When I watch the worlds strongest man there are a lot of competitors who are extremely tall. Many are over 6’ but quite a few are 6’6 or taller. Height among WSM competitors seems comparable to NBA players.
So is there a formula that relates maximum strength to maximum height, ie will someone who is 7’ (but who is normally proportioned) have a maximum strength that is 20% more than a person who is 5’?
Then again, when they do lift things the weight is further from the fulcrum. With their arms the hands are further from their elbows for example.
I’m assuming there is a reason strongman competitors tend to be taller than average.
Thats interesting, but I’ve noticed on worlds strongest man competitions that the atheletes tend to be taller than average. Most are at least 6’ tall, and many are closer to 6’6.
Looking at the top 3 competitors from 2019, they were 6’3, 6’5 and 6’9 for example.
It’s an indirect relation. A lot of tall people are at a mechanical disadvantage when doing many weightlifting exercises, and many tall people are not at all strong.
However, there is a correlation between maximum height and maximum weight. Tall people who are mesomorphic likely weigh more than shorter mesomorphs. And the correlation between maximal strength and weight, for trained lifters, looks like the top half of the letter C. The more you weigh, the stronger you can be. Many powerlifters are big all over, but don’t look particularly fit or trim.
Growth hormone scales everything in the human body. (there are some who theorize that taller people might be slightly smarter on average for this reason, because their brains are proportional). This includes the size of the muscle tissue initially and the room it has to expand in.
I’m not sure leverage has any effect at all - yes, a taller person’s arms are longer, but if the attachment points of their muscles to those bones are proportionally in the same ratio as a shorter person, the lever equations will work out to be exactly the same ratio.
So yeah. What you are seeing in such a competition - or most sporting events, really - is a contest of “who got the luckiest with their genetics and also trained hard”. Both are required. And obviously in contests that have poor controls for “cheating”, it’s also who cheated the best and started with good genetics and trained hard.
I wasn’t aware that the attachment points were proportional.
I figure if a guy is 6’9 and has a lean body mass of 330 lbs, he will obviously have more muscle mass than someone who is 5’6 with a lean body mass of 190 lbs. But I figured the proportions of how far you have to move the weight when lifting it, how far the hands are from the elbows, etc would negate some of the benefit of that extra muscle mass.
As I understand it, strength is a factor of the cross section of your muscles. It’s an area computation (as opposed to length or volume). Your body weight, for example, would be a volumetric computation.
If you know that Bob has height X, strength Y, and body weight Z, for example, and you wanted to know how strong/heavy he would be if he was taller or shorter, you would calculate like so:
That said, humans are a bit more complicated than that and the biological gender factors in fairly heavily as does age, weight, etc. If you want something more advanced, you’ll need to look at the Wilks coefficient or the modern upgrades that include more variables:
Up to a point, the bigger the human the stronger that human is.
A 6’6" man has good genetics, had good nutrition growing up, and has a mass and muscle cross-section advantage over someone smaller. Add in good training and you’ve got a contender.
But someone 7’7" might have some sort of hormonal disorder to achieve that height, and that can affect all sorts of things, plus the square/cube law starts to give diminishing returns at a certain point. Pound-for-pound someone shorter might actually be stronger than someone taller, but the tall guy has so much more poundage so in absolute terms the tall guy can lift more than the short guy. That’s a reason you get really big guys in strong-man competitions.
The very tall are prone to back, heart, and joint problems. Humans work best overall within a certain size range and the further you get from that range the more problems you get.
If anything, height and therefore limb length/back length is inversely related to ability to lift. Although it depends on the lift.
In lifts like the deadlift, the shorter your legs and back, the less you have to move the weight to get it to waist level. Longer arms offset that somewhat, because you don’t have to lean over as far to grip the bar. Squats, it doesn’t matter how long your arms are, just leg and back length. Bench press and overhead press, you want shorter arms because the distance to move the weight is less, which is why the best bench pressers are not always the best deadlifters.
Some of the strongman lifts will give an advantage to taller competitors. The one where you have to lift the stones over a bar means that a very short competitor will have to lift the stone higher above his chest and shoulders, offsetting the advantage of a shorter lift to waist or shoulder level. In the farmer’s walk, longer legs mean longer steps.
But as Dr Paprika says, big people tend to be tall people. It would be advantageous to be very short, but very very large, but it doesn’t usually work out that way, just because of how people grow. Sometimes it does - Paul Anderson was probably the strongest, scientifically measured man who ever lived. He was 5"7", and weighed in his prime about 370 pounds. Naim Suleymanoglu was one of the greatest Olympic lifters of all time. He was 4’9" and weighed 132. Mike Bridges, the great powerlifter of the 80s, was 5’2" and lifted in the 182 class. Ed Coan is probably the greatest powerlifter of all time - 5’6", 220 lbs.
Depending on the lifts, they might be better off if they were 5’3", 5’5" and 5’9". All other things being equal, which they never are.