While guys like Pavel will claim that “strength is a skill” – it’s true only to a point, and I think that the point is largely misunderstood or misinterpreted nowadays.

Doing strength-building movements – especially and particularly the classic lifts: deadlift, squat, overhead press, clean, chins (weighted), dips (weighted), bench, maybe row – require some “skill,” but I wouldn’t classify them as “motor skills” in the typical sense.

Those are “strength skills.”  They are practiced in a certain way (with ever increasing load/intensity) in order to disrupt homeostasis and create adaptations in the body.

That is, simply repeating the movements involved in strength exercises will not get you stronger.  Practice the movement all you want, but if you don’t add weight (progressively over time), you won’t get any stronger.  You might, however, get more skilled.

The first example that comes to mind that allows for a nice comparison of these two types of “skill” development is the sport of Olympic weightlifting.

In the Soviet Union, and I think in many Eastern Bloc countries with state-funded Olympic training programs, children would be chosen to begin training for their sport at a very young age…perhaps around 5 years old.

For the first three to five years of the child’s training career, they would never touch a real barbell, let alone a weighted barbell.  Instead, they’d practice with a towel, or a wooden dowel.

They’d practice the motor skill of the Olympic lifts – which is a very very specific motor skill (hence those lifts being a sport unto themselves).

Around the age of 10, the child might be allowed to begin practicing with a lightweight barbell, and from there, ever so gradually, progressively add weight – always making sure that they maintained the highest level of motor skill in the execution of the movement.

While a lot of this has to do with children simply being ill-suited for progressive weight training, because they’re still growing at a rapid rate, much of it also has to do with getting a person at a young enough age that they can accumulate 10,000 hours of practice at the skill before they achieve full developmental maturity.

This hearkens back to my old blog posts on skill and skill development.  Skill is problem solving.  It’s the ability to creatively solve problems given the resources available.  “Talent” is what we call “inborn skill.”  And, it seems, that it doesn’t really exist.

While some people may be more uniquely suited for expertise at certain skills (say, because of limb/torso ratios, etc.), the expression of that “talent” is all that really matters.

So, it’s impossible for us to know how real, frequent, or infrequent “inborn” talent is or is not – that is, until every child is given equal access to every musical instrument, athletic sport, computer program, or whatever other skill you want to measure, from the age of 2 on.  Not only that, but they need also be given the freedom, time, money, and emotional support to continue.  Got that?  Great, now tell me how “talented” someone is.

But this post isn’t about talent.  It’s about STRENGTH and SKILL.

The truth is, we all need both.

It’s just that I see so little focus on the real training of EITHER these days.

Most folks in the gym go in and pump some iron to look good.  They don’t try to lift heavy poundages.  They don’t do the classic lifts at all.

They also do bizarre skill-based workouts…things you might do for fun if you were a little kid, but that are treated with unsettling seriousness in an “adult” gym.  Things like balancing on a stability ball on your knees while you move the medicine balls you’re holding in each hand in strange patterns, or while catching and throwing a medicine ball.  Not a lot of laughter…a lot of grimacing.

But what’s the point of that?  I mean what’s the point both of the seriousness with which it’s undertaken, and of the “exercise” itself.  It doesn’t build strength.  There’s no progressing it.  There’s no overload to it.  The body is in too unstable a position to overload.  And it only builds the strangest type of “skill” possible…one divorced from anything you might encounter in life at all.

If you’re going to be performing that trick on a stage, or a streetcorner, for your paycheck, it’s important to practice that.

But if not – what the hell are you doing?

The saddest thing of all is that the trainers aren’t even laughing.  I mean, not the ones who are making the people do it.

Take a look at your programming, ye trainers and trainees.  Return to the basics.

Train STRENGTH with heavy stuff, progressively made heavier, and predominantly with “traditional” (bilateral, barbell) movements.

Train SKILL outside, or wherever you exercise that skill, and try to make it as absolutely perfect as possible…