This continues to be a source of confusion for most, do you beleive, that if you get stronger, your muscular endurance will improve proportionally, and if you improve your local muscular endurance, the strength of those muscles will improve proportionally?
People claim you must do high reps and low weight for muscular
endurance and low reps and high weight for strength.
What are your thoughts on the matter or personal experience with this.
All I know is that a 50kg lady can deadlift 180kg. So personally, I'll continue to steer clear of 'strength' training (other than maybe 5x5's on deadlifts, to avoid injury risks from form breakdowns.. that and heavy deadlifting, unlike squatting, is more 'fun' for me).
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Training wise, from what I've seen, to get stronger you need to get bigger. You can become more efficient by improving your CNS ability to use all your muscular potential by training with low reps but there comes a point where it's more efficient to introduce hypertrophy (higher rep) work to build size.
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Depends on what you mean by endurance...
Long distance atheletes will always have smaller muscles.... For their specific genetic make up...
The current accepted theory on disparities between size and strength is to do with activating all your muscle fibres at once as efficiently as possible (at the same time) to lift the weight. There's also theories on relative size differences between different parts of muscle fibres - myofibrullar (sp?) vs sarcoplasmic but I don't believe this has been conclusively proven.
Basically, you are never able to activate all your muscle fibres at once, unless you are put on an electric chair....
So at a certain bodyweight, you have a maximum strength potential. E.g., I might have the potential currently if I train with low reps to eventually hit a 140kg bench press (my current max is 130kg) without getting bigger. Currently I'm using 70% of my muscle fibres to hit 130, and I can get to 80% I can hit 140... this is very crude.... but you get the idea. If I train for another 5 years maybe I can hit 145kg max, but there is a limit, and I will never hit 150kg or 200kg (lol) without putting on significant size.
This is what I was getting at Goose - having seen that little 50kg lady deadlift 180, it feels like you don't necessarily need to get bigger to get stronger.
Being able to squat 130kg for 5 reps makes squatting 100kg for 10 reps much easier too
The current accepted theory on disparities between size and strength is to do with activating all your muscle fibres at once as efficiently as possible (at the same time) to lift the weight. There's also theories on relative size differences between different parts of muscle fibres - myofibrullar (sp?) vs sarcoplasmic but I don't believe this has been conclusively proven.
Basically, you are never able to activate all your muscle fibres at once, unless you are put on an electric chair....
So at a certain bodyweight, you have a maximum strength potential. E.g., I might have the potential currently if I train with low reps to eventually hit a 140kg bench press (my current max is 130kg) without getting bigger. Currently I'm using 70% of my muscle fibres to hit 130, and I can get to 80% I can hit 140... this is very crude.... but you get the idea. If I train for another 5 years maybe I can hit 145kg max, but there is a limit, and I will never hit 150kg or 200kg (lol) without putting on significant size.
I think this is true to a point.
IF i were to say train for squats but only ever squatted to maximum reps for say 40kg, i might be able to punch out 100reps with a lot of training at some point.
HOWEVER, if i was to train for strength and had my 1rm at 200kg would i have the endurance to squat 40kg for 100reps?
I would say no, i would initially find the 40kg squat much easier but i dont think i would be able to last the 100reps without the prior training to do so.
There is obvious a correlation both ways, but the lifter who rarely does muscular endurance traning will struggle until he or she gets used to it.
In early 1990s trained with mate who was 2nd in mr universe. at time he coud do 190kg bench and I around 167.5kg, while he smashed me in heavy set of 6 reps in terms of weight, the next set on lighter weight I easily outrepped him.
I was used to training muscle endurance, he was not.
As goosey suggests, there will also be individual differences in terms of who is good at what sort of reps.
You are probably right.
I would say that training for strength has a significant carry-over into muscular endurance because it makes the repeatable task "easier". I would not say that training specifically for endurance has as much carry over for strength.
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