Strength and Endurance

[TimD]

At the time I was in my 20s, I'm 5'7" and went from about 155 to 185.

I'm 28 y/o, 5'8", 235 lbs (not fat, although according to the Army chart and the NYT modern man you were fat about 20 lbs ago and I died 40 lbs ago). I will lose weight doing the military's preferred functional fitness/warrior athlete/operator training nonsense until leveling off at about 190 lbs. I don't know your body, but my guess is you were still nowhere near your potential strength or weight.

[obelix]

If I had to lay it out, sprint endurance sports tolerate the most amount of mass and ultra distance sports tolerate the least. Both benefit from improved force production, sure (see above), but the sprint sports will tolerate more mass since the amount of fatigue dissipation is less critical to performance compared to absolute force production. The 400 or 800m "sprint" may be the median here, though I would argue more for the 400 than the 800 given the time domains and stark training differences. The body morphology differences between sprinters, 400 specialists, and milers bear this out as well.

Where would you say a sport like motocross falls on this spectrum?

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

Where would you say a sport like motocross falls on this spectrum?

Somewhere towards the distance end, though this is confounded by the extremely high skill component that is the bigger predictor of success in that sport.

[Gene61]

Another endurance sport where weight training is feared is rock climbing. When I pointed out to the scrawny little climbers I met guiding my group up "The Grand" Teton, that the famous Rob Miller, who mapped out some of the toughest routes up El Capitan and who climbs it multiple times in a weekend and who is in his 50s trains hard with barbells, they were like "huh, you're kidding! I'll have to check this out!"