Yes, it's decent and takes consistent training with good technique to develop the strength to lift at that level.
Someone doesn't just "grip and rip" 500 without at least a couple of years of experience training up to it.
One of the biggest factors to lifting heavier weight is the weight of your own body. An athlete who weighs 250 will find it easier to lift 500 than one who weighs 180 because he's only lifting twice his own body weight compared to the more than two and a half times his own weight like it would be for the smaller guy.
So someone who wants to increase their personal best one rep max wants to consume more calories for a couple of reasons:
1. One reason is to decrease the gap between the pounds they want to lift and the pounds of their own body weight they can use to lift it.
2. The other reason is to give the body more reserves of calories to burn as fuel for more energy they can use for the lift.
You can optimize your training for more efficiency depending on what your goal is in terms of:
a) just wanting to get stronger (like strength training and powerlifting for example),
b) just wanting to build more muscle mass (like bodybuilding for example),
or
c) wanting to do as much of both as you can, meaning increasing strength and increasing muscle mass (like powerbuilding for example).
Someone who just wants to increase strength without necessarily adding as much muscle mass as possible, can limit themselves to fewer sets consisting of only a few heavy reps each that are closer to their one rep max.
The next week, they add more weight to the reps even if its only about five pounds more than they lifted the last time they trained that lift. This type of training to lift heavier weight than before is strength training in a linear progression. You get stronger and stronger each week you train until months later you've built significantly more strength. Every few weeks, you can schedule a "deload" where you don't lift anything to give your body a week of extra rest. The funny part is, even though you took that scheduled rest week after training consistently heavy week after week, you can't wait to get back to your training the next week and your energy will be through the roof due to the break.
These type of strength training programs are structured for several weeks designed to gradually add more and more weight as you progress each week through the program. This kind of structure can be helpful if you have a set target you'd like to reach by the end of the program because you can anticipate when you're likely to hit that new strength goal due to the linear progression scheduled into the program. You can see if you're on pace to reach the end goal as you complete the sets and reps the program requires each week along the way.
Sometimes you might run into a plateau for any number of reasons. It could be you didn't consume enough calories that week so you're low on energy and strength. It could be you didn't get enough sleep so that your body had the opportunity to release the natural growth hormone the way it does in deep sleep. It could be an outside stressor affecting you with more anxiety than usual that causes your body to become "catabolic" and burn muscle as a response to the release of the stress response hormone cortisol. Or it could be something you're not even aware of and you just can't seem to lift all the heavier reps scheduled that week.
There are a few different ways to break through a strength plateau like that. One way is to lift as many of the heavier reps in each set as you can until you just can't and then rest longer than usual until you can finish that set. Even though you didn't increase the lifts directly just as planned, at least you eventually completed the reps and sets so that your muscles are trained to lift that heavier weight. Ideally, you'd want to only rest the same amount of time between each rep and set at the heavier weight this week as you did last week, with the only difference being you're lifting heavier reps. Sometimes you'll be able to get right back on track the next week without having to rest longer between reps at the heavier weight like you did the week before because you got stronger with the training.
Another way to break through a plateau is to simply reduce the weight of the reps that week if you just can't lift it no matter the effort you use. The key is to only reduce it by as little as you must in order to complete the scheduled reps so that you are at least lifting heavier than you did the previous training session even if it is slightly less than scheduled that week. Just like the previous method, you might find that you gained enough strength through the training to where you're able to get right back on track with the program the next week and complete each set and reps as planned without more rest or less weight as was needed in previous weeks.
If you try both of those approaches and you seem to just stall out at the same strength as the previous week to where you can't even complete the reps at slightly less weight or with more rest between the heavier weight and it feels like you just hit a stubborn brick wall where you can't make any progress, then all is not lost and you don't have to waste that training session. Keeping in mind how the goal is linear
progression, the key in those most stubborn of strength plateaus is to adjust your approach in a way that helps you make
some kind of progress even when you can't lift more than you did in the previous session. In those instances, you can lift the same weight as the previous session but with less rest in between. That way you are still training your body to achieve something that requires more strength than the previous session. Sometimes that is enough to keep building strength and you find you're able to lift the heavier reps scheduled the next week of the program.
So that's a basic approach to training to gain strength.
If the goal is only to add more muscle mass and you don't necessarily care about increasing strength while you do it, then instead of fewer reps at heavier weights, you do back off on the amount of weight per rep to a lighter, more moderate weight significantly less than anywhere near the maximum you can lift with a single rep and you add more reps of that lighter weight in each set. The focus on the mass building isn't necessarily to lift heavier to get stronger, but to simply work your muscles in a total rep range of about 50 reps per muscle group in order to create the micro-tears in the muscle so that when you rest, you trigger your body's hypertrophy (muscle building) process that uses the amino acids in the protein you consumed to feed your muscles during post-workout recovery to repair those tiny tears in the muscles and build them back bigger than they were before. It would do you little good for your goal of growth if you trained in the gym but didn't eat enough in the kitchen to feed your body the calories it needs to add mass, so that's why you hear the old saying, "muscles are made in the kitchen."
So that's if the goal was to strictly add muscle mass. Now we've covered basic approaches to either gain strength or to build muscle mass.
If your goal is to get the best of both worlds, gain strength and grow bigger muscles while you do it, then you want to use the powerbuilding approach. In order to accomplish strength and size without sacrificing too much of one or the other, you lift heavier reps than the strictly muscle-building sets of the bodybuilder so that you increase strength, but you don't lift as heavy as the strictly strength-increasing reps of the powerlifter so that you can complete enough reps per set to stimulate muscle growth.
There are more benefits, in my experience, to this powerbuilding approach because while you're gaining strength, you're also packing on slabs of new lean muscle mass gains that you can ultimately use to lift heavier weights as you continue to build strength and grow. Because you're lifting heavier, you place a demand on your body to repair and rebuild with bigger stronger muscles to meet the increased demand on strength and yet, because you're lifting enough reps to create enough tears to repair and rebuild them with more mass. The fewer reps of the strength training only approach causes the muscles to grow stronger, but with that approach, there's not enough reps performed to cause them to grow as massive as they could. The powerbuilding approach hits that sweet spot where your muscles grow stronger and bigger in size.
A final word on hypertrophy. We somewhat approached this principle when we discussed how to push past previous strength plateaus in order to get stronger than you've ever been before, but this principle was only discussed from the angle of strength progression in a strength training workout program. In order to maximize hypertrophy (muscle growth) in either bodybuilding or powerbuilding, you use the same progression principle, but from a different angle in its application. Instead of decreasing rest periods between reps or sets for strength gaining purposes, you can use the same principle for gaining mass.
To really build the big massive muscles with explosive power and strength, you need to train your fast-twitch muscle fibers. To get a good picture of the difference between fast twitch explosive type muscle and the smaller slow twitch endurance type muscle, look at how different in appearance the muscular track star sprinter looks compared to the much skinnier-looking and not what you'd call "muscular" look of the long distance marathon runner. Why? It's the different types of muscle fiber being trained. One is fast, explosive muscle used for reaching high speed quickly. What do you think of when you think of explosive strength and high speed quickly? If you think about it, you think of
intensity. On the opposite end of the spectrum, do you think of the muscle used to jog at a slower, steady long distance pace as being intense? Not at all. It's the farthest from it. Instead of intense, you think of the exercise done for long distance endurance as boring, because it is. This difference in the fast twitch explosive muscle fiber type and the slow twitch endurance muscle fiber type can be easily seen in the appearance of those who train those types regularly. You can use this knowledge to help you build the explosive power, strength and speed you'd like your football players to possess on the field by targeting these muscle fiber types in the gym with intensity training. Training with intensity can be exploding up through each squat rep. You can do the same with the bench press, shoulder press, deadlifts, and pretty much every exercise you do.
Another way to add intensity besides increasing the speed of the reps in each set is to decrease the time between each set. This means you're incorporating more intensity into your training because you're actually placing more demand for that explosive speed and power on your muscles as well as training your muscles and body to move explosively in the process. Another way to add intensity is to do supersets. Supersets are a set of one lift or exercise immediately followed by another type of lift or exercise without rest in between so that they are not two sets, but one "super" set. This will really stimulate muscle growth due to a different kind of demand for speed, strength, explosion and endurance all at the same time placed on your muscles than they're used to. This type of training will also really improve your conditioning for peak performance.
I think that should be enough to answer your question with the reasons "why" instead of just the "what" of how it works. Hypertrophy and the science of muscle-building is something that has always fascinated me so I definitely find it easier to discuss than finding a stopping point to quit talking about it!
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