Building strength requires quality work, not heaps of volume. That’s where the heavy single method comes in.

Coach and YouTuber Daniel Vadnal explains that going as heavy as you safely can, while keeping your form sharp, can have a powerful effect on strength. After implementing the heavy single method in his own training, Vadnal added 15kg to his weighted pull-up in just one month.

The same principle can be applied to almost any lift you want to get stronger at, whether that’s the squat, bench press, deadlift or shoulder press.

Best of all, it’s incredibly simple.

Progressively work up to the heaviest weight you can lift for a specific exercise with a series of warm-up sets. Once you’re fully dialled into the movement and prepared, complete a one-rep max effort.

For Vadnal, that helped him add 15kg to his already-heavy weighted pull-up in just four weeks.

‘Each week I would do a heavy single. I’d warm up, keep going, keep going, and then just do a top set of my chin-up. So, starting out several weeks ago, this was about 65 kilos, then I went up to 70, then to 75, and then also today trying out the 80 kilos – and lo and behold, I achieved that,’ he says.

A heavy single teaches the body to produce maximum force and can help drive neural adaptations. Lifting near your limit requires your nervous system to recruit motor units efficiently and rapidly.

Vadnal’s linear progression shows how the method can work: his body adapted quickly without the higher levels of fatigue he might have accumulated from more volume or repeated heavy sets.

‘It puts you in a really good place to make linear progress because your body is adapting. You’re getting more of a strength response, a strength adaptation. You get a high rate of force development, the neural display of what your body can do,’ Vadnal adds.

‘After you finish doing that, then you can do a series of back-off sets,’ Vadnal explains.

Back-off sets involve dropping the weight slightly and performing a few quality reps. These are still heavy – Vadnal completes a few sets of three reps with around 80% of his one-rep max – but he makes sure not to reach failure.

That allows him to accumulate more quality volume without creating excessive fatigue. These submaximal loads also give him more technically sound practice with heavy weights. Grinding through reps would defeat the point of the approach.

‘I’m doing triples with around 80% of my one rep max. And in this example today, I’m using 65 kilos. So, it’s a really simple way of priming your nervous system to handle one-rep maxes, get comfortable displaying your strength in that single, and then conservatively backing off just to gain a little bit more of those reps in your body at a high intensity, well shy of failure is a smart approach,’ he adds.

It’s worth noting that research suggests one-rep max training isn’t the most efficient way to build muscle, with more reps and slightly lighter weights generally better suited to hypertrophy. But if your goal is pure strength, the heavy single method could help you make progress quickly.

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