Recently during one of my live video seminars HIT trainer Andrew Short jokingly suggested I talk about “speed strength.” I say “jokingly” because he and I and probably most of the people watching know there is no such thing, but a lot of people do believe things like moving quickly, lifting heavy weights, and performing endurance activities require different types of strength and different ways of training to improve them. Fortunately, this isn’t the case and you do not need complex workout programming to improve all of these.
Your muscles produce force for the primary purpose of controlling your body’s position and movement. If your muscles get stronger they can produce more force, if they get weaker they can produce less.
The other factors of functional ability support the work done by your muscles. Your bones and connective tissues transmit the force. Your cardiovascular system delivers fuel to and wastes away from yours muscles so they can create the energy required produce force. Your flexibility allows your muscles to move your joints. Skill allows your muscles to produce force in a coordinated and efficient manner.
How much weight you can lift, hold, or lower under control depends on how much force your muscles can produce. How many times you can lift and lower or how long you can hold a particular weight depends on how much force your muscles can produce. How quickly or “explosively” or fast you can move depends on how much force your muscles can produce.
These are not different types of strength, they’re just different ways of using your strength in combination with other factors of functional ability.
Your maximum or limit strength isn’t a specific type of strength, it is just the most force you can produce for a short duration to lift or hold something heavy.
Your “strength endurance” or local muscular endurance is not a specific type of strength either. The stronger you are, the lower the percentage of effort required to lift a sub maximal weight so the longer you are able to do it.
There is no such thing as “speed strength” or “explosive strength”, either. If you are stronger you can generate more force thus accelerate more quickly and move faster.
There is no such thing as “agile strength.” Your ability to move and change direction quickly is depends on a combination of your strength and your skill in the type of movements you are performing, and not a different type of strength.
Why is this important? Because it means you don’t need different types of training to improve these things; just getting stronger in general will improve all of them. You don’t need to alternate between focusing on “max strength” one week, “strength endurance” the next, and “explosive” strength the week after that. You just need to focus on getting stronger in general and all of these will improve. If you want to optimize your ability to perform an activity or skill you need to combine general exercise for strength with specific practice for skill.
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Drew,
Excellent post! I have had this discussion with many people over the years. It is hard when something has been repeated so many times that people believe it as the truth. I will be sharing this post with friends and clients.
Thanks again for the post,
Dwayne Wimmer
Owner, Vertex Fitness
Great explanation Drew! If you wanna improve upon any sport, activity first make sure you get stronger through proper exercise and also practice the skill necessary to become better at your sport or activity. I guess most of those so called ‘different types of strength’ protocols had been invented to sell you just yet another new programme and rather than help you in a longer run they only bring more confusion to the masses.
Excellent use of the sword of logic. Keep up the good work.
Once again dead on the money!
I thought that type IIa muscle fibers adapt according to how you train. If you emphasize limit strength, then the IIa fibers become more glycolic (more like IIb fibers) whereas if you do a lot of lower load, high rep training, they become more oxidative in character (more like type I fibers, better for activities requiring some endurance). If the muscle fiber adaptations are different for different kinds of training, can you really say that strength is just strength?
The general adaptations would be different between strength training and traditional endurance activities, but not between different strength training protocols as long as the set durations are not excessive.
So we still need to train for endurance in different session from strength training right?
Having able to squat 100kg doesn’t mean we can just run a marathon next week without any endurance training? Or able to do twice bodyweight weighted chin up and succesfully rock climb to the top the next week without any endurance training?
Or can we?
A proper strength training program will improve your general endurance but you need to do practice the specific skills of these activities to be able to perform them more efficiently. Optimizing performance of these requires both endurance and skill.
Ouch! I think I just heard a plate drop in Ohio 🙂
Keep up the good work with these Q&A type posts. They are very interesting.