How strong is the correlation between strength and muscle definition?

Question

For example, a 170 lb (70 kg) person with defined muscles versus a less muscular person.

In: 166

Answer 1

Strength is the ability to generate force and is loosely correlated with muscle size. Bigger muscles are usually stronger than smaller ones, but not always. Strength is also heavily dependent on the ability of the nervous system to properly trigger muscle groups to generate that force in sync with each other. That’s where you get the skinny guys on a construction site who can lift more with ease compared to the newbie who always goes to the gym and targets size over strength. There are also differences in types of muscle fibers, heavily genetically dependent that are stronger than others but more prone to fatigue, weaker but less prone, and a middle one.