Achieve Elite Strength

What does it take to achieve elite strength?

Achieving an elite level of strength with the pull up–and other  exercises–requires a level of dedication to training that few can even fathom.

You have to get all the major factors and the details right for years. If you do that, and you stay healthy, you can certainly reach elite levels of strength.

When I talk about elite strength standards, I don’t mean necessarily winning world championships. That takes extreme dedication and elite genetics–and not everyone has the right parents or genetic makeup to be the best in the world.

I do think most people, under normal circumstances and with normal genetics, can achieve elite levels of strength–meaning they are stronger than 95 percent of people and are capable of competing at the national (or maybe international) level in powerlifting or other strength sports.

I believe with the right training, attention to detail, and attitude, most healthy people can achieve a strength level better than 95-99 percent of the population within ten years.

Achieve Elite Strength: What are Elite Strength Standards?

These are what I consider elite benchmarks of strength. Achieving this level of strength won’t make you the strongest man or woman in the world, but you will be stronger than ninety-nine percent of people.

These are rough estimates and differ slightly by body weight, but these are the levels I would consider to be truly elite.

Strength Standards: 

Women Strength Standards: 

Pull ups: 20 pull ups in one consecutive set, full range of motion

Bench Press: 1.3-1.5 X Bodyweight

Back Squat: 2.2-2.5 X Bodyweight

Front Squat: 1.9-2.1 X Bodyweight

Deadlift: 2.6-3 X Bodyweight

Men Strength Standards:

Pull ups: 25 pull ups in one consecutive set, full range of motion

Bench Press: 2 x Bodyweight

Back Squat: 2.6-2.9 x Bodyweight

Front Squat: 2-2.5 x Bodyweight

Deadlift: 2.9-3.5 x Bodyweight

Achieve Elite Strength: Ten Years

Experts suggest it takes ten years of dedicated effort to become an expert or master of any given task. Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Talent Code, suggests it takes about ten years to achieve elite performance in any field. He believes it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery.

Other experts believe mastery takes 20-25,000 hours.

Based on your genetics, work ethic, and dedication, it will probably take you between 10 to 15 years to achieve elite strength.

Achieve Elite Strength: What is Deliberate Practice?

Deliberate practice is difficult, exhausting, and frustrating. It involves continually pushing yourself just a bit past your current abilities.

You have to push just a little bit past your current abilities–challenging yourself each time you practice. Unfortunately, you can’t expect to achieve performances way beyond your current levelwith each training session–that would result in injury or overtraining.

You have to work at the “sweet spot,” where the task at hand is a bit challenging but doable.

Deliberate practice also involves making mistakes, analyzing those mistakes, and making continued attempts to correct those mistakes to make movement patterns automatic. You can’t skip the process of trying and making mistakes. Those mistakes help you learn better.

You have to go through the frustrating process of making mistakes and improving technique to improve your craft.

Achieve Elite Strength: Apply Deliberate Practice to Training

If you apply the idea of deliberate practice to your training, it can help you to achieve elite strength.

Deliberate practice nicely coincides with the fundamental principle of strength training progression: progressive tension overload.

To get stronger, you have to get stronger. You must continually subject your muscles to greater and greater levels of stress and tension in order to get stronger. You must continually raise the weights that you use, the reps that you do with a certain weight, the time under tension that you subject your muscles to, the number of sets and reps that you do, and your number of training days over the training week.

Deliberate Practice

To improve your strength levels, you need to continually operate just beyond your current abilities.

You don’t necessarily have to lift heavier weights every session. You can also add reps, sets or extra training sessions. Each week, you will have to do just a little bit more than the week before to spur progress.

Achieve Elite Strength: Strength is a (Neural) Skill

Many trainees believe that they need to change their program frequently to make progress. I blame a lot of the “muscle confusion” prophets for this.

Changing exercise selection frequently is a sub-optimal training strategy for those trying to achieve elite strength. Some variation in your program every 6-8 weeks will help you to hit slightly different muscle fibers and movement patterns. However, changing your exercise selection too frequently will prevent you from achieving true proficiency at the skill or movements you want to develop.

Strength is a skill. When you first learn a movement you are very inefficient at it. You move with inefficient technique, and you cannot recruit a lot of your motor units to do the exercise. The movement is not automatic yet either, so performing it requires a lot of conscious thought and mental energy.

When you go through the process of becoming good at a strength skill, your brain learns how to perform the movement in the most efficient and optimal way. This process takes a long time, and a lot of dedicated effort.

Some of the world’s best power-lifters and weightlifters still work on improving their technique.

If you want to achieve elite strength, you need to practice those skills to the best of your ability, continually honing your technique and muscle memory, over a long period of time.

Achieve Elite Strength: Muscle Moves Weight

One of the most important factors in your strength potential is your amount of muscle mass.

Most trainees don’t put enough emphasis on building muscle mass. More muscle means the potential for more strength. If you don’t put a premium on building more muscle, you will eventually limit your strength potential and fail to achieve elite strength.

Pound for pound, you will be the strongest at the weight where you can maximize your amount of lean muscle mass while minimizing your amount of body fat. This may require you to go through bulking and cutting phases to achieve body recomposition over time.

Training to Build Muscle

You should aim to train your major muscle groups with compound movements that use of a lot of muscle mass, like the squat, deadlift, bench press, row, and overhead press. These exercises are great for building muscle and strength. You can also use some single joint movements like leg curls, lateral raises, calf raises, rear delt flies, and curls to bring up your weak points and build more muscle.

You should aim for 9-15+ sets per muscle group per week (taking overlap into consideration), using training volumes of at least 30 repetitions per muscle group per session. Over time, high rep sets (8+) and low rep sets (<8) will produce mostly equivalent muscle growth. Aim to work in multiple rep ranges over the course of your career to spur growth in all of your muscle fibers.

As you get more advanced, you will likely need to add more training sets and training sessions per week to continually add more muscle to your frame. What worked when you were a beginner likely won’t work as you become more advanced.

Progressive overload is still one of the most important factors to adding muscle to your frame, but from a muscle development perspective, become more concerned with adding training volume over time. Volume (sets x reps x load) is the most important variable for muscle growth, so if you want to grow muscle, you should be sure that you are steadily increasing your training volume.

Achieve Elite Strength: The Devil is in the Execution

Many people believe achieving elite levels of strength takes really complicated program design.

A basic program can help you achieve elite levels of strength over time. The devil really is in the execution of the program. The following workout can be either a piece of cake or the most difficult workout ever, depending on your intensity and execution.

Squats: 3 x 5

Bench Press 3 x 6 

Glute Ham Raise 3 x 10

Pull ups 3 x 8

Plank 3 x 1 minute

Intensity, not Complexity

An inexperienced trainee may think: “Wow, those are really basic movement patterns, this should not be hard at all.

But this workout can be truly gut-wrenching if the trainee performs it with enough intensity.

Finding a sweet spot where that workout is challenging enough to spur adaptation but not so challenging to cause injury takes experience and common sense.

Working at your sweet spot will allow you to make the best progress over the long term.

Achieve Elite Strength: The Power of Belief

Developing self-confidence in yourself will help you immensely in your journey towards elite strength. If you don’t believe in yourself, you won’t have the self-confidence to attempt heavier weights.

Your lack of self belief can limit your strength. You will approach your sets cautiously because you don’t believe you can command the weight.

Your ability to hit elite levels of strength and do big things in the weight room requires you to have confidence in your abilities and self belief.

Believing in yourself will also allow you to put in the work when the going gets tough. If you view the challenge as temporary instead of a permanent trait (i.e. I will overcome this VS. I am weak) you will be much more likely to overcome the problem.

Remember, you are going to be working on your goal of achieving elite strength for a long time (unless you are a genetic freak!) so you need to get comfy putting in the work for a long time, believing in yourself, and enjoying the process.

Achieve Elite Strength: The Not-so-Little Things

Sleep

Many people approach sleep, nutrition and hydration as little details but the truth is that these are the big rocks for training hard and making progress for a long time.

Sleep is huge. Sleep is a vital time for cellular and muscular repair. People that sleep four hours burn half as much fat and build half as much muscle as those who sleep eight hours per night.

Athletes who sleep more probably reduce their risk of injury and improve their performance both acutely and chronically.

Nutrition:

Your body needs an adequate number of calories for daily life and functioning as well as growth and muscle recovery. You should also be consuming adequate protein (between 1.5-2 grams per kilogram of bodyweight or a little more) in 4-5 bouts of 20-30 grams per meal. You need enough quality fat for hormonal maintenance and recovery, and enough carbohydrates to fuel hard training and restore depleted glycogen stores. Unless you are very overweight, you likely won’t reach your muscle and strength potential on very low calories, so you should make every attempt to fuel yourself well for your training.

For most trainees, maintenance level calories (read this or this to learn more about your calorie needs) will do in the beginning stages of training. Once you start plateauing at maintenance calories, however, you may have to go through bulking and cutting cycles to reach your muscular potential.

Achieve Elite Strength: Conclusions

Achieving elite strength is a long, slow arduous process full of hard work and dedication to the training process. However, if you are dedicated to the goal, and you work hard enough for long enough, it is definitely within your reach!