Relative Strength

Well, it's been hard getting into the gym and to BJJ this week. We've been very busy.Yesterday, I hit the gym and did a full body routine. Nothing too serious, just something to get all my muscles involved. Today, I did a little cardio lifting. Started with an 800 meter row, then did 4 sets of each: Tabata Thrusters/Jump Rope 2 mins, KB Swings/Planks, Jump-ups/21s, and Situp/Pushup/Obliques 20/20/20 reps. It felt decent, but a little weak.

I wanted to talk a little about relative strength because it's something that is, or should be, pretty important to a lot of people . Relative strength is your strength to weight ratio and absolute strength is your strength no matter how big you are. There are a lot of people out there who are quite strong but quite big. A lot of people, including myself a few years ago, would argue that being big isn't a "but", however it really depends on why you are in the gym in the first place and what you do. Bigger muscle is fine if you just want to look good at the beach, however it can be excess baggage to someone like a police officer, a fireman, a combat military member, and most sports, especially those fighting sports which require the athlete to meet a weight requirement. Imagine a member of S.W.A.T. or a military member on a combat team who weighs 225lbs and is quite strong. It's great that he can carry his load plus more, but what happens if he gets injured and the rest of the team needs to carry him or move him quickly out of danger? The point is, you do not have to be big to be strong and sometimes that extra body weight can be a burden.

So, the next question on most of your minds is probably, how do I get stronger without muscle hypertrophy (size). The easy answer is: improve your neural efficiency. The hard question is: how? Neural efficiency, in general, refers to how well your brain can control individual muscle fibers in a muscle. This actually happens over time to a certain point. Remember when you first started lifting how awkward it was and how you couldn't lift that much, but after the 3rd to 4th week, you had made a pretty good leap in weight lifted? That initial "great leap forward" was more due to your body learning how to effectively control the muscles in order to do your lift. But that only happens automatically in the very beginning. In order to continue or force this to happen may require you to do some experimenting on what works for you, but two methods you can try is to lift heavy weights at low reps and you can lift weights at a rapid pace. The reason is simple. If you lift heavy weights, your central nervous system needs to make use of as many muscle fibers as possible in order to lift such a heavy weight. It is the same when lifting weights at a high rate of speed; it requires the use of more muscle fibers than normally would be needed to lift the weight due to the rapid nature of the lift.

So in short, combine your workouts because you can not lift heavy all the time. Mix up your routines with heavy workouts, 1-6 reps, 3-4 sets one day, and lighter weights at a rapid pace the next. There is a point where you just can not increase any more strength without putting on more muscle mass/weight. But the point is to fill your body up with as much strength as possible before you do grow.