Tricks of the trade: The indisputable relationship between muscle size and muscle strength
1 June 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Athletes, good ones who know what theyre doing seek to improve their athletic attributes. An athletic attribute is a characteristic, a trait or identifiable asset that improves performance. The bottom line for an athlete is performance and how to improve it. There is a definitive cause-and-effect at work: if you become faster, stronger, increase endurance, agility or any other numerical benchmark, athletic performance improves. It matters not the sport selected, baseball or shot-putting, long distance running or soccer, football, racquetball or dodge ball if you improve your athletic attributes, i.e., improve degree of leanness (as expressed as body fat percentile), become stronger, more powerful, improve speed and agility, etc., etc., whatever it is you do you will do better. This is a proven fact.
Back in the ancient days of yore, athletes were taught and instructed that all they needed do (or should do) was practice the sport, over and over and over, ad infinitum. Status quo coaches pontificated with incredible solemnity that if you wanted to be a better baseball or basketball player than you should play baseball and basketball all the time. You would improve the most by engaging in the sport exclusively as this would improve the specific skill set needed for elevated performance within the sport. This orthodox mindset was sacrosanct until the sixties and early seventies when cross-trained athletes starting beating the holy hell out of the purists on practice fields and gyms worldwide. Coaches that harbored athletic prejudice, expressed in a disdainful attitude towards weight training (makes you slow and ponderous; you wont be able to get out of your own way.) and nutrition (diet is for girls) and cardio activity other than the sport itself suddenly started getting spanked by cross-trained athletes on a consistent basis.
One quick example: back in the early seventies NFL defensive ends like all-pro Fred Dwyer weighed 245 and agile as cats, quick and gazelles, lean as ultra-marathon runners. An orthodox athletic ideal unfortunately for the gazelles a new breed of offensive lineman achieved critical mass in Pittsburg and now the gazelles faced saber toothed tigersguys like Mike Webster who weighed 275 with a lower body fat percentile than the gazelles. Mike had a 550-bench press and a nasty attitude. Physical to the max he would simply pummel and pound the smaller men with no mercy or quarter. In an awesome display of lung power and stamina, Webster became the only athlete ever to run up and down the every row of the stadium steps of Three River Stadium without stopping one time. The bulked-up, leaned-out cross-trainers (possessing skill sets equal to the gazelles) began systematically to defeat lean and light rivals: it was akin to bulky artic hunters slaughtering baby seals with clubsno more gazellesnowadays a defensive end stands 66 weighs 285-pounds and has a sub-five second 40-yard dash.
Every one weight trains and does cardio and eats with great precision - because if you dont you are going to get beat by someone who does. Stuff done outside the sport can add 30% to sport performance. Acquisition of athletic attributes is the goal of performance-based cross-training. Growing big powerful muscles is a spin-off side benefit for athletes. Bodybuilders follow a protocol designed specifically to grow muscles as large as possible. The athlete seeks to become as strong as possible because pure strength is an incredible asset regardless the athletic activity.
Athletes train to acquire strength and power and it is coincidental that the acquisition of strength always results in a concurrent increase in muscle size. Get a lot stronger in a particular weight training exercise and watch as the targeted muscle becomes significantly larger. Biological cause-and-effect. Science baby. As a Purposeful Primitive we weight train like the athlete, not like the bodybuilder. The athlete seeks to get stronger and stronger is defined as boosting the poundage or repetitions in an exercise. Increase the poundage significantly and realize a significant increase in muscle size. Strive to get stronger and everything else will fall into place.
People often become confused regarding motive and intent, in progressive resistance training; regardless the mode or method, the goal should be to become stronger and this is expressed numerically. Dont become confused: train three to five times a week for around an hour past that and the point of diminishing returns sets in. Within the allotted hour blast away at ultra-basic, compound multi-joint exercises. If you have any time left follow up with a few judiciously selected isolation exercises. Consciously seek to extend the limit in some manner, fashion or waypush the boundary of the envelope ceaselessly, relentlessly. Realize that the limit is a shifting target. Realistically we have our good days, bad days and great days. The experienced athlete makes subtle daily limit adjustments based upon circumstance.
Physical limits need be psychologically accessed before each workout: I might be able to do 200-pounds for 12-reps on a good day, 200×10 on a normal day and 200×8 on a bad day. You can make progress without exceeding your all-time best: if I am having an off day and my realistic best is 200×8 and I come in and workout and manage 200×9 I have exceeded 100% of capacity on that particular day so progress is made despite 200×9 being way below my all-time best of 200×12.
Is this line of thought too obtuse and obscure? Minutia beyond comprehension? Angels dancing on the head of a pin? My old training partner Larry C (multi-time world master powerlifting champion) alluded to my being too technical for normal people in an e-mail yesterday? Comments?
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