I was wondering if there’s anything along the lines of 1lb of muscle can pull/push x lb(s). Or if muscles can even be measured like that. Just curious if there are deminishing returns when it comes to muscle growth and performance.
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The factors are too complicated to simplify it down like that.
Things like where the muscle attaches to the bone affect the force that person can generate, as does the proportion of fast Twitch vs slow twitch muscle fibers.
Even if you account for that, some peoples muscles hold more or less glycogen (and thus water) than others, which gives benefits for anaerobic exercises, but also means their muscle weighs more for a lower quantity of actual muscle fibers.
Then there is the efficiency of the movement in the subject; people have different nerve conduction velocities, neuron firing speeds and patterns etc which also have an effect on how much force they can generate with a given motion.
Two people with the exact same height, weight and body fat percentage could nonetheless have significantly different performance for those reasons (and more!)
There *is* a diminishing returns situation with muscle size/volume though, for a *bunch* of reasons. Science and Practice of Strength Training by Vladimir M. Zatsiorsky & William J. Kraemer is a decent resource if you want to know more.
There is quite a lot of research when it comes to energy efficiency. Measure the mechanical power output of cyclists while also measuring exhaled CO2 and you get nice numbers on the energy efficiency of their muscles. It’s usually around 20% I.e. you generate a lot more waste heat than actual mechanical output. When cycling at 100W mechanical output power your body produces hundreds of watts of heat.
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