Getting big vs getting strong... yeah, I know.

[BigShot]

Firstly, my search-fu has completely failed me... I'd be unsurprised if someone posted several links to answer this, but I have looked.


So I've been out of the gym for a while (injury first, then just flat broke - joys of working in an industry that's been murdered by recession... grumble grumble whine) but I'm still an enthusiastic advocate of barbell training and SS in particular.

On that note I recently got a long-time gym user (bodybuilding routines, not a real novice program) interested in the program, but today I got a message saying he was "giving up" on the strength thing because he wants to get big. That "the force a muscle can exert is proportional to its cross sectional area" and also suggested that bigger muscles hold more water and glycogen meaning strength and stamina.


Now, I don't have the knowledge to really pick that apart - though my gut says that if strong is a function of big, better to train strong and get big as a result - and probably be STRONGER than the guy who trained big thanks to the effectiveness of the lifts and program of SS.

I'll be seeing him later on and would like to give him an intelligent answer to his comments... any help?

I know you can only lead the horse to the water... but as this horse is a thinking human being with a scientific mind (and by that I mean... he's a scientist - as his job) I'm hoping it might be persuaded to drink.
I'm not going to sink half my life into persuading him - but there you go.

Most likely he'll see my size change when I next get paid and put aside a lump for gym membership and food and then become interested again - but until then... what would you say?

[FatButWeak]

How old are you? Why would you give a fuck about somebody else's trainign routine unless they are your sex partner?

This other guy is right: all things being equal (bone length, pointof tendon insertion, percentage of fast v. slow twitch fibers, age, hormonal profile, gender, neurological conditions, experience under the bar, etc.) a bigger muscle is stronger and has a greater work capacity.

But when you are talking about pursuing hypertrophy and becoming bodybuilder/powerlifter sized big, you must move massive amounts of weight to get there. Watch videos of Ronnie Coleman deadlifting - he isnt doing sets of 135. The way to pursue hypertrophy is to get beastly strong, then, with multiple wheel on the bar, start eating big and doing more volume.

Doing volume with fairy weights does not cause hypertrophy. It just doesn't. Strong => hypertrophy is the only way that works.

[Corrie]

I think FatButWeak is right. No matter what goal you have in the end, you have to have a decent strength base to maximize your ability to reach those goals.

[BigShot]

I'm 31 and he's a mate (read: friend for those among you who don't speak plain English (slang)) and as I spend about 15 hours a week shooting the shit with him the topic sometimes comes up - usually with him taking the piss out of me for having the body of an 11 year old girl (got hurt early on in the program then had to stop - as above). When that happens, SS comes up soon after.

Your response is basically what I've said to him before - if you want to get big you need to get strong first - but being basically clueless about how this shit works (I just know what to do... drink your milk and squat, pussy) I was looking for some direction.

We'll see. I reckon he'll do what he's doing and then I'll laugh at him the day I squat more than he can.

[Briks42]

You get strong by doing compound lifts through a full range of motion in an (at least reasonably) intelligently designed program.

You get big by doing the same exact thing and eating enough for growth. Getting big and getting strong are both done by doing the same lifts, in pretty close to the same rep ranges.

People might say do 3's for strength and 8's for hypertrophy, but I'd say that doing 3's while eating enough will get your bigger than doing 8's and not eating enough. Doing the correct lifts and eating enough is the most important thing BY FAR.

[FatButWeak]

If he can get big (see pictures of Dorian Yates for what big looks like. If he makes an icky face and says someting like "I dont want to accidentally get that big" then show him a picture of Greg Plitt, who most sissies think is big enough) without getting strong first, then God bless him. Some people respond to those bullshit methods. They are rare.

One of the reasons why I love SS so much is because I used to do Muscle and Fitness workouts of a million sets, a million exercises, all that bullshit. And I never got any bigger. It just did not work for me. And this was during my peak hormonal years (15-30). Now, at age 42, I have grown and improved my body much more by pursuing strnegth. The size and shape that I desperately wanted (for the chicks, primarly, secondarily for sport) only came years later when I followed a simpler routine like SS, with 5 exercises and 3 sets of five reps. Simple and effective.

If I was one of those guys who got good hypertrophy results in the gym by doing dozens and dozens of bicep curls and partial squats in the Smith machine, I would never have bothered looking for something different. Why would I? The bullshit would have worked. But it didn't. So I looked.

For the record, anybody who has bigger muscles than you has trained and adapted them to do more of a certain type of work than you have trained and adapted those same muscles to do. The smaller guy will almost certainly have a smaller 1RM max than the bigger guy, but the bigger guy will have a much MUCH larger 5RM, 10RM, etc. because the larger muscles are better adapted to doing more work.

This is not to say that a guy with a large chest, biceps and bench press (but who never trains the squat, or who only does leg extensions) is going to have a stronger squat than a guy who squats three times a week with a bird chest, but now you are comapring apples and oranges. "Chesty" doesn't train the squat, so of course he will be weaker. But who was the weaker bench press? "Birdie" will.

[Dastardly]

Just like briks said. The whole rep thing is largely over emphasised. You just need to apply stress to your body and have enough nutrition to grow. Compound 'strength' lifts do this most effectively, and you can use more weight at lower rep ranges. So go figure.

When people get much stronger, they become more able to handle heavier weights for more reps. Also, ridiculous isolation exercises which would be redundant for a beginner or intermediate start to become more useful, as the trainee can lift big weights in those exercises and also becomes less able to squat, bench and deadlift heavy as often because the huge weights they handling are harder to recover from.

I only really do low rep squats. My work sets are 1-3 reps. Yet my legs are much thicker than all the guys at the gyms I attend doing 15 rep squats. Like I say, its about how you can apply stress. With exercises like skull crushers or dips you can can benefit from higher reps even as a relative newcomer. Because of the mechanics of the exercise, it is easier to overload muscles even at high reps. And you will gain a lot of strength from doing so.

Sticking to light weight/high reps on bench press, squat or deadlift wont be nearly as effective for hypertrophy or strength gains.

[BigShot]

All pretty much exactly what I expected to hear.
No doubt we'll talk more about this stuff in the future but as things stand it looks like he's going to do as he's doing... also not unexpected.

I said a few things from this thread pretty much verbatim and even read one post directly as "something I saw online today" but he seems set.

We'll see what happens when I get back under the bar in a few weeks (oh please! not training is driving me batshit) and do the baby-mammal routine of growing on a diet of milk and iron. I doubt anything will make the point better than that. We'll see.

Thanks for the replies folks.

[veryhrm]

- you can also hit him w/ terms like sarcoplasmic hypertrophy vs myofibrillar hypertrophy concepts. Big words may appeal to his science side.
- and if he's been working out for a long time and his program is good... then why isn't he ALREADY big ? \
- another argument is that he only needs to run SS for a couple of months. It's practically guaranteed that if he does the program for 3 months he'll be impressed enough w/ his progress that he'll prob choose to continue. For someone who's been training for years and is used to going to the gym to lift, a 3 month experiment should be no big deal.

[PaulBeech]

All the big bodybuilders at my place all ramble on about ten reps of this, twelve of that and strength training is shit because it won't make you look any good. What they don't seem to realize is that they all work up to heavy sets of five or less reps. To me its just like all those ten rep sets were just warm ups. I'm sure not all bodybuilders train like that though.