Powerlifting is actually a misnamed sport, it should be called strengthlifting. Power is typically defined as the rate of doing work, and as a physical property in human fitness you are generally considered to be “more powerful” the more explosively you can utilize your strength in various ways. So a sprinter is more powerful than a distance runner, and the most powerful sprinter is the one who finishes the sprint fastest. A lineman’s performance in football is often considered a measure of their power. An Olympic weightlifter has to be extremely powerful because the two Olympic lifts require explosive force.
Powerlifting on the other hand, the velocity of work matters not much at all. Some very heavy powerlifting records are set with pretty low work rate.
So yeah, I do think power lifting and its three lifts are in fact the best measure of actual strength that exist. Combined the three lifts hit all of the musculature.
I agree with most of your post, except for this part. Competitive sports, especially the lucrative ones, basically use a sieve method for collecting the most genetically endowed athletes. Afterwards, all sorts of silly bullshit their coaches come up with gets touted as “proven” because some genetic freak was still a genetic freak after trying it. It very rarely is the ideal method, and almost always fails to improve less-endowed athletes in the general population.
Martin I am quite sure you have not actually looked at the meta-analysis, nor any of the many studies they analyzed. But seriously, I don’t care that you think that science that shows something other than what you already believe is flawed or what level of proof you demand.
And I respect your definition of strength as one valid definition and certainly it is what you mean by strength and what you mean when you say you want strength as a fitness goal (or as your single fitness goal). What I disrespect is the inability to appreciate that such is not what everyone means when they say they want strength as a fitness goal and your obvious confusion between using something as a possible measure of strength and having it be the definition of strength.
While this poll in another thread is hardly scientific it does illustrate that many do not subscribe to that as what they mean when say they want strength as a goal. To respond to someone who swims some and says he wants get a bit stronger and be a bit more defined with Starting Strength or maybe 5/3/1 are the only approach and anything else is wrong is really a very stupid comment.
Are the powerlifts a reasonable metric for strength? Yes. But not the only one. Are they reasonable tools? Certainly. For the strength that most of us are looking for is a monomanical focus on hittting the biggest powerlift numbers you can get the best approach? IMHO no.
Once again, I am not a powerlifter. I do some of the powerlifts as part of a wide variety of exercise I do though and amazingly enough without any focus on building big numbers or specific goal I am still at solid intermediate level at age 55, having transitioned from almost exclusively endurance activity to a mix that includes more weights only in the last five or so years. No 5x5, 5/3/1, SS, Westside program, needed. Heretically I also do balance board work with lighter weights for core strength, a variety of gymnastic inspired body weight exercises (like wall supported handstand push ups and working on planche progression and even some simple ring work), do plyometric work, and run up and down my stairs carrying weights equal to my bodyweight. And I still marginally care more about my aerobic fitness, even if it might interfere with strength gains. The “lift heavy or go home” mindset is not the mindset that all who want more strength have or need to have. The variety that I do happens to have helped me lift moderately heavy but maxxing my 1RM is not my strength goal and it is not for a lot, possibly a majority, of others either. Of course unlike many exclusive powerlifters my approach has not blown out my back or given me tendonitis - my shoulder injury was in a cycling accident and healed in 3 weeks (AC separation).
Glad that you have found one of MANY programs that work and that it fits your goals and your needs. It’s the witnessing for it that is annoying; this is not GD.
Yeah, I think I probably overstated it there. The sports of Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting specifically I think would filter out ineffective training techniques and lifters in those two sports would, over time, aggregate to the most effective known training methods. In those two sports strength is really everything (in powerlifting) or almost everything (Oly lifting), so training regimens that are sub-optimal will produce sub-optimal results. In the Oly world there is a lot of criticism leveled at USA Weightlifting (we’ve done horribly in Oly lifting for a generation) for the fact that the training program used is quite different than what Bulgaria, Ukraine, Russia etc are using…and since those countries are winning the medals we can read “different” as “worse.”
For most of the more complicated sports I think you’re right, that strong genetics endowing you with a lot of ability in that sport make various S&C oddities not too meaningful, but largely because S&C is only a smart part of those sports. I think S&C is pretty varied in the more skilled sports because strength is only a small part of success at those sports and S&C might be focused on non-strength activities, the S&C that is focused on strength can survive sub-optimally because it doesn’t really matter if you’re running him through a shitty lifting program Lebron James is still Lebron James.
Show me a study that indicates doing x will produce greater strength gains than doing y. You’ve not done that. I participate in a powerlifting community where we read a lot of studies on lifting, and most of them do not make sense to anyone who has seriously lifted.
There is a serious problem when most physiology professors have never ran any kind of serious strength program and then design their tests, they tend to test things that can never meaningfully measure real strength. A good example of physiologist produced tests is the infamous NFL combine bench press test which sees guys doing 30+ reps of a relatively low weight (it’s 250 lbs, a low weight for an athlete in a strength sport, some guys have done it for 50+ reps.)
Show me a study, not a meta-analysis, that shows that x will produce greater strength gains than y. I can debunk it once you’ve done that, but you’ve yet to do that.
I posit my definition of strength is about the only logically consistent one possible. Please present another one that actually makes sense. “Injury prevention”, “flexibility”, “power”, “endurance” and all kinds of other terms that get commingled with strength ultimately fail to make sense. Largely because all of them can be improved through activities that produce no measurable increase in physical strength. How can you translate increased flexibility into increased strength in a measurable way? We know getting more flexible by and large doesn’t let you move heavier weights. So what does it do that measurably impacts strength?
The guys at CrossFit (a phenomenon I have mixed opinions on) actually agree with me. When a CrossFit PR rep debated Mark Rippetoe on ESPN he was careful to note (and his blog further explains) that CrossFit doesn’t believe strength is the definition of physical fitness (and I agree), and further that CrossFit’s goal is not to increase strength. CrossFit then delves into a lot of CF jargon, but what it boils down to is their measure comes down to some sort of CF-jargoned combination of power/endurance. It may even be a good approximation of what someone might think of as “general physical fitness”, but it’s not designed to be a strength program and CF admits that. They kinda have to, because just like me they recognize that strength in the lifts is how anyone with a brain measures strength and CF notoriously produces low lift maxes. There are a lot of guys who 6-7 months from novice lifter who start on a powerlifting program have higher 1RM than the highest 1RMs posted on a local CF wall. The reason being CF doesn’t really focus much on building absolute strength. You certainly get stronger doing CF but you also get poor recovery time and go weeks without repeating certain lifts/activities so you’re not going to make steady progression on any lift and after awhile you won’t be getting stronger at all as your body adapts to the CF system.
He specifically said he wants muscle growth and to get stronger. That merits a prescription of a focused strength training program. The two that I mention are highly adaptable to inclusion with other sport activities (typically by lowering progression, thus lowering number of work outs per week and giving your body increased recovery time from lifting so you can continue your sport participation.)
What would you propose is a better metric for strength? Seriously, come up with one that is logically consistent.
Very few guys ever get injured during weight training, if you read Rippetoe’s book (which has many of the citations you lust after), he shows it has one of the lowest injury rates of any athletic activity. Way lower than any competitive sport. But there’s a big difference between weight training and powerlifting. You can follow a powerlifting training program and you’re at very little risk of injury. But if you become a competitive powerlifter your risk of injury goes up substantially because injury risk always increases when you’re competing. The nature of competition requires you to push your body past what is safe. Competitive powerlifters often accrue a lot of injuries, but so do competitive anything in any sport.
Some of what you’re talking about seems fine to me, but some of it doesn’t make sense. For example if you’re able to squat 300 lbs you have a strong core. If you’re able to squat body weight you actually probably have a strong core. One thing often misunderstood about powerlifting is somehow it doesn’t involve core training. As long as you’re engaged in raw, unassisted (meaning not using a monolift) squatting then your core has to be strong to support the weight of the barbell on your back (just to lift it off the rack) and your core has to be strong to keep your spine in correct position as you lower and then raise in the motion.
To my mind targeted core training is generally unnecessary if you do even a little bit of squat/deadlift.
I also find it very odd that you think Jim Wendler and Mark Rippetoe are about maximizing 1RM. Both of their programs are designed for novices, the 1RM is not really used for anything in SS and Rippetoe even says 1RM has little value to even know since he advises always doing sets of 5. Wendler does make use of the 1RM for setting the weights of your lifts each mesocycle, but again, his program like Starting Strength is generally targeted to people who want to get stronger.
Both are pretty open about what you need to do to maximize 1RM (if you’re going into PL seriously): eat a shit load, rest a lot, don’t do anything else so you have full recovery time. But neither advocates that, they both just advocate a progressive strength training regimen that can carry over to providing benefits into other activities. Wendler’s program is designed to be highly malleable to fit in with any athletic lifestyle. Rippetoe’s programming is designed to be done to the letter but only for ~4-8 months or so. Note I don’t really advocate his programming, I mostly recommend his book because it is a technique bible, he spends like 10 pages on the “program.” He spends 60 pages on telling you how to safely squat, something like 30-40 pages on the other four lifts he teaches. Starting Strength is first and foremost a manual teaching you how to safely do lifts, and a reference for coaches and trainers to help them teach trainees on those lifts. You can rip his programming pages out of the book and it’ll still be the best book you own on safe lifting technique.
I never said there weren’t many ways to skin a cat. I don’t actually follow Rippetoe’s program or Wendler’s. Rippetoe’s program is designed for novice weight lifters, and particularly young novice weight lifters. I use his book as the be all end all reference for technique. By the time he published his book my novice lifting status was about 40 years in the rearview mirror. I don’t follow Wendler’s but I like the way it’s structured, I follow something a lot closer to the Starr 5x5 (which both authors note as one of the inspirations for their programs), simply because that’s what I was trained in in the 70s and have stuck with it.
If you’re wanting to participate in some sort of regular athletic activity or sport, you’re going to need training that is different from someone who is solely lifting for strength. My only point is if you’re strength training you should focus on that at least enough that you’re optimizing it. I think that anything that isn’t progressive is going to be of minimal value. I haven’t seen any evidence that say, doing 3 sets of 10 reps of bicep curls at the same weight 2 times a week for years and years on end does much of value for anyone, and that’s largely the type of programming most people follow if they’re just vaguely and casually “lifting weights.”
One item to address right off - when I tried to claim in another thread that powerlifter low injury rate factoid ultrafilterslapped me down:
Certainly Shodan’s story is consistent with that as well - by his report blew out his back chasing a combined total goal and hurt his shoulders since.
Hard evidence it aint but you seem to prefer the anecdotes anyway.
Let me change tact.
Do you count the strength needed to do an iron cross as “strength”? Much of it is isometric or eccentric movements. Sure most rings men can also bench a shitload if they ever benched but most don’t.
Now I lust for the strength of a rings man and really don’t care about having the strength of a powerlifter. I’d love to be able to do muscle-ups and unsupported handstand push-ups, to do a true planche for more than 5 seconds. Seeing those who do that awes me. Lifting more? Meh. Seeing people who lift heavier than me … boring. Not the strength I am after.
Truth be told we disagree less than we agree. And the guideline that you are so dismissive of is actually pretty much saying the same thing too. Progressive training … yes. The guideline is open to progressing in more ways than weight alone but clearly emphasizes that as one goes lifting heavier with fewer reps more of the time is essential. Your programs apparently advise low weight with low reps to start for a novice; the guideline is more low enough weight hit 8 to 12 reps to the point the last is at good form but barely, then increase reps progressively until over 12 and then increase weight, repeat. Do that for a bit then go to lower reps higher weight. Believe it or not that works for novices quite well. Disagree that you should only do strength training if you are going to optimize it but agree that casually lifting weights without any progression in ind or imposed will get much in the way of gains.
What I propose is that there no single metric for strength any more more than there is one for fitness. When I once asked here for people to propose a defintion for “fitness” the most cogent response was “fitness for what?” and the same applies for strength. Strength for what? I would not say that an accomplished powerlifter is generically weaker than an accomplished gymnast because he cannot hold an iron cross, or that the gymnast is weaker because the powerlifter has a bigger three lift total. The gymnast has more isometric strength and more ability to exert strength eccentrically, more stabilizer muscle strength and more rotational strength. They both have ample whole body strength but their whole body strength is still specifically adapted to what they are using their strength for.
From Starting Strength, there is a citation of “Relative Safety of Weightlifting and Weight Training,” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 8(1):53-57,1994 that shows injury rate (injury rate = injuries per 100 participation hours) Powerlifting at 0.0008, Weightlifting at 0.0006, Weight Training at 0.0012, Gymnastics at 0.044, and then some more dangerous sports: Soccer 6.2, Rugby 1.92, Basketball 1.03.
These numbers actually show that weight training is more dangerous than competitive powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting, contradicting what I previously had said. But, that’s probably because I was stupidly thinking of weight training in a very particular way…namely emulation of powerlifting in competition (where you always have safety equipment and/or spotters) but in a non-competitive environment. I believe such lifting would have to be intrinsically safer (since you aren’t lifting for personal bests), but I also think that many people lift without spotters and outside of safety racks, or even worse home alone in their garage without any form of safety equipment (where they can get pinned under a bar with no one to hear their screams.)
It’s possible these numbers are inaccurate as I’ve not vetted the original source. WAG powerlifting is slightly more dangerous than Olympic weightlifting because it includes the bench press. Of the handful of people who die lifting weights every year I think almost all of them are bench press related, it’s the most dangerous lift commonly exercised and is frequently exercised in a dangerous way (no spotters, alone in a garage, with no safety rack etc.) I would think the squat and deadlift are probably safer than the C&J and snatch because they are such low velocity simple movements, but maybe I’m wrong. I know a cross fit guy was paralyzed from the snatch because he dropped the bar behind him and it bounced up and slammed into his back, severing his spinal cord.
Interesting aside there were professors from Ohio State University who put out some pretty troubling research about injury rates of Cross Fit and were immediately sued by the Cross Fit organization. I’m not sure how that’s turned out, I believe it’s still ongoing.
The iron cross comes up a lot when gymnasts and powerlifters argue on message boards (I’ve seen this.) I think that my feeling on gymnasts is that while gymnasts do get very strong, and many can quickly adapt that strength to fairly high barbell lifts, the strength required to do an iron cross is not strictly strength driven but technique driven and training driven. It does require a certain base of strength. I can’t do an iron cross so I do not know how much exactly or have any conception, just that it’s really hard. But I also know that there are guys who can squat 650 lbs that can’t do an iron cross, and guys who can do an iron cross who can’t squat 650 lbs. So to me that suggests that they are working on different measures of human ability.
Simply put, an iron cross is similar to blocking a pass rusher in football. It does require strength, but the absolute strongest blocker isn’t the absolute best blocker. Because there are technique and other factors at play other than pure strength. So too with the iron cross, doing an iron cross requires strength, being able to get to that point requires building legit strength, but just being strong isn’t enough to do an iron cross.
FWIW the reason gymnasts get so strong (many of them omit serious weight training, some incorporate it, at least based on what gymnasts who visit the powerlifting forums say) is because barbell training is not the only way to get strong, and I never said it was. They get strong through a lot of serious body weight training, but they also usually take years and years to get there. I think someone who seriously dedicates themselves to lifting a barbell can see the sort of strength gains it took a gymnast years to build up in maybe a year or two. They won’t be able to do an iron cross, though. Without having ever done one, I also think there are body type issues at play too. Just like your body type can affect your ability to do sports like rowing or swimming, just being absolutely strong can’t be enough to do an iron cross. You also need to be strong and lean, and the fastest way to get strong conflicts with efforts to get strong and lean.
Most powerlifters can’t do those sort of moves, but at the same time most powerlifters I know can do a ton of dips and pull ups / chin-ups, and given their typical size I find that to be impressive. I think a very top level powerlifter, if he was willing to lose absolute strength and consequently lose body fat and weight, could probably get to the point of doing an iron cross. I’m not sure how long that would take versus a gymnast ramping up into barbell–but I’ve known of gymnasts to do heavy barbell lifts after a few minimal sessions learning the motions.
FWIW the Starting Strength website has articles which define the ten general aspects of fitness (and citing an external source, not anyone associated with Starting Strength):
[quote]
[ul]
[li]Cardiovascular/respiratory endurance: The ability of body systems to gather, process, and deliver oxygen.[/li][li]Stamina: The ability of body systems to process, deliver, store, and utilize energy.[/li][li]Strength: The ability of a muscular unit, or combination of muscular units, to apply force.[/li][li]Flexibility: The ability to maximize the range of motion at a given joint.[/li][li]Power: The ability of a muscular unit, or combination of muscular units, to apply maximum force in minimum time.[/li][li]Speed: The ability to minimize the time cycle of a repeated movement.[/li][li]Coordination: The ability to combine several distinct movement patterns into a singular distinct movement.[/li][li]Agility: The ability to minimize transition time from one movement pattern to another.[/li][li]Balance: The ability to control the placement of the body’s center of gravity in relation to its support base.[/li][li]Accuracy: The ability to control movement in a given direction or at a given intensity.[/li][/quote]
[/ul]
The guidelines as put out by an organization that frankly most powerlifters have little use for (the ACSM), it’s hard to take an organization seriously that sells certificates to personal trainers that cannot safely teach basic barbell movements.
The meta-analysis you linked to was also a subject of discussion on the Starting Strength and other forums, and the following article on that site highlights various criticisms of it, many of which I agree with (link.)
Most notably to me is the study treats anyone who has spent a year in the gym as trained versus untrained. This includes a woman who goes in and does nothing but run on the treadmill for a year. How is she supposed to be considered adapted to weight lifting from that? There are other quibbles covered at the link.
As to why favor the powerlifting lifts as the best measure of strength, I will first say with a slight caveat that this isn’t my true position. I actually would instead prefer to see the squat, deadlift, and press used to measure overall strength. Particularly I would also like to see the press replace the bench press in competition.
But my reason for this trifecta is:
All forms of testing strength are activities which involve more than just pure strength. Meaning, while the squat, the deadlift, the press, the clean and jerk, and the snatch all require strength, I argue that the Olympic lifts require significantly more agility, balance, accuracy, power, coordination than the “trifecta.” For that reason success in those is “less” a measure of pure strength.
Non-lifting activities like gymnastic iron crosses likewise involve, in my opinion, significant non-strength metrics for success, making them poor measures of absolute strength.
I’m actually concerned with functional strength when I argue for the trifecta. While I’m not sure what form it would take, I actually posit that since machine lifts use almost no balance, agility, coordination etc, you could build a machine that isolates pure strength even superior to the deadlift/squat/press. But what we know from how machine strength translates to free weight strength is that it’s always translates to less. This is because machine strength motions do not represent the realistic loading and dynamic forces on the body that are ongoing when using strength “in the field.” (I.e., to push someone out of your way, to lift a big rock etc.)
So to contradict myself, a machine of some sort that removes things like balance, agility and etc from the equation likely is the best measure of pure strength, but I care more about functional strength when I argue for using the deadlift/squat/press.
My reasons for the three exercises I choose largely relate to how strength is used and what gives the body strength. Strength is used to exert force, force by humans is used to either push something or pull something. Human strength comes from our muscles being able to move our skeleton with a certain amount of force, training these muscles in a way that causes them to adapt and grow generates greater outputs of force. So to test this strength we need something that tests push and pull and in a way that tests the force used to push/pull as generated by our musculature. (So obviously some test which measured force as generated by our body’s dead weight falling onto something, or something like that, is a poor measure.)
Since overall force production is the application of the full body’s strength, we need something that recruits most of the body. There aren’t really any singular activities I can think of that legitimately use the entire body’s musculature in a meaningful way. Even the deadlift which hits almost everything excludes muscles of the calf, which have little involvement in the deadlift. So we need a combination of exercises, and I feel the ones that come the closest to our goal of full body force production measurement are ideal. And since we want to measure both a push and a pull, we need to have more than one exercise in any case.
So then the deadlift to me is the obvious choice for our pull. I challenge you to find a pull motion that utilizes more of the body’s strength. The squat is an obvious push for similar reasons, you’re pushing with all the muscles of the lower body, the posterior chain, you’re also utilizing the obliques, the abs, and the erector spinae in the squat as stabilizers (and properly executed at some point in barbell squatting regularly you may very well experience DOMS in these stablizers, particularly the abs and obliques.)
The only real knock on the squat and deadlift is the fairly limited involvement of important muscles of the upper body. The musculature of the arms, shoulders etc. The deadlift does recruit significantly the muscles involved in grip (if you are doing raw deadlifting) and serious deadlifters often notice a prodigious growth in forearm size, the traps also are recruited in deadlifting, but again, the two lifts I named are frequently considered “lower body” (I detest that because neither uses musculature confined to the lower body.) So to fill this gap I propose the best single exercise that hits the upper musculature is the overhead press. Why the overhead press over the bench press? It goes back to functional strength. The bench press is a wholly unnatural position for a human unless you’ve fallen under some object you’re trying to press off of yourself. I feel the press thus more accurately represents functional strength versus the bench press in the same way the squat more accurately represents functional strength than the leg press.
The press is a push, and it could be argued that we should add a fourth test incorporating some upper body pull as well. I’m not entirely opposed to that, but this debate had dwelled into discussions of powerlifting as a measure of strength versus other non-lifting activities and I wanted to defend powerlifting versus those. Outside of that context some upper-body pull wouldn’t be out of line as an added measure. But I don’t know which I would choose off hand. Pull ups are pretty good, but difficult to progressively load (you have to start using weighted vests and such.)
I appreciate the response even though we obviously have different thoughts on the matter.
Actually I do not think of the iron cross, or the rings supported el, as having all that much more skills basis than do the powerlift moves.
The part that you are missing is that powerlifting is training not only for increased mass but for certain motor units being emphasized that are used in particular sets of motions and for the neuromotor adpations that get them firing in specific patterns that translate to the most output on those predminantly isotonic activities. A successful powelift is a specific coordination of muscles performing isotonically to very particular ends. Pull and push are both only one sort of strength and pull and push of specific movements are still very specific movements. The iron cross and the hanging el are also strength focused (more more than skill) activities and are no less specific movements and specific sorts of complete body strength. They however require muscles to be used to great degrees that are used much less in powerlifting and require many of the same muscles to be used to much greater degrees eccentrically and isometrically. (Which is not to say that powerlifitng does not use isometric and eccentric movements as well, just a different emphasis of different muscles and in different patterns of firing.)
Neither IMHO is a more valid measure of strength or a better of strength. The issue is what you want the strength to accomplish.
I think there is a significant involvement of power, balance, stamina, and coordination to an Iron Cross.
Push/pull are not types of strength and I did not say they were, they are types of force. In physics when dealing with classical mechanical force (an interaction which changes the motion of an object), it’s always described as either push or pull. The body’s strength, which produces force, can thus only produce force in one of the two modes. Unless I guess you want to argue for a different model of basic physical force, in which case I think a lot of high school physics teachers will be up in arms at you.
Isometric muscle contractions are well known in powerlifting (history of isometric focused powerlifting routines), and yeah gymnasts certainly focus more on contractions of that type. However the different contractions do not produce untranslatable results. The standard way I’ve helped people achieve a pull up or chin up (most Americans today cannot do a single one) is an exercise in which they essentially hold themselves up in the position for a pull up for as long as they can. Then release, wait a bit, and do it again. Do that a few times a couple times a week. What slowly happens is eventually they get strong enough to actually do a pull up, but a pull up requires muscles to lengthen, while the isometric hanging exercise does not (typically you use a stool or something or just plain jump into position and hold yourself up motionless.)
But since strength is a measure of force production, it must be noted that isometric contractions in body weight exercises ultimately cannot produce greater force than weighted movements. Thus, we know an iron cross cannot produce more force than a 650 lb squat. The force required to do an iron cross is equivalent to the load on the muscles (which is dependent on body weight), since the muscular force involved in an isometric contraction is equivalent to the weight of the load. Since body weight isometric contractions have a fairly fixed load, and squats do not, and since we know almost no one weighs 650 lbs, we know a squat of 650 lbs must produce more force than even the heaviest gymnast’s iron cross.
But you are right that specific training produces specific adaptations, a front squat and a back squat are extremely similar movements. But they are different enough that someone with a very impression powerlifting score (say over 2000), who trains exclusively in the back squat and who has never front squatted in his life, will have almost guaranteed a lower maximum front squat than a very strong lifter (say 1850-1900 score) who incorporates the front squat into his regular motions.
However, what I have seen personally, is when trained powerlifters do incorporate new strength exercises (I’ve often seem them incorporating things like powercleans, or the aforementioned front squat), they very rapidly get them up to a level commensurate with their overall strength. Far faster than humanly possible to have built enough additional muscular strength, what thus is happening is adaptations already undergone contribute immensely to those other lifts and their neuromuscular system as a whole is developing capabilities to recruit that strength in a new motion.
Part of this actually explains the novice effect. I’ve seen novice weight lifters, true novices, go from squatting say 85 lbs to 185 lbs in like 1.5 months. Now some of that was legitimate strength gain (actually some argue it’s all strength gain but that’s a side), I don’t feel that is the case. I feel it’s a case of the body learning to utilize strength, since the untrained person basically doesn’t know how to do a squat he can’t properly recruit his actual strength.
Another good example of this is a new rower. Since I got heavily involved in rowing some years ago (and reduced my involvement in lifting a little bit), something I note is that even very strong people cannot produce a really great amount of force per stroke. Most novice rowers believe rowing is about maximizing how many strokes per minute you do, but it’s really about having the ability to generate a huge amount of force per stroke, rest on the recovery, and then repeat it again. In a short race scenario your spm will obviously be higher than in a longer race, but the key is still explosive amounts of force per stroke. Essentially to succeed at ramping up stroke rate you need to be able to do it while still generating a lot of force, high stroke rate of weak strokes is not ideal.
You essentially have to train your body to do this, but just because you come into rowing strong doesn’t mean you’ll be doing this on day one.
But Martin we are not talking about force. We are talking about strength. Muscles really do not care if they are pushing and object away or pulling and object towards the body. From the muscle’s POV each of those is an isotonic contraction producing a force over a unit distance over a unit time. From the muscle’s POV both an isometric and an eccentric application are different beasts than a cocnentric isotonic contraction.
The force, distance, and time elements are all critical part of muscular power, but not, as you note, for powerlifting. For that application it is force over distance that matters, however long it takes. For an isometric contraction distance is zero and it is force over time that matters. Eccentric contraction is another matter yet.
For each the issue is how the muscle recruits individual motor units to accomplish the task. Each individual motor unit produces more or less based on how much it has experienced hypertrophy, and physiologic adaptations within the units (how they utilize energy). The muscle as a whole adapts by learning how to recruit the motor units best for the specific task.
Leverage is a powerful thing in bodyweight exercises. Comparing a squat to an iron cross is silly.
Sorry for all the typos above that make that hard to read.
I do also want to follow-up some other items in your post …
Count me among those who consider novice strength gains as all strength even if most of it is the neuromuscular adapatations, i.e. “learning to utilize” what you’ve already got in a task-specific manner. Agreed, that is also a large part of what happens in the front vs rear squat example as well. Again, muscles get strong for a specific task in three ways: neuromuscular adaptations, hypertrophy of specific motor units most used for the task, and metabolic adaptations within the muscles. The first is no less a part of strength gains than the other two.
Rowing is more a true power application of muscles. And of course also muscle endurance and aerobic capacity. The role of lifting in rowing is a great example of needing to know what an athlete wants the strength for and rowing coaches are very divided on the role of lifting for their sport. Some advise lifting mainly to strengthen the complementary (antagonistic) muscles (the push to rowing’ pulls and the pulls to rowing’s pushes) to help avoid muscle imbalances and the injuries associated with such. Some want to get the muscles used in rowing stronger. Some are more concerned about increasing muscular endurance (with short rests and circuit training style work-outs) and some with plyometric work for that explosive power.
Most rowers also talk about a sweet spot between how much force per stroke and spm that is where they function most efficiently to deliver the most watts/minute. But you’d know more about that than me.
There are a lot of complexities to rowing that I’m not all that hip to, I started it late in life and I’m not uber-into it. Due to the weather it’s kind of a seasonal thing, I just do Concept2 to keep from getting too rusty in the winter. There are members in my club who row throughout the winter whenever weather permits but I just don’t have that in me. I initially just wanted to participate in a rowing education program as I had been using a Concept2 rower for cardio and just kinda wanted to see what it was like on the actual water.
It ends up that while the club doesn’t have a problem filling men’s heavyweight teams (all much more serious rowers than me) there are a lot of people who want/wanted to do mixed teams and they didn’t always have enough people so I was recruited just due to being another warm body.
I do know there are a lot of hotly debated issues in the rowing community. One of them pertains to tall vs short rowers. Most top colleges that offer rowing (or “crew” I guess in college) and Olympic rowing predominantly want really tall rowers (I’m 6’5" so this school of thought would’ve liked me as a rower when I was in my 20s, but I was too heavy even then.) Some rowers however claim that this is because most recruiting is now done based on performance on an ergometer (like the Concep2), since a lot of coaches will look to recruit kids who can totally rock an erg even if they didn’t actually row in HS. The argument some make is that the ergometer shows an strong biomechanical advantage for taller rowers that is not actually present on water, and that shorter rowers can easily be equal or better on the water.
I also have a Concept2 and use it as part of my aerobic mix. Would you have any concerns about doing a hard work-out day on the C2 (such as intervals) in between weight days? Not that I am likely to get on the water but how did you experience the difference? As to the sweet spot, have you played with resistance settings vs spm to see how it translates in watts produced for you?
