Six Strength Training ‘Rules’ You Can Safely Ignore

I find that some of the most interesting things in the new ACSM guidelines are where it tells us what not to worry about. According to the evidence the authors have reviewed, there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t conclusively supported, and you can safely stop worrying about it:

1) Training “to failure” isn’t necessary. You don’t have to keep going with an exercise until you physically can’t. You should work pretty hard, but hitting the point of failure is not critical.

2) Instability training isn’t better for balance. You don’t need to stand on unstable surfaces to train your balance; balance gets better as people get stronger, regardless of whether they used stable or unstable surfaces to train.

3) Time under tension isn’t important. Some gym bros will tell you that the amount of time your muscle spends doing an exercise is the most important thing, and thus slow reps are better than fast ones. The ACSM review did not find any benefit of maximizing time under tension for either strength or muscle growth.

4) Beginner/intermediate/advanced routines aren’t needed. The same basic advice applies to everyone, the ACSM concludes. That doesn’t mean you have to train the same way as an advanced lifter as you did as a beginner, but it also means you can just keep doing what works for you as long as it’s working.

5) Any equipment you use to strength train is fine. Gym workouts, home workouts, resistance bands, bodyweight exercises—anything that gives you a good strength workout is fine. You should make sure you can do challenging sets of exercise with whatever you choose, but there’s no inherent reason to prefer barbells over, say, resistance bands at home.

6) Progressive overload isn’t always needed. This will be a shocker to a lot of fitness buffs! Gradually increasing the difficulty of your workouts is a way to get stronger, but it’s not always necessary to get the basic health benefits. That said, if you start out with very light or easy exercises at the beginning, you’ll need to increase the difficulty to make sure you’re training hard enough.

Ultimately, the guidelines emphasize that doing something is better than nothing, and that finding something you will stick to is more important than optimizing the details of your routine. Only about 30% of us do any strength training twice a week, and that number may be as low as 10% for older people.