and to make sure you’d be capable of fighting or running away if the situation called for it (for most of human history, those were the two basic ways we responded to most threats, hence the common term “fight or flight” response).Ensuring you have enough available energy to meet these stressors is your body’s primary adaptive response. Most importantly for the context of lifting: This is an inherently catabolic (“breaking down tissue”) process. Your body breaks down stored glycogen and proteins to make sure you have enough available energy to respond to the threat.That’s bad news for the lifter. Getting bigger and stronger is a fundamentally anabolic (“tissue building”) process.So when the stress from day-to-day life and lack of sleep tell your body it needs to be in a catabolic state, you’re going to have a hard time carrying out the anabolic process of building muscle.If you want to get into the nitty gritty a bit more, there are already articles on Strengtheory about how lack of sleep makes it harder to lose fat and gain muscle, and about how chronic stress literally doubles how long it takes you to recover from lifting.But right now, we can keep it simple. Training is like having a conversation with your body. You give it the message that it needs to get bigger and stronger via stress on the muscles, bones, and connective tissue. You hope it will respond to that message appropriately. But when stress builds up and you’re not sleeping enough (which is a stressor of its own, which also compounds the effects of whatever chronic stress you’re under), you’re effectively sending your body mixed messages, telling it that it should both tear itself down and build itself up.The end result is something similar to the multitasking scenario from earlier. It doesn’t do a very good job getting bigger and stronger, and the training stress makes you less able to cope with the stressors of day-to-day life and lack of sleep until eventually your body is so worn down that you completely burn out, often resulting in some sort of sickness or infection; when your body’s ability to respond to threats is overwhelmed, bacteria or viruses that would usually be stopped cold by your immune system are able to multiply enough that you wind up sick with a cold, flu, or respiratory infection.So remember, when you’re trying to tell your body it needs to get stronger, you need to make sure you’re managing your day-to-day stress and sleeping enough, otherwise you’ll get nowhere.”