I work with a fellow who can only be described as big. He’s no more than 6 feet tall and easily weighs 350 pounds or more. It turns out he is also a competitive power lifter, capable of benching almost 450 and squatting over 700 pounds, which seems like an awful lot to me. Is it typical for big people to extremely strong or is my friend just an aberation?
My Brother is Horozontally challenged, and he’s not evolutionarly adept as you would think. Well in Political Correct terms anyway:)
Wouldn’t carrying all that fat around with you 24 hours a day give you a real workout?
I mean, just getting up off of the toilet is a ‘workout’ when you’re that size. If he’s ‘squatting’ 350 pounds every time he stands up, how much harder would it be to squat 700 pounds?
Big with muscle is not the same is big with fat. While your friend may look like other “large” people I suspect that under the skin he has a significantly more developed musculature. It takes a great deal of training and effort to bench 450lbs, I don’t think many 350 pounders could do that.
Also, while carrying around your own weight does develop some degree of strenght, putting twice your bodyweight on your shoulders and trying to get up from a squat position is a great deal more difficult.
At my current weight I’ve been able to lift wildly differing amounts depending on how much I’ve been training. My bodyshape hasn’t changed much, but the proportions of muscle and fat have changed, much to my chagrin.
Your friend can lift that much not because he’s big, but because he’s got a lot of muscle. He got that way by training at those particular lifts. If he were lean, he’d probably still be able to do it.
A fat person who doesn’t weight train is no more likely to be strong than a lean person who doesn’t. Fat people may have more lower body strength to start, but that advantage disappears pretty quickly in a training program.
"Are big people usually strong?"
Not in every case, a good friend of mine’s nephew is at least twice my size, yet I’m at least twice as strong.
I arm-wrestled as well as grappled with him (he was being a smart-assed tough guy,because he’s bigger)
There was no contest because I’m much stronger (yet I’m tall& lanky)
I’m thinking it has a lot to do with muscle to weight ratio
He’s no longer a smart-ass to me
The answer is “Yes, but…”.
It’s kind of like the Body Mass Index, the overall answer is usually right, but it’s based on all things being equal, which they never are, so it’s often quite wrong on an individual basis.
There are a great number of factors in “strength”, some of which get pretty detailed and into science I don’t claim to understand (fiber composition, fiber recruitment, etc.). A larger muscle, which you would expect to find on a naturally larger person, will be stronger than a smaller one, if all of the other factors are the same. Genetics and training change the factors, which is how you wind up with somebody like Eddie Coan setting a powerlifting record that lasted for (off the top of my head) 9 or 10 years at a body weight of 220lbs despite the fact that a lot of the guys who were trying to break it outweighed him by 100lbs or more.
It can also be an advantage to have a big gut, in certain lifts such as the squat or clean.
If your belly is big enough, it can allow you to push against your thighs and generate more upward thrust, somewhat similar to bracing your hands on your thighs allows you to push upward more efficiently than with your hands at your sides. (It changes the length of the lever formed by your lower back.)
Vasileey Alexeyev, the famous Soviet lifter, had a 72" waist, and enjoyed that kind of leverage. (He was also phenomenomally powerful as well). Paul Anderson, the strongest man of all time, was only 5’6" and weighed around 365 pounds. His forte was the squat, where his 1169 pounds still stands as the all time record. He also holds the record for greatest weight ever lifted by a human being, 6,270 lbs. (July 10, 1957, at the Ford Motor plant in Tacoma, GA).
Having an extremely large chest also helps in the bench press, as you don’t have to lower the weight as far, providing your arms are disproportionately short.
Muscle makeup also has a big effect, as the more fast-twitch fibers in the muscle, the greater the momentary effort that can be exerted. Another factor is the ability to recruit more fibers per effort, which can be improved to some extent, but has a genetically determined upper limit.
A bigger muscle is a stronger muscle, all other things being equal, but they rarely are.
Regards,
Shodan
I wanted to expand on this, since it’s a lot more significant than most people realize. The length of a person’s limbs has a real effect on how much weight they can lift, which makes lifting weights a rather misleading way to measure strength.
Think of it this way: take two guys, one with a 36-inch reach, and another with a 31-inch reach. When doing the bench press, one “rep” is defined as bringing the bar down from a position where your arms are extended to their maximum down to your chest and back again. But consider the laws of physics: Work = Force x Distance. The guy with the longer arms is moving the bar 5 inches more than the other guy, and therefore doing more work. The same principle holds for the squat; people with long torsos and/or long legs have a mechanical disadvantage, since they must move the bar farther to get to a squatting position and back again.
When I played football in high school and college I was considered both big and strong, yet I was routinely outlifted by guys smaller than me. However, nobody my height but lighter than me ever lifted more than I did.
(Power is actually more important in football than raw strength, anyway. I was fast for my size, and I just ran over a lot of people who were as strong as me, but just didn’t have enough mass to match the kinetic energy of my body when I was moving quickly.)
I’m not sure if we’re wandering from the OP or not, but the discussion is probably relevant.
You see the same kind of mechanical selection in strongman competitions, too, where the range of motion is imposed by the equipment rather than by the body metrics of the competitor. In an event like the Atlas Stones, a Magnus Samuelson is lifting the stone to about his upper chest to place it on the platform, whereas Paul Anderson would be lifting it to his forehead.
Olympic lifting has a huge component of speed and technique, powerlifting is largely brute force, strongman competitors and throwers tend to be tall, etc., and this is not a good sample set for questions about the general populace, but you can get some useful data from it.
Given that a big man and a small man are both equally well conditioned, the big one will be absolutely stronger. I.e. he can lift more weight. However, it is quite likely that the small one will be relatively stronger, i.e. can lift a larger percentage of his body weight.
For example when I was in the army and doing hard calisthenics every day, I weighed about 140 lb. I could chin myself more times than most of the bigger guys who were up around 180-200 lb.
the ratio of muscle length to limb length is a big deal. A lot of tall skinny guys have long limbs, but proportionately short muscles, so the muscles have less of a mechanical advantage on the limbs, proportionately.
As far as being fat making your strong? Well, being fat means that you have been in a calorie surplus for a long long time. This means that your muscles, trained or not, have been receiving plenty of nutrition. As for some skinny guys, they are skinny because they don’t eat enough. This means that their muscles have been starving for carbs and calories for a long long time.
So, on the whole, if you benched now for your max, then waited 10 years and got real fat and benched again, you would be a little stronger.
Age has some to do with it too. After 40 years old, your body starts eating an average of .5 pounds of muscle a year, if you don’t use them.
That guys at your work has worked hard to be able to lift that much. He did not put up 450 by being fat.
Points of insertion also matter. The further from your elbow that your bicep attaches to your forearm, the stronger your biceps will be. It’s a pretty simple principle, and matters all over the body.