What I Learned Trying To Get Stronger

I never considered myself “strong”. I’d see those huge guys in the gym deadlifting plates the size of car tyres, and I’d think to myself, “Okay forget it, I’ll never be like that so let’s just go do some bicep curls and call it a day.”

But late last year, I started feeling like I should become stronger. Maybe it’s a guy thing. I don’t need to look like The Rock, but I wanted to be strong enough to be useful. I want to be able to carry an armchair, or hoist my future kid on my shoulders, or chop down a tree if I ever crash-land on an island (hey, you never know).

I also came across this article about how Everything You Know About Fitness Is A Lie, which got me really inspired. How would I feel if I could deadlift 2 times my body weight? Would it make me more confident? Would I be so massive that my humongous thighs would give little children nightmares?

It was time to find out.

Getting Strong Isn’t Easy, But It Should Be Simple

Here’s the general message of the article I referenced above: Getting strong shouldn’t be complicated. You shouldn’t need to subject yourself to a convoluted mess of weight machines, stairmasters, bosun balls, and kettlebell swings. You don’t need to be a circus acrobat.

Instead, according to Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength program, getting strong involves a series of 4 simple barbell lifts: The squat, the deadlift, the press (aka the overhead press), and the bench press. These are the classic “compound lifts” which work multiple muscles at the same time. No fancy machines, no bosun balls, no yoga mats needed. Just a barbell, a rack, and some weights.

In each session, you do 3 sets of 5 reps for each lift. (The only exception is the deadlift, where you only do one set because that one set is enough torture). The heavy weights whack your muscles, you recover, and in the next session, you add even moreweight, and repeat.

How do you know that you’re getting stronger? Because the actual weight you can lift gives you a tangible, quantifiable measure of your strength progress. As someone who talks to clients all day about measurability, I loved the idea.

But what level of strength should I aim for? A colleague introduced me to Strength Levels, a website that gives you benchmarks based on millions of self-reported results. As a fresh-faced newbie to the strength-training world, I decided that I would aim to hit an Intermediate level for a 1-rep max, which was:

• Squat 1.5x bodyweight
• Press 0.8x bodyweight
• Deadlift 2.0x bodyweight
• Bench Press 1.25x bodyweight

What’s the best way to get a guy obsessed with something? Give him a goal, a way to measure his progress, and the potential of bruising his ego if he fails. I had all three, so off I went.

It’s Not A Good Idea To Do This Yourself

First, I taught myself the lifts using the Starting Strength website and YouTube videos. I practiced them in the office gym, and the first few sessions were easy-peasy. My muscles weren’t aching. I didn’t even break a sweat. I could totally do this!

But over the course of 2-3 weeks, the weights started to feel heavy. After a particularly shaky session when I struggled my way through an overhead press, I decided “Okay I need to find someone to coach me or I’m totally gonna injure myself“

This led me to Hygieia Strength & Conditioning, the only Starting Strength-affiliated gym in Singapore. I visited the gym so that the coach (hi Shaun!) could teach me the lifts in-person. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to take up ongoing coaching so that I could get better.

Unfortunately, Hygieia is all the way in Haig Road which was too far for me. So I signed up for their online coaching program, which involved me setting up an embarrassingly large tripod to film myself lifting (and ignoring all the judgmental looks of everyone around me). At the end of each session, I’d send the recordings to Shaun so that he could give me feedback on my lifts. This wasn’t as good as having an in-person coach, but it was the next best thing.

The Boring Work of Being Consistent

Anyone who’s read books like Atomic Habits will know that the key to success is to be consistent. Boring, mundane, drag-your-feet-even-if-you-don’t-feel-like-it consistency. Schedule your workouts, and STICK TO THEM, even if you’re tired and hungover because your friend who runs an Italian restaurant kept feeding you wine last night (true story).

So that’s what I did. I made it as convenient and low-barrier as possible. Twice a week, Shaun would send me the weights I had to hit for my next session. The lifts themselves were always the same, so I walked into the gym knowing exactly what weight I had to hit for each lift.

I trained twice a week at my office gym, leaving my shoes and equipment in my locker. I’d wake up at 6am, get into the office by 7am (when the squat racks were still empty) and grind through my warmup. Once I hit my first working set, the dopamine was usually enough to get me going to complete the entire workout.

It’s also important to remember what I DIDN’T do. I didn’t train more than twice a week. The Novice program of Starting Strength recommends 3x a week, but I could realistically only commit to twice a week given my work schedule and the need to recover between workouts. Inadequate rest is one of the biggest unseen barriers towards making progress.

Oh, and I had to get a bunch of gear too:

• Weightlifting shoes: These are more stable than regular sneakers and help you to lift heavier weights. I got this pair from Shopee, and immediately felt the difference.
• Chalk: Shaun discouraged me from wearing weightlifting gloves because they tend to weaken grip strength and can obscure the tactile feedback you need to lift properly. Instead, I bought liquid chalk which helped to dry my hands without a mess
• Micro-weights: These were tiny weights in 0.25kg, 0.5kg, 0.75kg increments that I could loan the barbell with to increase the weight by just a little bit each time.
• Weightlifting belt: Once I hit 100kg on the deadlift, Shaun encouraged me to buy a solid 4mm weightlifting belt. There’s a lot to look out for in a belt (more on this here), but it really helped when I was lifting heavy.

When The Going Gets Tough

The first few weeks of the program felt amazing. I could consistently increase the weights on each lift by 2.5kg each time, which meant that my squat could go from 80kg, to 82.5kg, to 85kg, without much difficulty. It felt good to see my numbers go up, which was tangible proof that I was getting stronger.

However, I noticed that any disruptions like travel and illness would set me back significantly. After 8 days of travelling through Europe, I finally found a hotel gym with a barbell rack. But after not training for so long, I had to decrease my weights by 10kg, and it took 2-3 weeks for me to build it back up again.

As I advanced to the heavier weights, it started to get REALLY hard. I recall a particularly tough squat: Straining under the barbell, knees shaking, lower back feeling like it was on fire, and taking every single drop of willpower I had just to stand up. Once I racked the bar, I thought to myself, “Wow, that was really hard”. And I was immediately confronted with the unpleasant thought that my next workout would be EVEN tougher.

When the weights got really heavy, I started failing sets. Whenever I failed a set, I’d have to rest for a bit, and then try and complete the set. This was extremely demoralising, especially for the squat, when I had to unload all the weights, re-rack the bar and weights, and try again. There were days when I could only do 1 rep at a time before failing the next one, over and over again.

As my wife kept reminding me, I can’t keep on increasing weights forever. At some point, I had to hit a ceiling. For me, I knew I was at my limit when I started failing more sets than I could complete. At that point, Shaun started giving me “down weeks” when he dropped my squat & deadlift weights by 10-20kg, before going back up the following week.

So overall, it was TOUGH. There were days when I just wanted to give up. But my obsession over following a set routine got me returning to the gym twice a week, over and over again.

So How Did I Do?

I love a good chart, so here’s one showing my progress over 5 months:

You can see the drops in my squat and deadlift weights in mid-June, when I started failing sets. The bench press and press also followed a zigzag pattern because Shaun gave me lighter weights in alternating weeks.

All in all, my peak results (converted from my 5-rep results into a 1-rep max using this calculator) were:

• Squat 126.7kg (1.69x BW)
• Press 60.2kg (0.8x BW)
• Deadlift 146.3kg (1.95x BW)
• Bench Press 92.3kg (1.23x BW)

How does that compare with my goal of being an Intermediate weightlifter? I managed to exceed my squat goal of 1.5X BW, meet my goal for the Press (0.8x BW), and came in slightly under for my deadlift goal (2x BW) and bench press goal (1.25x BW).

I could have continued training until I hit all 4 goals, but a confluence of factors convinced me it was time to stop: I went travelling, fell sick, AND pulled a muscle during an office competition (more on this below).

As a nice bonus, I took part in an office barbell lifting competition and won a bronze in the Squat category. Before I started training, I would never have imagined I would be standing on a weightlifting podium next to two other massive guys.

The Good and the Bad

So for anyone who’s thinking of trying out the Starting Strength program, here’s my completely subjective and biased view of it:

The Good

• It really does work. I saw tangible gains in the 5 months I trained, and I enjoyed tracking my progress. Having a solid base of strength also provides a great foundation for virtually any other physical activity
• It’s simple. There’s no complicated programming. I knew exactly what I needed to do every time I walked into the gym, and it made my workouts predictable and efficient
• It felt good to complete a new PR every week. In a weird and tangible way, it proved to myself that I could overcome bigger and bigger challenges over time. Knowing this was good for the soul.

The Bad

• It got really hard when the weights got heavy. Failing sets is NOT fun, and it often led to spending a lot of time in the gym because of all the unloading and reloading. I once had a miserable two-hour long session because I kept failing all my sets
• It didn’t really help me to get bigger. I think this was more of a failure on my part. I was definitely eating more (you need fuel to regrow those muscles), but I probably wasn’t eating enough.
• You probably need a coach or a partner to spot you, preferably in-person. Like I shared earlier, the risk of injury is pretty high when your form is off. One reason why I decided to stop the program was because I wanted to find a workout where I’d have an in-person coach who could help me improve

So, What’s Next?

Overall, I’m happy with the progress I made but I’ve decided to try something new.

In the article that started this whole journey, the writer talks about the four basic muscular aptitudes: Strength, power, muscle mass, and muscular endurance. Strength means how much you can lift once. Power means how much you can lift very, very quickly. Muscle mass makes you look bigger and better in a T-shirt, and muscular endurance means how many times you can lift a given weight in a row without stopping.

In training purely for strength, I’ve come to neglect the other three aptitudes. (The realisation came when I climbed up an overhead bridge recently and found myself gasping for breath) So I’ve joined a gym with an in-person coach where I’m training across more modalities.

But I’m glad that I started on this journey, which has given me a good strength foundation to build upon. Maybe my thighs aren’t gonna be scaring little kids anytime soon, but it’s nice to be able to consider myself stronger (even just by a little bit!).