Eli5: Lifting more weight without building more muscle

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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

9 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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