Actually it is. Bodybuilders like to get as big as possible and try to maximize both. But the size you get from strength increases outstrips the size you get from just doing pumpy stuff. Andy Baker's been referenced here to point to value in hypertrophy training, but I'm pretty sure I've either read or heard something from him to the tune of "getting your squat to 500 will do more for the size of your legs than any hypertrophy work you can do". To see a fun little example of how little a pump actually makes your muscles bigger, look up the video on youtube where Brian Shaw and Eddie Hall do a bodybuilder/bro type "arms" workout. They measure arm circumference before and after. They both gained an inch on each arm from the workout. Aside from that one inch, the remaining size difference between their arms and say, most anyone else's, comes from them having become extremely fucking strong.
That's a rather bold and confident claim for the quality of evidence you provide.
If I increase my squat by 100 lbs, of course my legs will get bigger because they are now happily full of more contractile tissue. That is not what I am disputing. The only thing which I'm disputing is the claim that training optimally for strength is (necessarily) the same thing as training optimally for size.
I'm pretty sure zft is mistaking size for aesthetics.
If you want your muscles to look better, aka more definition, my understanding is you get to the lowest bodyfat percentage that you can and you do bodybuilding pumpy stuff, good luck with that.
If you just want your thighs to be bigger, you get stronger on your Squat/Deadlift and secondary exercises if you are an intermediate/advanced lifter.
Our friend clearly chose the latter, so I don't get his lack of understanding. He must have noticed what happened to his body as he got up to a 507 x 5 squat, so why does he want to do sets of 12 and leg extensions so badly?
I find this phenomenon quite amazing. Here you got a guy basically giving away invaluable knowledge on using barbells to improve everything, but there is a segment of pedantic nitpickers trying to find the tiniest flaws in arguments he made ten years ago. It seems like one of those diseases of the modern age.
It's really like the you guys have the reading comprehension of a third grader. Do you really think I'm confused about the fact that strength training results in hypertrophy?
I didn't claim that there is necessarily such an alternative way. But, as is clearly written in PP:ST, certain training methodologies do result in different distributions of hypertrophy (i.e., the distribution of sarcoplasmic vs. myofibrillar hypertrophy). People in the business of getting big solely for purpose of getting big seem to empirically favor a distribution towards the sarcoplasmic end of things. (And yes, I know---as I'm sure you're already thinking, people do a lot of things which are suboptimal and what is common practice may not be (and often isn't) ideal.) Perhaps you can more rapidly accumulate muscle volume with that type of training (and the perhaps the maximal theoretical accumulation is greater) vs. training which results in optimal progression in regards to strength.
From the quote that zft provided from PPST, it would seem in a way that maximizes size, where size is a function of amount of contractile tissue and the amount of glycogen and high-energy phosphates in each cell.
He never said he wanted to do sets of 12, it seems to me like he is simply trying to understand. But your Rip cosplay is blocking your ability to critically think. And before you accuse me of being an above-parallel-squatting weakling, I too have squatted over 500x5, and I'm not even fat or on TRT like the rest of the board.
I think maybe what people are trying to say is that if you want a heavier sarcoplasmic hypertrophy response, you do sets of 8-12 reps and pump a bunch of shit into your muscles. This is how most people in the gym lift, and are often dismayed when they get sick, take a short break from “exercising,” etc., and lose 3/4 of their size.
A guy who deadlifts 500 is pretty much always going to have a nice, thick muscular appearance until the day he dies. My grandfather was like that. He was a 500+ deadlifter back in the day and stopped lifting in the 1960’s after he took a hit to his torso from a carnival ride. When he died of cancer in 2001, I’ll never forget wondering why his forearms still looked so jacked.
Pity it wasn’t until years after his death I understood why.