eli5: Why do people who are actually strong look different than bodybuilders who train all week?
In: Biology
Let’s use the analogy of two houses being built beside each other.
The first house has all the main structures going up at once, the concrete foundation is setting and the builders are putting up walls. It all comes together well and they’re already painting the outside of the house.
Next door is slower. They’ve waited for the concrete slab to set and even done a thicker layer. They’ve put up scaffolding and reinforced where they’re going to put the walls up. They’ve only put up 3 of the walls whilst next door is already painting.
The next morning the builders turn up after a major storm overnight that battered both houses. The house that was being painted has crumbled to rubble. The house next door has had the 3 walls fall down but the scaffolding is still up.
The shoulder is a good example of this – most big bodybuilders can name the larger superficial muscles (delts, lats, traps, tris, bis). These get torn and reheal by the less reps heavier weight style of training and makes the outside of the house look bigger. Ask the strongmen to name the rotator cuff structures and they will likely be able to tell you, because their more reps less than max weight style is concerned with the structural integrity and scaffolding of the house.
Big trees fall hard. Hard trees don’t fall.
I just want to throw in that bodybuilders are actually strong as well….Ronnie Coleman could squat 800+ pounds in his prime….if that’s not “actually strong” then I must be the equivalent of a wet noodle.
Since I’m not seeing it explicitly mentioned, bodybuilders are extremely strong. Beyond a year or two of resistance training, every bit of strength gain will necessarily come with hypertrophy (muscle growth). Per unit of body mass, bodybuilders aren’t the strongest because they focus on “show muscles” like biceps, triceps, pecs, and medial delts, whereas strongmen and power lifters tend to have disproportionate quads, traps, and backs. You may be seeing some selection bias as well, where people whose bodies respond to resistance training with hypertrophy stay with bodybuilding, whereas guys/girls who just get stronger don’t.
I’m surprised it isn’t mentioned yet, although it is first necessary to define what you mean by ’actually strong’. Anyway, the reason is that strength to a large degree is a neurological adaptation and one can become very *efficient* at utilizing the muscles(and brain) to do a specific movement. Bodybuilders however don’t train to become proficient in certain movements, they are concerned with size and aesthetics and size. They engage therefore more with 1) alternating phases of weight gain followed by weight loss, and 2) a large variety of exercises, in particular isolated exercises to exhaust each muscle group.
To continue upon other’s content, functional labor doesn’t make you look strong. It just makes you strong.
Example: I spent a full summer picking up things that weighed around 100 pounds. All day, every day. I was on heavy crew. In the course of a day, I’d lift an odd sized object weighing about 80 lbs about 1,000 times a day. I was strong as hell. It was a pot yard nursery so I was working 10 gallon which are soaked in and there’s a big ass tree in it as well. They are heavy and awkward. By the end, I was lifting them like picking up a cat.
I went back to the gym when college was back in session. I had no problems moving 100lb weights with one hand and setting them. It was like picking up a box of cereal to me.
Then I went to do some bench curls. I was no stronger than before. I could pick up 250 lbs to my chest like it was nothing, but I still only curled 70 lbs on a bent bar.
Bottom line, the pretty muscles don’t seem to do any real work. The big muscles take the weight. Also, your own mass makes a difference. You don’t get skinny when you do heavy labor. You have a gut that looks like fat but it’s all muscle. It ain’t pretty, but you need it.
You also need the fat for energy when you’re really working hard. I’ve lost 4 lbs in a day from heavy labor. Granted, that’s mostly sweat, but the fat gives you reserve energy. Without the reserve, you’ll tank out.
Also, the proportions of body builders are different that people who are focused on the work. There are plenty of youtubes showing a BB who is bigger and stronger getting choked out by a smaller MMA fighter.
Look at boxers. They need strength and endurance, but they typically have biceps and chest muscles that are nowhere near the proportions found on the average BB.
Strongman have more fat. Bodybuilder try to go as low in fat% as they can. They also tend to train different.
But you have strong bodybuilders and strongmen who look like bodybuilders.
Look at old video’s of Ronny Coleman. He’s lifting insane amounts of weight. Look up “Mariusz Pudzianowski” in google image search. He’s looking like a bodybuilder despite being a strongman.
What do you consider “actually strong”?
To build on what the other user was saying about strongman and fat, Bodybuilders are actually strong, but they train in different rep ranges and with different movements. They focus on higher repetition to maximize muscle growth and isolate lagging muscles, rather than training 1 to 3 reps on big movements most of the time, which maximize muscle recruitment. If a power lifter and a body builder had a bench press competition, the power lifter will have a higher 1 rep max, but the bodybuilder will likely have a higher 10 or 15 rep max due to specificity.
Bodybuilders isolate individual muscles for maximum development.
Strong people do tasks that develop the musculature to work together. Individual muscles aren’t hypertrophied, and don’t interfere with each other’s motion.
Bodybuilder physiques are for looks, not for practical applications.
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