Most gym goers thought the following question at least once “Should I focus on gaining strength or should I rather concentrate on size and aesthetics?”. What people often forget is that these two aren’t mutually exclusive.
You can not add 30 kilos to your squat without your quads growing in size, same as you can not add 5cm to you thighs and not see any improvements on the squat. And this is the case especially for natural athletes.
You can combine these two areas trough all kinds of different methods. Whether it is a periodised program with first a hypertrophy block where you do higher reps with moderate weight and then slowly transitioning into lower reps, higher weight and dialling down on the strength part of your program, undulating periodisation where you constantly switch your primary focus to make it as hard as possible for the body to adapt to a certain type of stimulus, or you can use any other of the many approaches out there.
Natural lifters will always benefit from an increased strength, even if their primary goal is aesthetics. Strength and hypertrophy are related and in some cases even dependent on each other. So people who aren’t willing to let go of their “I don’t care about strength” mindset are robbing themselves of unlocking more of their potential.
Enhanced athletes can get away with just doing high-rep pumping workouts but this is not the case for naturals. People who are not taking anabolic steroids and/or other performance enhancing substances will not see the greatest benefits just from pumping as much blood into the muscle as possible.
The best option is to combine strength & hypertrophy in whichever way you find suits you the best and if you weren’t prioritising strength until this point, try to do so. You will only benefit. And don’t worry that you would lose your aesthetics. It’s the opposite. Your physique will become way better and also bigger.
