Is strength equal to muscle volume?
Muscular strength is nowadays recognized as a fundamental physical quality for sports performance, for the maintenance of health and for the improvement of people’s quality of life.
Normally, the amateur or semi-professional athlete who practices sports in the gym, in the bodybuilding area mainly seeks to increase muscle mass (hypertrophy) exercises are focused on increasing the volume forgetting a very important physical aspect, strength.
It is important to know that having more strength does not mean having a lot of muscle volume. Strength is the way we have to face a weight and the capacity we have to overcome the resistance it gives us. The more strength we have the more weight we can lift safely and correctly.
Strength will not, in the first instance, increase the volume of our muscle fibers, but it will help us to improve the quality of the existing ones.
The muscular nervous response will be greater so that in the second instance it will help us to be able to grow when we work in a more concrete way.
Keys that favor the increase of strength
Intensity
If you want to gain strength you must force the muscle to improve its consistency and not its volume, for this we must give the muscle a lot of intensity in a short period of time.
Know the maximum weight you are able to lift (executing the movement correctly), then try to achieve 6 repetitions at the highest possible weight, so you will maintain a level of intensity between 85% and 100% In this way we will bring the muscle to what is known as muscle failure and concentrate all the tension.
Progressions
Our body generally has a great capacity for adaptation, and an average amateur athlete can achieve this adaptation the third time he/she performs this type of intensity in the same exercise, so it is advisable to introduce variants such as increasing the intensity by reducing the repetitions.
If we want to progress in physical preparation, in our hypertrophy we must alternate strength and volume exercises.
