How to develop useful strength?

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I suppose it depends on your definition of “useful.”  If your goal is to impress people around you with the amount of weight you lift, any type of strength training will do.  

Most of the heavy lifting that we do in the gym (deadlift, squat, split squat, etc…) tends to be in the sagittal plane of motion.  This can lead to some problems.  Have you ever seen a guy who is very “gym-strong” try to do something full-body, multiplanar, balance-dependent, and/or explosive?  For example, break dancing, hitting a homerun, or executing a kick-flip on a skateboard?  It often looks clumsy, or mechanical.  Why?  Because a gym-strong person has all the “hardware” to execute these movements, but they’re used to doing these movements in isolation (e.g. biceps curls), or in a single plane of motion (e.g. deadlifts), or slowly (e.g. heavy squats).  They often will need a “software” upgrade to be more useful in the real world.

In order to make sure you’re real-world-strong, not just gym-strong, it’s important that your training includes a few challenges: (1) rotational movements, (2) compound (multi-joint) movements, and (3) a variety of speeds of muscular contraction.  Below are examples of each of these: 

• Rotational movements: woodchop’s

• Multi-joint movements: 1-arm dumbbell row

• Variety of speeds of contraction: med ball overhead slams

Incorporating rotational movements, multi-joint movements, and a variety of speeds will help you keep the strength you develop useful.