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29 Jan 2012 20:14
Why? I've always wondered about this? Are you such an Adonis but at the same time so weak that you need to work your butt off so that you can become as strong as you look? Even pro bodybuilders are pretty darn strong compared to the average Joe. But let's just stick with the average Joe, not the pro. Let me ask again, why would you want to get strong without adding any muscle?
I wonder this because at least once a month I see a new article explaining how to do this. Why is this concept so popular? Is it because:
You Don't Want to Get Bulky
Well, that won't happen. I know that you may have read articles that tell you that doing strength training will turn you into Arnold faster than Arnold himself became Arnold with bodybuilding, but those articles are, pardon me, full of crap. It will take years of dedicated strength training for you to get all huge. And as I have pointed out again and again, those big old bulky strength dudes who you THINK got their quasi-bodybuilder look from pure strength training, have likely done their fair share of work in bodybuilding parameters, as well as plenty of biceps curls and chest flyes. If you don't want to get bulky you will not, unless you are a muscle gaining freak, what is typically referred to as an "easy-gainer".
You Think Big Muscles will Slow you Down
See point one, above. Nope. High force strength training increases speed. Even if you don't train for speed it increases rate of force production. Strength training has become a very important part of athlete's training for speed. Likely you will read that high repetition bodybuilding training will bloat you with big "empty" muscles, decrease your ROM, and slow you down. Well, Flash, if you are so concerned about speed, why are you into bodybuilding? Stick to strength training and you can have your speed and eat it..I mean you can have your speed and your muscular strength. Obviously, those training for speed should have most of their training dedicated to that skill.
You Want Dense Muscles, Not Big Ones
I take it you've been reading Pavel. This goal, nowadays, seems to be the most popular one. To bad it is utterly meaningless. Muscle density is not a clearly defined concept. Some people think that muscle density is something similar to muscle tone, or tonus. I.E. it is how hard your muscles are and is related to…
Scientific Underpinnings of Muscle Tone
Wait a minute. Let's start from the beginning. Some think that the word tone refers to the shape and definition of muscles. This is the origin of "toning exercise" and toning routines. This is an incorrect usage of the word tone.
More correctly, the term muscle tone or "tonus" refers to the tension in the muscles. You can think of it as a state of partial contraction (very slight) in which the muscles are kept, kinda like the muscle is always "ready for action." More specifically, it refers to the slight tension that can always be felt in a relaxed muscle, which is called the muscle's resting tone. Strength trainees, athletes, and active individuals will tend to have increased resting tone. That is the technical explanation.
Problem is, even within this technical arena, it's used differently by different experts and authors (common problem), so that some people may only consider tone by looking at the muscle's resistance to passive stretch and others might only press the muscle (palpation) to test its tone, which is a way of judging its stiffness and consistency. These two different methods do not measure the same property but are both looking for "tone". Different pathological states may change these features relative to one another, making tone an ambiguous term.
Not only does tone lack an exact definition (or true understanding), other words related to it are also ambiguous, like firmness, stiffness, elasticity, and tension. Then comes in muscle density. It goes like this: "I want to have strong and hard muscles without being big. Therefore I want dense and toned muscles." It seems like to get dense and toned muscles you have to go for the same ambiguous firmness, stiffness, etc. to get these two different features. The guys in lab coats cannot even decide on what exactly they mean, but you can?
Density could refer to the actual density of an individual muscle fiber, which for mammalian muscles is about 1.056 g/cm3. You cannot change that.
Or it could refer to the intramuscular fat content or how closely packed together the myofibrules are. If intramuscular fat is decreased or the density of myofibrillar packing is increased, this should theoretically serve to increase muscle tension capacity. When you engage in strength training, these things happen. You don't do resistance training to have these things happen, you do it to increase the strength (tension generating capability) of the muscles. These changes in the muscle, and many others, are part of the explanation of how muscles get stronger. They are a couple of features, among several, that are side effects of the strength training process. The goal of isolating this one component of the results of strength training through a special kind of strength training simply means that you are capping off just how strong you are willing to get.
Why? Because these changes are part of the initial stages of strength training! They happen early on, along with neural change, and simply help explain why there can be such a profound increase in muscular strength in the early stages of training without apparent changes in muscle mass. Eventually, to keep getting stronger, morphological changes become more and more important. You "only" want to have toned and dense, but small muscles, then you only want to get so much stronger, and no more. Period. That is easy. Strength train a little, and then maintain. There is no magic recipe, really.
I cannot imagine a more silly and boring goal than "decreasing my intramuscular fat, increasing myofibrillar and resting tone." If that is your goal, then happy training. If it seems I'm engaging in a bit of hyperbole, perhaps I am. But specific measurable goals are fairly important in training. If I have correctly translated the "tone and density" hoopla into it's actual components, then I'll leave it up to you to determine whether these are goals within themselves or simply a couple of components of the outcome of increasing muscular strength.
Strength training is a fairly specific activity. Its goal is to increase the absolute force producing potential of our body. But I have to tell you, when someone starts telling people they should be careful, they don't want to get too bulky! Better train for tone! Increase density! Do body weight only training!…Some of us get a little perturbed. Because these people are implying that developing large strong muscles through strength training is a walk in the park. They are acting as if this happens because we accidentally trained too heavy and too hard. No. It takes years and years of "backbreaking" work to get "big, strong, and muscular" let alone huge and bulky. Many people who do dedicated strength training, past noticing that they seem in shape and "look strong" you would not think of as huge and bulky. It just doesn't work like that. You have to want to get huge and bulky to get truly huge and bulky.
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Ketan, a member here (newuxtreme), said on Facebook:
Here is my response:
First, I don't know if you are disagreeing with me or not in all of your statements. I will take it from the opening sentence and from your past history with me that the entirety is meant as a refutation of some kind.
What you are talking about is relative strength/power, which is a function of body fat and functional mass. A person that has a low relative strength ratio compared to some other person might have excess body fat and what some people call "non-functional" mass. If so, this would be because of poor training and diet. If you train for performance in a sport that relies on relative strength/power you are training for relative strength/power and this would be assumed in everything you do.
As should be obvious, this article is not aimed toward a relative strength athlete who already has appreciable body mass from training and who already has a specific purpose for engaging in strength training: his or her sport. Such a person certainly would not be thinking that he or she was going to suddenly become over-bulky and slow because of their training. On the other hand, if they were "slow" in terms of relative power, it would be because of faulty training and/or eating, not because they engaged in purposeful strength training. Purposeful strength training does not result in a bunch of non-functional mass. If you have a bunch of non-functional mass, enough to really cause you to have a low relative strength ratio, then somewhere along the line you failed to engage in purposeful strength training and crossed over into purposeful mass building, which is not the same thing.
I'm not sure if this agreeing with me or refuting me either, but I think I just said the same thing in the article.
You may have missed that this entire site is about training for maximal strength regardless of mass. Not training to avoid mass and not training to get mass but only training to gain maximum strength.
Let's be clear. This article is about goals and motivations for doing resistance training, and specifically resistance training that fits the definition of strength training. If it not aimed at some hypothetical relative strength athlete and such a person would NEVER think that they were going to "accidently" get over-bulky and "slow". If they were over-bulky and slow, I already explained why that would have happened. This post is aimed at non-trained people who are interested in starting strength training but are being told, by many different sources, that they should train in a way that STOPS THEM FROM GAINING MASS, because this would automatically slow them down and make them over-bulky. Strength training to get strong but avoid mass is as silly as strength training to gain mass, which is a side effect.
Some of this fear comes from an irrational belief that there is a direct and finite cutoff between strength training and bodybuilding and if you cross this line even a little bit you will swell up like a bloated bb'r in his speedos and will barely be able to beat a guy in a wheelchair. This is not how it works and it takes a whole lot of dedicated work within those bodybuilding parameters to get bulky and slow, which, yes, certainly can happen.
It's a big trend these days for everyone to bring up athletes this and that. Most people doing strength training are not athletes, except in the recreational sense. If this article were aimed at athletes, it would be a very bad article. Instead, I am talking to people who simply want to get stronger, but are concerned about irrational things. This does not assume that they don't have other physical interests, but I am certainly not writing for relative strength athletes.
In case I haven't made myself clear, this is where you ran afoul:
If you were big and just as strong, would that mean you were bulky? Or fat? The working defintion of 'bulky' in this article is 'muscle bulk', not fat and muscle and anyone who was trying to assume it was not would be willfully ignoring the context of the article as nobody in their write mind would read "bulky" in this context and think it referred to excess fat.
If all that extra weight were functional lean mass, then you would theoretically be stronger, not "just as strong" as the lighter person. If all that extra weight were fat, you would have been engaging in excess eating, not excess strength training. If all that extra mass were non-functional muscle mass (which is a misnomer in some ways) you would have been engaging in bodybuilding, not strength training. It is almost impossible to have a perfect relative strength ratio, for anybody. But a person who is a lot bigger than someone else but has the same strength? No, that is not a function of training for strength. Furthermore, it does not even prove that the bigger person has engaged in less efficient strength training, as he may simply have a larger frame, which could be an advantage in some sports/positions and a disadvantage in other sports/positions.
With hypothetical senarios, we could go on and on forever. If you're 50 lbs heavier than another person your same height, but have the same strength, you'd most likely be either much "thicker framed" than the other person, or much fatter, and the lighter person would have a better relative strength, obviously, but not because you engaged in strength training, and he did something else, so there was no point in the things you said in those regards.
However, you may be overestimating the affect of extra body weight when you extend it too far. You mentioned MMA. Just because you take two guys of the same relative strength and one is 10 kilos lighter, you cannot automatically assume the lighter has the advantage. You can't even assume that the heavier person will gas out quicker. The heavier guy can bring more leverage and the extra body weight could be an advantage in grappling, etc.
People make much to big a thing about this all the time. They see one guy who is all cut up and muscular and one who is muscular but doughy looking and assume the cut up guy is "lighter and faster." Not necessarily true at all. And it is easier to take the concept for relative strength too far, as it is a ratio that becomes quite meaningless when it does not consider body proportions.
If you must exaggerate to make a point, then you're must not be very good at making points.
I read Ketan as agreeing with you, but trying to apply it to real-life examples.
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."— Peter Drucker
Progression tables for my main lifts are here
It doesn't seem to be agreeing, to me, Doc. Read more closely. If he is agreeing he can tell me and I will apologize.
If you must exaggerate to make a point, then you're must not be very good at making points.
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