If you're reading this, I bet you have physical goals that aren't going as well as you'd hoped.

I spent years rock climbing without advancing through the grades.

I spent years strength training, collecting more injuries than actual strength.

A recent breakthrough in my training came from an unexpected place...

Bodybuilding.

What to these characters all have in common?

• Strength Athletes

• Climbers

• Average Joes who what to improve their health

They all have something to learn from bodybuilders.

Spoiler alert: It's not the spray tans.

I got into physical fitness first through indoor rock climbing, then yoga, and finally resistance training. I noticed in those cultures, bodybuilding had a bit of a bad reputation.

To be fair, the image of professional bodybuilders, with their succulent orange marinated beef bodies, looks a bit strange from the outside.

But we can't let our perception of an entire activity, culture, and school of knowledge be skewed by a few extreme examples. 

I don't identify with the goals of professional bodybuilders.

• I'm working out to improve my health, I don't want to take steroids.

• I don't want to starve myself and perform onstage.

• I don't want to spray tan.

But this is a logical fallacy. Like saying all runners have to run races. I've started trail and road running, yet I hate racing.

You can be a climber without having to live in a van. You can build your body without gulping down protein shakes. You can get bigger and still be able to scratch your own back.

We can do any of these activities in our own unique way. We don't need to feel constrained by ideologies and dogma from other practitioners. We can feel free to find our own path forward, even if it doesn't fit neatly into an existing category.

One of the most liberating things in life is to develop your own unique approach on training and your various hobbies. If what's already out there doesn't fit you perfectly, do what does. Create it.

Any perspective has unique value to share, and lessons for us to learn.

What type of athlete am I?

I'm not really a strength athlete. I don't do strongman or powerlifting.

But I am trying to develop general strength, for advanced lifts and skills.

I'm also a rock climber, so I use my whole body to get up the wall -- with a huge emphasis on the fingers and forearms.

I'm training for my first ultramarathon, a coast to coast race of 55km.

Am I a hybrid athlete? A multi-sport athlete? Does it matter?

A common thread to these various disciplines in which I dabble is this:

Rebuilding my body to be stronger and more robust for the demands of life & sport

In other words, bodybuilding.

I'm interested in building improved capacity in my body. For general strength , but also very specialized sport-specific strength:

• I want to be strong for life, able to pick things up off the floor and hoist them over my head

• I want massive forearm muscles, tough finger tendons, and robust shoulders to meet the demands of climbing

• I want upper body mass to push my upper body strength ceiling higher

• I want legs that don't get injured running long distances, to support my aerobic training. But I don't want so much leg muscle that it negatively affects my climbing.

The discipline that knows the most about developing these attributes is bodybuilding.

3 Lessons I've learned from the bodybuilding toolset:

1. Muscle is hardware. Strength is software.

Muscle is the raw material, and strength is the operating system sitting on top. So both are integral parts to improving function.

Steven Low outlines the simple formula for strength in his foundational book Overcoming Gravity:

Strength = Neural Adaptations x Muscle Cross-Sectional Area

“Developing Strength with focus on these neural factors in conjunction with muscle mass gains will provide faster results.”

It's possible to essentially maximize the neural adaptions for a given quantity of muscle. Once you reach a certain level of muscle fiber recruitment, you need more mass in those fibers to produce more force.

In this graphic, the strength output is the area of the rectangle. We see that both extremes of focus on muscle (the pump & fluff bodybuilder) and skill (the skinny powerlift specialist) yield less overall strength than a combination of both.

This is why there are weight classes in all strength sports.

In my own training, I spent several years training without really ever stimulating much muscle growth.

I did grow some from strength programming, and I got a lot stronger at first. But in almost every lift and movement pattern, my progress stalled. I started to acquire overuse injuries in my elbows and shoulders.

I now believe I had maxed out my neural adaptations. I continued to try to progress to heavier weights, but I simply didn't have enough muscle mass to support it. I had reached my strength ceiling for that weight.

I started out training calisthenics, but hit a massive plateau. I now believe it was due to not having put on enough muscle to do advanced skills at my height (6'1").

But skill is also software. The unique skills required for any sport have a minimum hardware requirement as well . Having plenty of system power makes learning and mastering these skills easier.

Whatever your physical goals are, a foundation of specific muscle mass will help you. ‘Where’ and ‘how much’ vary by sport.

2. Moderate to high rep ranges are underrated.

Criminally underrated.

One salient difference between the domains of strength versus hypertrophy training is rep range. In strength programs, there's a focus on 1-5 reps. Bodybuilding has a more varied approach, with a lot of 8-12 and even as high as 15-20 rep ranges.

When I focused on strength for years, I don't think I ever did than 6 repetitions in a set.

When I hit plateaus, my technique would drop to meet the level of the higher weight. My strength stopped rising to meet the challenge. I developed bicep tendonitis from overhead pressing, and elbow tendonitis from weighted pull ups.

Now I incorporate lots of 8-12 rep work:

• This is still pretty heavy, but allows many more reps with solid technique. And more closer to failure.

• In 3 rep sets, only the last rep is close to failure. And the technique usually suffers.

15-20 rep work also stimulates growth effectively— though it's much harder to reach failure. But this is a great mental skill. I think it's helped increase my toughness, and my ability to tolerate suffering.

The carryover to absolute strength is clear.

Even though I'm not doing any low rep sets— I just hit an 11 rep-max on weighted chin ups of +27kg. And each rep was slow and controlled. This with no elbow pain, while 8 months ago I was doing +25kg for a max of 5 reps when my elbow pain started to develop.

Higher rep ranges seem to allow strength development with less joint stress. Probably due to using lower loads, with less incentive to cheat form.

It allows the muscle to be the limiting factor, more than technique and more than soft tissues, which are slower to adapt to training stress.

2. Isolations & Specialized Exercises Are Incredible

If there's one thing that bodybuilders do well, it's attack their isolation exercises with intensity. And if you have specific goals in any sport, you need to do exactly this. Because to overcome specific weaknesses, you must target them directly.

It's the combination of specificity and intensity which is so powerful.

• I'm hitting curls as hard as I'm hitting deadlifts.

• I'm hitting tibialis raises like my life depends upon it—and it's helping me get over shin splints from a ramp up in running volume.

• I'm doing lateral raises to complement my overhead presses and seeing great progress in both movements.

• For climbing, you can never have too much finger strength. The main driver of progress for me in the last year has been armlifting. This is using grip implements to deadlift weight off the ground. Armlifting in hypertrophy rep ranges (8-15) has been instrumental in improving my climbing performance. And I'm doing fat grip farmer carries to beef up my forearms.

The key with these is treating every training exercise— no matter how small— as important. Go into each set with absolute intention, because each part is essential to the whole.

1 Lesson From Strength To Apply To Bodybuilding

Measure your progress by strength.

Measure your bodybuilding progress by how strong you're getting. Your weight won't change much even on a weekly basis, so it can be misleading.

Even measuring your body parts is only meaningful on long timescales. And if you're not a 'serious' bodybuilder, like I'm not, you probably don't care too much about your measurements anyways.

But we must track our progress, and the way to do it is through tracking strength increases in your training log. Strength is the short-term metric.

As long as you're adding weight or reps over time— while training as close to failure as possible— you'll get bigger. But the strength gains will show up before you notice size.

So this means you'll be tracking more like 10 rep maxes, 15 rep maxes, and 20 rep maxes.

But you know what? These numbers are way more meaningful than 1RMs.

If you have to take a pre-workout, peak for 3 months to produce a 1RM performance, it's not a good reflection of how strong you really are.

When someone asks ' how much do you bench' and you say some number that you did once, a year ago, and couldn't reproduce any time in the next month, you're not being honest.

Tell me what you can do for 10 controlled reps with no warmup, and I'll tell you how strong you really are.

If you are stuck in your own fitness or health journeys, I'm doing free consults to help get you un-stuck. DM me on twitter with whatever your struggle is and I'll get you back in motion.

Thanks and stay strong out there.

I hope you enjoyed the read.

—John