Bit of a weird question. How is it that that people gain strength without getting relatively bigger or more muscle.
Imagine I can bench 100kg or 225lb for a 1 rep max. Now imagine I train hard and now can lift the same weight for 3 reps.
Its unlikely your muscles have gotten three times bigger.
What has actually changed in the body to enable this?
In: Biology
Lifting requires groups of muscles working together, never a single one.
At the beginning they aren’t used to working together, so you actually lift will below your real capacity.
When you lift heavier weights, your body adapts in various ways beyond just building bigger muscles. Your nervous system becomes more efficient at coordinating muscle contractions, your tendons and ligaments get stronger, and you improve your technique. So, even though your muscles might not significantly increase in size, these other adaptations allow you to lift heavier weights without necessarily getting much bigger.
iirc depending on genetics and the type of training you do muscle fibers can either get larger or become more dense
Just to clarify – your initial question is flawed. When you lift the weight for 3 reps instead of 1, you are not 3 times stronger, you are only 9% stronger. And while it’s true that you didn’t gain 9% of your overall weight as muscle, it is very possible for your muscle fibres to have gained some volume from that. But your muscle fibres don’t get stronger just by gaining volume, they also simply adapt and become denser/tougher.
Add to that your body’s way to adapt by making you simply more efficient (via engaging more muscles, providing more stability etc)- and voila, you are 9% stronger by only gained maybe 1-3% volume in your chest.
Would love to hear is this what I’m writing is proven.
When I was in gymnasium we used to arm wrestle a lot.
One guy didn’t appear to have much muscles (and it wasn’t hidden beneath layers of fat), yet he was so strong. I assumed that 1cm^(2) of his muscle cross section was certainly stronger than 1cm^(2) of others. If there is such thing in biology I don’t know but that was my impression.
I don’t know if everyone’s single muscle fiber is same strength but it appears not.
Moving from one rep at a given weight to 3 reps at a given weight is not tripling your strength. That’s a pretty minor increase in strength. The actual weight is much more significant. Going from say a 75 lb bench to a 225 lb bench is more like tripling your strength (it is literally 3x the weight but “strength” as a concept is a little more nuanced). And you would find that you did indeed build substantially more muscle doing that.
Lifting is a skill that can be practiced and honed. Someone very skilled will lift more than someone unskilled at the same muscle mass.
Of course, it’s impossible to ever give a real world example since highly skilled lifters have lifted a lot and built a bunch of muscle as a result
If you are able to lift more weight over time, your muscles *will* have got bigger. Perhaps not much, and slower when you’re more advanced, but neurological adaptation will only get you so far.
You’re not really. You really can’t build muscle or strength without the other. You can definitely prioritize one though and build a lot more strength than muscle. Basically it’s this.
Think of muscles as factories that produce strength. When you build muscle, you’re building more factories and making your already existing factories bigger. But each of these factories are very inefficient. Lifting is a skill. There’s also training your central nervous system, lifting cues and a whole bunch of other stuff powerlifters focus on. This is basically the equivalent of making those factories more efficient at producing strength.
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