As the title says. Why does hypertrophy (growing muscle tissue in size) does not correlate with the strength of the individuals training for strength (as in heavy weight lifting, without growing muscle tissue)?
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The stuff we use to measure strength is all skills. People who work very hard to get good at performing the heaviest deadlift possible will probably deadlift more than people who have larger muscles but don’t work on heavy deadlifts as often.
Also, it takes a different kind of strength training to get the biggest muscles possible than it takes to lift the biggest weight one time. The lifts that allow you to move the most weight (like deadlifts, squats, bench press) allow that because they use many muscles at the same time, they’re called compound lifts. If you spend all your time training those, some of those muscles (like your quads) will get too tired to carry on, while other muscles (like your biceps) aren’t tired yet.
So people who want to get their muscles as big as possible do fewer compound lifts. Instead they spend more time doing isolation lifts, where say they work out every muscle in their shoulders until they couldn’t possibly lift another lb. Then they work out their biceps until they’re completely obliterated, on and on until they’ve hit every part of every muscle.
So if you were to measure strength by “how many moderately heavy bicep curls can you do in a row” people with very large muscles usually *would* do better than people who train for “strength”. Because that’s not the strength exercise they practice.
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