The mathematical nature of strength training.

Few things could be simpler. Use a few exercises that work as much of the body at one time as possible.

Find out how strong you are now on these exercises, and next time you train lift a little heavier weight, just a little. It's the same

process you used to learn to read, to play the guitar, to get a suntan, and finish your master's thesis.

It's the same process used to build an airplane or to evolve a more complex organism.

It's the accumulation of adaptations, the enemy of entropy, and it can be done by quite literally everybody.

The ability to adapt to stress is a trait common to all living organisms.

A physical stress is a change in the physical conditions under which an organism, like you, lives.

If the conditions stay the same, you stay the same.

If the conditions change, you have two choices.

You adapt so that the new conditions aren't a stress anymore, or you fail to adapt, and perhaps

you die. It is also important to understand that adaptation is specific to the stress that causes it.

The calluses on your hands from the shovel grow on the palms of your hands where the shovel handle rubs, not on your face.

You don't learn to play the piano by practicing the clarinet.

At its most elemental reduction, this is the situation.

The ability to adapt to physical stress is built into our DNA, and it's kept us alive for a long time.

Training is the systematic and intentional application of progressively

increasing specific stress, enough to produce the desired adaptation, not enough to kill you.

And it's just simple arithmetic. So what's the problem? If this process is so simple,

both logistically and philosophically,

then why in the hell is there so much pointless confusion about what, how, and why?

I'll tell you, because it suits the purposes of lots of people to make you think it's complicated.

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