When muscular endurance is increased, if muscles are not getting larger, in what way are they becoming stronger?
In: 70
Muscles get stronger through hypertrophy, which can be sarcoplasmic or myofibrillar — two pretty different ways the muscle can get larger. Yet even without it, strength can increase without size changes in several ways.
The blood vessels feeding the muscles can expand and allow more flow, which means more fuel, oxygen and waste removal. Like when you can’t do something even once more, but an hour later you can do it again.
Also, the central nervous system can ‘adapt’ to doing the same thing, over time; IE., your brain figures out what corners it can cut in driving an action. A single, simple, repeated action you might eventually be able to do all day, yet if you try some other form of endurance it’s much harder. There’s still plenty of debate as to how this works, though.
And finally, the heart itself is a muscle, and can get stronger accordingly. Full body exercises generally do this the best, like swimming or running or bare-knuckle alleyway fighting — anything that raises your heartrate enough according to your age, over longer periods of time. When the heart is stronger, you can do more things longer even though the body is the the same size.
And finally, muscle size is not a static measure of strength. There’s more to them than their size. There’s different types of muscle fibers, and different type of muscle-LIKE fibers, (like tendons), and because of this smaller people can be stronger than larger people some times. …Though there is definitely a limit.
Most combative sports involve weight classes for similar reasons.
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