Generally, the formula for gaining strength and improving your physique is fairly straightforward: get your body moving, lift some weights, and clean up your diet.
However, when it comes to important factors that pop up, such as how to break through plateaus and continuing to increase performance, it’s crucial to focus on two things many people miss:
Work capacity and mobility.
What is Work Capacity and Why is it Important?
In short: work capacity is your ability to lift, carry objects, or keep moving through an exercise or movement for an extended period of time. It can also be thought of as the total amount of “work,” such as sets and reps, you can perform and positively adapt to.
To use an example, someone with a higher work capacity can perform more sets and reps more often (and recover faster) than a person with a low work capacity (say, a beginner).
Why is this important? Because building your work capacity allows you to not only mitigate your risk of over training, but also significantly increase your gains and get you to you goals faster. This is because an increased work capacity means you’ll be able to work out harder and perform more reps, which can ultimately lead to greater results.
Plus, increasing work capacity is also crucial for breaking through plateaus. Many of us have experienced doing the same workouts, sets, and reps that provided results initially, only to plateau after a few months. This phenomena can be linked to the SAID principle, or specific adaptations to imposed demands. When you keep your training volume and intensity at the same level all of the time, your body isn’t stimulated to adapt to a higher level. Hence, you reach a plateau.
Also, if you’re an athlete or aspiring athlete, increasing your work capacity can lead to better performance over longer periods of time. This is crucial in sports that require high performance without burning out for long periods, like basketball or even MMA. If you can sustain a higher output for longer than the competition, your chances of winning can increase drastically.
What About Mobility?
For decades, mobility was an overlooked part of fitness, unless you were a serious athlete. Now, everyone is beginning to realize the benefits of not only being strong, but also being mobile. In fact, I would go so far to say that you aren’t truly strong unless you’re also mobile, since strong yet “stiff” joints or muscles can be broken easier than their flexible counterparts.
Mobility is defined not only by flexibility, but by flexibility through full ranges of motion. This includes joint mobility, where joints can freely move through their full range without stiffness and under weight. Mobility also helps increase these ranges of motion, which ultimately allows for greater and smoother movements.
Increasing your mobility not only complements your increased work capacity, but is actually crucial if you want to mitigate injuries as you’re increasing your training volume and/or intensity. This is because if you don’t include mobility training, your body may overcompensate by using more mobile joints and muscles during movements.
This could look like your lower back compensating for your obliques during a rotation, for example. More pressure will be placed on joints and muscles that aren’t mobile, and more pressure can lead to injury.
On the flip side, increasing mobility can also increase your performance. This is essentially because your body is able to move freely through extended ranges of motion, which provides an advantage. Mobile athletes may be able to rotate more smoothly, move more quickly, change directions faster, etc …
Increasing Work Capacity + Mobility Simultaneously
Ideally, increasing both work capacity and mobility at the same time is the way to go to get serious increases in performance while mitigating injuries.
When it comes to mobility, practicing even a small number of mobility movements every day can have a measurable effect. Check out the Daily Mobility Workouts on our Durable Athlete app (get 14 days FREE here) as well as the mobility section.
A few simple ways to begin increasing your work capacity include:
• Adding an extra workout every week. An example of this is if you do squats twice per week, try adding in a third day. On this third day, reduce the weight a bit, but increase the number of reps (volume).
• Another tactic is to begin knocking seconds off of your rest periods between sets. For example: if you’re used to resting for 5 minutes between heavy sets, knock 15 seconds off your resting time. Continue to knock 15 seconds off after each workout until you’re only resting 2 minutes between each set.
These are a few simple strategies you can implement to begin increasing your capacity and mobility. However, our new 12-week Work Capacity + Hypertrophy Program will guide you through 12 weeks of workouts designed specifically for gaining strength and work capacity, so you have everything you need at your fingertips to start getting results! Join here:
