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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It does correlate, the difference between size and strengh is mostly overblown. For non elite atheltes bigger basicly means stronger
There are some cases that skews how people see this:
– Powerlifter vs bodybuilder: Powerlifters look smaller compared to bodybuilders while they are often way stronger. This is the result of different goals. Bodybuilders want to look big so they train the muscles that make you appear big and muscular. This means they often isolate biceps, chest and shoulder exercises to make them look super big. For powerliftiers theese musces only get trained with compound exercises as they aren’t as important for competitions. Also very important is bodybuilders cut to decrease bodyfat%, and if shirtless a smaller more cut guy may look bigger than a bigger guy with higher bodyfat%. Powerlifters don’t want to get lower on bodyfat as its suboptimal for performance. This is also an example for many other sports vs bodybuilding where they look smaller but can easily be stronger than bodybuilders in their fields.
– Steroids: If steroids are involved size CAN diverge from strength more. A lot of times it does because pushing strength to the limit when using steroids has a higher chance of injury, so athletes may focus on a higher rep lower weight routine for safety.
– Big guys who dont train: Someone might be big but never really trained in which case they are big but quite weak. You need the mind muscle connections to lean how to really use your musces.
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.
Strength is a skill, so it requires your brain and other cells in your spinal cord to ACTIVATE muscle fibers in a coordinated way. With training (exercise), the central nervous system gets better at creating powerful contractions, activating more fibers than in those who are untrained. *Yes*, muscle fiber size is related to maximum force output, but the **advanced motor coordination** that stems from years of training explain why it’s possible to have smaller muscles yet still have very high force production.
**PS for those who strength train:** How you lift matter for size, with muscle-lengthening activity (eccentric activation of a muscle) leading to more size gains than the muscle-shortening movements (concentric). So if you don’t want to gain muscle but want to get as powerful as possible, you may drop the weights (olympic lifting for example) to avoid the eccentric part of the exercise. Gain that power without gaining much muscle size.
Your body wants to adapt to what it failed to do at the gym, it will want to get purely stronger when it failed at a test of strength, and it will want to get bigger when it fails a test of more prolonged strength. When you train for strength by lifting for lower reps, you’re training to recruit more muscle fibers during your lifts, more muscle fibers working means more force being generated. When your training for muscle size, you’re prioritizing just building as many new muscle fibers as possible.
You’ll still build strength with hypertrophy training and size with strength training, just things like your training rep range, rest time and sets will determine the strength to size ratio.
Sometimes muscles get bigger because they have more of a fluid called sarcoplasm. This is how bodybuilders get bigger. On the other hand you can make the actual muscle fibers bigger which is what power lifter generally go for and works better for total strength. A body builder and power lifter of the same size will have strength differences for these reasons
Muscle size does correlate with muscle strength. What you’re asking is why size is not perfectly correlated with strength
It *does* correlate, it’s just that it’s one of two components, the other being *motor unit recruitment*. Basically you got a bunch of fibers (motor units) that make up your muscles, and you have nerves coursing within those that trigger their contractions, but you might not actually have enough nerves to trigger all of them.
So if you start being more active, the body can respond to the increased performance need by either growing more muscle mass, or increasing *innervation*, and it’ll choose based on whether there’s enough protein available to build and sustain the increased muscle mass. This is why eating lots of protein is critical to bodybuilding, and also why competitive weight lifters aren’t necessarily as built, since maximizing motor unit recruitment gives more strength without bumping up one’s weight class.
Strength is a function of nerve innervation of motor neurons. The more nerve-motor neuron connections, the more “pulling” that occurs within a muscle. Hypertrophy (hyperplasia) is an increase in the number of muscle cells, these will inherently have some nerve-motor neuron connections, but not in the same density as in muscle groups that are adapted to increase density of these nerve-motor neurons.
Peak Force production (max strength) vs Hypertrophy (muscle size). When one increases, the other will increase but not proportionally.
People talk about “old guy strength” in the trades. There are lots of older thinner wiry guys who are incredibly strong. This has a lot to do with knowing how to move, learning over time how to apply more of their body (as well as superior leverage and centers of gravity) to a task. I see so many younger kids stand and try to shove. And fail. Because they’re only using their triceps. The older guy is pushing with his entire body.
I find this interesting myself.
I’m only 160 yet can carry a lot. I see other guys like myself on the job carrying a shit ton too.
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