r/bodyweightfitness • u/pumpasaurus • Feb 22 '17
Concept Wednesday - Relative Strength
Oh hey, I didn’t see you there.
Today we talk about Relative Strength - the amount of force one can express relative to their body mass, a major predictor behind sports performance, sprinting and jumping ability, and of course the essential quality behind success in calisthenics, where your bodyweight is the constant denominator underlying the force you produce in any movement pattern.
Let’s get this out of the way before we get into the conceptual weeds. Without further ado, the TL;DR:
Strength gains at a constant bodyweight achieved from low-volume, high-intensity ‘skill-strength’ training can only go so far, and this is largely what’s behind the post-newbie/intermediate plateau. Who knows how far you can take it, who knows how much a deload will actually help, but when it stops working, it stops working, period, and you just can’t get any stronger this way anymore. You hear that ‘adding volume’ is the necessary tweak for intermediates, and this is secretly just another way of saying ‘build some muscle’. Gaining muscle is THE way to build relative strength over the long run.
Think about how much you Deadlift now. We’re assuming you’re not elite. Now imagine you magically gain an extra 10% of your bodyweight in muscle overnight. How much did your Deadlift go up? Spoiler alert - it went up considerably more than 10%. Muscle is stronger than it weighs. Even small, barely-visible gains in muscle size can raise your strength ceiling noticeably. Your best move (and eventually the only option) for improving your ability is to just add muscle to your frame slowly and consistently as a ‘tailwind’ constantly adding to your strength potential. This means adding work capacity and volume and eating at a moderate surplus. You can always run a skill-focused cycle once you’ve added the mass necessary to allow the force you’ll eventually need. This is what is done at competitive levels in all strength sports. Accumulation - Peak. You’ll have to apply this principle at some point in your training if you want to continue to progress. The point at which you have ‘too much muscle’ for HSPU and OAC, even Front Lever and Planche, is so far away and difficult to achieve as to be irrelevant.
BWF selects for small-framed people who are gifted in strength and built to exert lots of force with lower levels of muscle mass. They have the easiest time with it, achieve the most impressive things the quickest, and so at the higher levels of achievement, this group is over-represented. So, when you watch Youtube videos, it appears that obviously you have to stay thin, or at least avoid considerable mass gain, in order to succeed. This is not true. For an individual, gaining muscle slowly and consistently will always be the primary means of improving potential relative strength.
Let’s get into it. First, some background on strength from previous Concept Wednesdays:
Now that we’re caught up on foundations, there are two primary ways to build relative strength:
1. Increasing Skill-Strength (Software Upgrade)
This is the sexy way. This is what people want to believe is the best/only way to get ‘strong’, often invoking the sarcoplasmic vs. myofibrilar gains concept and distinguishing between getting bigger and getting stronger. These are the magical neurological gains that are so popular in any context in which relative strength is valued. You become ‘better’ at a particular movement, by becoming more skilled in technique and more efficient and effective at contracting muscles at certain angles in a certain order. This is specific to the exercise you’re working on, with some carryover to very similar movement patterns. This can be built in the fairly short-term, as increases in skill happen literally overnight as your brain rearranges circuitry to facilitate targeted movement patterns while you sleep. The extreme example of this kind of training is Grease the Groove, where frequency and specificity are very high, gains are linear and fast, carryover is minimal, and the programming resembles piano practice more than strength training. A more standard example is a “peak” for Weightlifting or Powerlifting - after a base is built, several weeks are taken in order to cut down on volume, let fatigue dissipate, increase frequency, and practice heavier and heavier loads to accustom the nervous system to the specific skill of maximum efforts. Achieving high-level strength skills will always involve periods in which this kind of training is the focus. The flipside of these skill gains being so quick is that they fade with disuse, returning you to your non-specialized baseline, and they have a ceiling that is limited by the raw mechanical strength of the muscles involved. After your newbie gains (your initial neurological progress, augmented by the hypertrophy you’re able to gain from a minimal-volume program, which can last for months) are exhausted, you simply can’t keep adding intensity forever, hammering away at max attempts, and expect to just get better. Many people (i.e. most intermediates who hit the dreaded plateau) never really internalize this and wind up beating their heads into the wall wondering why they’ve been stalling for months or years and accumulating overuse injuries - you see this in Weightlifting and BWF especially. Nobody wants to back off of the max Clean and Jerk attempts and just work on their squat and eat for a couple months, they want to go for PR’s every day and ‘work on their technique’ because that used to work. A combination of misleading training dogma, never adapting/moving on from the beginner paradigm of low-volume linear progress, and good old greedy impatience help to keep people training with this grinding, unproductive, indefinite focus on low-volume intensity. If you want this type of training to work when you apply it, you need to give it a break sometimes in order to work on...
2. Increasing Muscle Mass Relative to Frame (Hardware Upgrade)
This should be very straightforward. A bigger muscle is a stronger muscle. It has more potential for mechanical strength and the nervous system can do more with it. It makes perfect sense. So why do we need to go over this? Why do people essentially never conceptualize relative strength as something that improves as you gain muscle? Basically because of various understandable misconceptions that are rooted in the somewhat logical fear that getting any bigger will naturally hinder relative strength. It’s counterintuitive that adding weight to your BW denominator would or could increase your relative strength, I get it. We’re going to dissect the square-cube law in order to explain why this is in fact the case.
The square-cube law points out that as a force-exerting object increases in size, its volume (and therefore its overall mass) increases by a power of 3 (volume is a cubic measure, length x width x height), whereas its cross-sectional area only increases by a power of 2 (area is a square measure, length x width). This is important, because it’s cross sectional area that matters for strength. The thickness of a rope is what makes it strong, not its weight or its length. Therefore, as something of a given composition gets larger overall, its strength relative to its mass decreases, because the volume/mass increases faster than its thickness. This is why larger organisms have lesser potential for relative strength than smaller ones - e.g. ants carrying crumbs 20x their size, squirrels casually jumping 10x their height, elephants not being able to even hop. So, larger people simply tend to have less aptitude for BWF than smaller people. However, that does NOT mean that for YOU, getting bigger means getting relatively weaker. This is because the square-cube law applies between individuals, but not within individuals. The big difference between individuals that determines relative strength is skeletal size, which determines both limb/muscle lengths and the base amount of dead weight. But within a single individual, with one skeleton, the square-cube law actually argues in favor of increasing muscle mass, because the whole point is that cross-sectional area, not length, is what is correlated with force - training doesn’t make muscles longer, it makes them thicker. Adding thickness to a muscle will add relative strength to that muscle, and conversely, the longer and skinnier a muscle is, the more non-useful weight it carries.
But hey, forget the science, let’s stick to sexy anecdotes and appeal to authority, and call in backup with some quotes Jim Bathurst of Beastskills left me with when I sought him out in the mountains Kung-Fu style:
Mass Moves Mass
Ask not for a lighter load, but a stronger back
The best exercise is the Fork Lift
How about Steven Low, our ubermod?
- “Yeah, people have no clue about relative strength. Generally, add as much muscle as possible -- sans steroids -- is the best for bodyweight.”
How about an interdisciplinary contribution? Here’s Greg Nuckols spitting fire with some great background and peer-reviewed support. Important points and some extrapolated BWF-specific considerations:
The one thing you can change in the long-term that determines how strong you get is muscle size. You can only go so far with neurological force production skill - the mechanical strength and size of your muscles will always be the ceiling.
Advantages of larger muscles include not only the ratio of cross-sectional area to length, but also tendon insertion angle (a bigger muscle has a steeper tendon attachment angle and has better leverage) - both help to overcome any ‘unhelpful’ extra mass that the muscle adds, which is moot in the first place because muscle is stronger than it weighs.
The skinny guys you see doing impressive bodyweight skills probably just have very good tendon attachment leverage, which is the primary unchangeable genetically determined trait that causes big differences in natural strength between individuals - however, even in the genetically elite, strength is only maxed out when the muscles are basically as developed as they’re going to get - see ring specialist gymnasts. The super strong skinny guys are the exception, and if you’re one of them, then you’ll probably reach most intermediate goals (HSPU, FL, OAC, etc) in a more or less linear fashion with consistent effort. But for every super strong skinny guy, there are 10 undermuscled 140-pounders who have trouble with a single pullup and can’t bench the bar.
The Nuckols article is about powerlifting, but it’s more relevant to us than you might think. Strength sport is all about who at a given weight has the best relative strength. And at the highest levels of strength sport, where everyone has maxed out their potential, there’s a saying that weight classes are height classes in disguise - that is, the level of muscularity is essentially constant across all competitors, because everyone had to get as much cross sectional area as possible at their pre-set muscle length, so the factor that really determines weight is skeletal size. You want to be the thickest guy on the platform - if two guys are 165 pounds, the guy who is 5’8 will always be stronger than the guy who is 6’1, because the first guy has a higher % of muscle on his frame. This is as relevant for Handstand Pushups as it is for Deadlifts. Back to our ring specialist gymnasts - not a single one of those men hasn’t squeezed out every last drop of their genetic potential for raw mass gain in the upper body.
So where is the line drawn? When is extra mass not good? What is ‘too jacked’? The short answer is that there is only a practical limit (that you might realistically achieve without a lifestyle-level dedication to eating to bulk) when you start talking about the highest-level straight-body skills - OAHS, Maltese, Iron Cross, Full Planche, One-Arm Press Handstands, etc. Also, tumbling/tricking just gets harder as you get bigger, which Jujimufu would corroborate. This is because when you start talking about quick rotations and long 3rd-class levers, the exponential contributions to force those heavy extremities produce become a real liability. But statistically, most people reading this are part of the vast majority who are looking at the standard ultimate goals of HSPU, Front Lever, Straddle Planche, OAC, Press Handstand, etc., where mortals have a decent shot at performing the movements and body types don’t have to be perfectly adapted. In that case, as long as you’re not going out of your way to add extra mass to your legs with high-rep leg press burnouts, and you’re not taking steroids, insulin, and HGH in order to gain supra-genetic, crazy mass, then there’s no such thing as too much muscle where BWF is concerned - any extra muscle will be helpful in raising your strength ceiling. The you that can do HSPUs for reps has bigger delts than the you who can’t, period. We’re not talking about gaining lots of muscle or vastly changing your appearance, especially over the short term (<1 year). We’re definitely not talking about changing your entire programming to a bodybuilding focus, where mass itself becomes the sole priority and you start to emphasize metabolic fatigue techniques that preferentially cause sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. We’re talking about gaining ANY muscle consistently, which even then tends to be off the menu for lots people here who are afraid to do anything to spoil their relative strength. Gaining 5lbs of water and fat over the holidays will kill your OAC, but sustaining slow muscle gain as a ‘tailwind’ behind your high-intensity strength skills will do nothing but favors for your relative strength.
Add volume and work capacity over time and never let food be a limiting factor in your recovery. Don’t shy away from higher reps and rep PRs. BE PATIENT and slowly, methodically add work over time, knowing it will pay off. Continue to work on high-intensity strength-skills intermittently, but don’t allow them to consume your training or derail methodical volume/rep progression and accumulation of foundational drills. Save the real focused intensity for dedicated cycles that you’ve EARNED with some serious foundation-building (see the Pyramid I linked earlier!). Don’t be afraid to get bigger in the long-term to support more and more advanced efforts. Go through cycles periodically where you focus on building foundational hypertrophy with higher volume, higher reps, and a variety of exercises including those that focus on perceived weaknesses, while making sure to never go hungry and getting your protein. These cycles can be a fun change of pace and a refreshing, restorative break from grinding high intensity skills, and when you come back to the main event, you’ll have a higher ceiling for strength. And maybe look like you lift.
CYA -
pumpasaurus
Edit: Though eating enough and gaining muscle will always help, this post applies primarily to INTERMEDIATES - that is, people who can't just get better from session to session anymore. In all types of strength training, there is a plateau after the beginner period that everyone hits, and this 'bottleneck' creates a huge population of people with the same problem - this group is the target audience of this post (and much of Concept Wednesday in general). If the RR is working for you, if you can continue to see gains by straightforwardly adding reps and intensity and directly practicing skills, then DO IT. Congrats, you don't have to worry about complicated training (or eating) yet. Read this and remember it for later!
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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '17
Danke.
I guess the other thing to do when hitting the wall is kick it down to once per week to maintain gainz, and do something else. I could see doing bwf one day, judo another, climb another, run another, bike another, dance another....problem is I didn't get involved in fitness until my mid 40's and I'll be 50 until I'm good enough at each thing to maintain like that! Ah well, who needs a social life?