A co worker of mine who weighs about 130lbs soaking wet says that he has some sort of tendon deformity that allows him to be extra strong. He insists that he can curl 80lb dumbells with perfect form for example…and that is an incredible amount of weight to curl, and he claims he is a force to be reckoned with in arm wrastle-ing matches.
Is there such a thing as a “tendon deformity” that could contribute to a person’s ability to be stronger than what you might expect?
Wasn’t there a movie about this a while back? Something about a little kid pitching in MLB?
The last time someone “claimed” an incredible bench press, I made $20 bucks off the clod. Muscles lift weight not tendons. Personally, I’d want witness these feats before I put too much time in researching tendons.
That’s what happened to Jimmy Morris.
Also, major league pitchers tend to gain speed after certain types of tendon surgery, although this is usually attributed to advances in post-surgery rehab.
If the tendon is ties in further up the bone, then the muscle will provide more torque around the joint enabling the muscle to lift more weight. This is why chimpanzees are so much stronger than humans for less muscle mass.
Rookie of the Year. The kid breaks his arm or something, and after the cast is taken off, he finds he can pitch like a major leaguer. I’ts a fantasy, of course.
Hmm
So if I hold my arm out in front of me and poke into the elbow joint I can feel the tendon there that connects to the bone, and what you are saying is that the tendon would actually connect closer up my humerus towards my shoulder?
Is there a medical name/condition for that as it would pertain to a human?
Would a person who has something like this have a shorter arm typically?
How much more weight would one be able to lift with this condition?
This, essentially. It is not really a deformity, just an atypical arrangement.
Arms and their muscles are set up to be levers of the third class. This is because we are evolved as hunter-gatherers to throw things at our prey/enemies. Speed is more important than strength, thus typically the tendon attachments are set up to maximize the speed imparted to the resistance for a given input force.
In terms of natural selection, it is more of an advantage to throw a rock really fast than to curl a lot of weight. That’s why your friend’s biceps strength is unusual.
Regards,
Shodan
It is rumored that former amateur and pro wrestler Danny Hodge has some sort of abnormality with the tendons in his hands/wrists. It is known for certain that the man had, and may still have, incredible strength in his hands. He was able to break pliers merely by squeezing them, and did this routinely while doing publicity for wrestling shows. From all reports, the pliers were not gimmicked in any way.
One of my uncles did this once, and he’s not even in a particularly strength-based profession. So if a professional wrestler is reported to be able to crush pliers, I’m inclined to believe it.
Thomas Topham, an 18th century Londoner of superhuman strength is thought to have had a condition where his tendons were attached further up the muscles than normal. Topham’s feats were witnessed and recorded by a certain Dr. Desaguliers, lending credibility where little is usually found. In addition to a variety of quaint, hard-to-quantify country fair tricks Topham would do things like break a 5/8", 2000 lbs. break strength rope by pulling on it and easily lift 220 lbs. overhead with one arm. Topham wasn’t a big guy, 5’10" / 190 lbs., and would look average when clothed but, as one witness described, had ‘armpits and hams full of muscles and tendons’.
Actually it’d be the other way 'round. For example, the bicep has the origin on the scapula, and it’s insertion is past the elbow on the radius. Point being it goes past the elbow. The further past the elbow it goes, the more leverage it gets to lift a weight, but the longer time it would take to do it.
Here’s some quick, very simplified, math.
Let’s say you want to curl 80 pounds. The 80 pounds will create a moment about the elbow. Let’s say the forearm is a foot long, for simplicity’s sake. This means we have an 80 foot-pound moment that has to be overcome by the bicep. If the insertion for the bicep is one inch past the elbow, then it has to generate 960 pounds of force to overcome it. If the insertion point is moved to two inches, this drops down to half the amount to 480 pounds.
Like I said, this is very simplified, though. I ignored the weight of the arm, other muscles helping out, etc… but it gets the point across.
A “deformed” tendon in this sense doesn’t automatically equal more strength, all it means is that if the guy worked out and progressed eventually he’d be in a position to lift more weight.
You’d still have to do the work to be able to lift the weight.
Think of it like this, part of the reason Michael Phelps is such a good swimmer is simply his body proportions, torso to arms ratio etc, are not the same as the average Joe. By having unusual proportions (and I use unusual as a good thing) he is able to swim better.
But Phelps still had to train. If Micheal Phelps even with this genetic advantage had never trained for the Olympics, and then tried to race an Olympic swimmer, he would’ve gotten beaten easily despite genetic advantage, simply because in addition to genetic, he would still have to do the work.
So the tendon shape allows you to train to lift more wieght, it doesn’t automatically mean you are strong.
Rookie of the Year is fiction, but “The Rookie” is fact.
Whatever happened to the story about the super strong baby from Germany? I Googled and I can’t find anything since 2004 when the story came out. That had to do with muscle growth other than tendons, but still …
People (who are reasonably well built) and who have unusually short arms can perform exceptional feats of strength with respect to curling and pressing. Paul Andersonwas noted of this.
I remember who you’re referring to and I googled but just got random stuff that wasn’t what I was looking for. But at any rate, I did watch a TV special on him, as well as a TV special on another “world’s strongest toddler,” and both of them have weird genetic mutations.
There’s a protein called myostatin that is made in the muscle cells, which itself limits muscle growth. IIRC, the first boy (the Germain one) had muscles that didn’t respond to myostatin. The second boy, the more recent one, just didn’t make myostatin. But the result is the same for both, increased muscle mass because their muscles never got a signal to stop growing.
Well, not entirely. Much of physical strength is a gift, that is, inborn and not made. Some of these people simply start out stronger than the vast majority of their peers, and can do things the average person will never attain no matter how hard they try.
That’s only one of the reasons. When they compared chimp and human DNA, they found that all humans have a defect in one of the genes that regulates muscle growth. For those of us who don’t have a genetic defect like super baby, this makes us a lot weaker than chimps. So not only do chimp muscles have better leverage, but pound for pound their muscles are stronger than ours.
Don’t ever wrestle a chimp.
You do have to wonder why being “weaker” would be an evolutionary advantage. This post rea family that is myostatin deficient shows it’s downside.
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