Quote from LongShot:
now, it is NOT a myth that strength depends on cross sectional area of the muscle. Of course that is true but other factors also play important roles in strength.
1) neurological efficiency
2) muscle points of attachment for efficient leverage
3) and CROSS SECTIONAL AREA
4) % Fast twitch/Slow Twitch fiber composition
they all play a role, so your myth assertion is BS.
:-/
Strength does not
depend on cross-sectional area. Pretty simple. Does size help? Of course. Is it essential? Should it be in the main focus? Absolutely not.
I guess if you've been looking at pictures from MuscleMag or Flex for too long it's easy to think that big muscles = strength.
But body building is not synonymous with strength training.
Look at the
real strong guys, weight lifters. 150 lb guys heaving around 400 lb weights. These guys would annilihate a body builder on the bench press or squat, yet do they have bulging muscles? Hell no. I don't know how anyone, especially someone that claims to be such a rationalist, can ignore the in your face evidence that strength gains are not dependant on ever bigger muscles.
Now I'm not a pure strength trainer, not by a long shot (excuse the pun); I certainly do like the sex appeal of big, defined muscles. Now, whether we're training Mentzer style HiT or we're doing more sets, we're doing a certain amount of reps per set -- usually around 10ish, although we may vary it -- to get the muscle building effect. To increase this intensity, we can attempt to do more reps with the same weight or increase the weight and do the same reps. I think most of us would agree that increasing the weight would be the way to go. (Stuart McRobert's
"Brawn" does a good job of explaining this.)
Well, after a while it gets hard to keep adding weight. Who of us hasn't experienced that?
That's why I recommend easing off and going on a
strength building cycle. And to do that, don't you think it makes sense to look at they way
strength training athletes exercise? I do. And, from everything I've read and seen and talked about, I can tell you that they're certainly not "going for burn" or training to failure on each set (hardly ever, in fact). Many of these guys train two or three times a day, day after day. Hard to do that if you're going to failure. And it seems to work; they sure are a lot stronger than you or I (unless you happen to be able to do 800lb deads).
I don't mean to say that they don't exert themselves, they certainly do. But such exertion isn't required at every work out, and is, according to what I've been able to gather, counterproductive. They periodize their training. A good book to check out regarding periodization is Tudor Bompa's stuff. He has a book with "Strength Training" in the title, if I recall correctly, which is a bit misleading, because it doesn't actually talk about strenght training, as I've described it, but it is a good overview of the concept of periodization.
Imagine, after a few months of training like this, you go back to your high intensity routines, how much more weight you'll be able to lift. Think that might be good for your muscle size? You betcha. (And depending on how long you've been going all out intensity, your body will probably respond well to the (relative) rest, ie grow.)
ps - it's a real fun way to work out, too. I love lifting weights. I mean I really enjoy it. Training for strength is great, because I can just go in my weight room, pick up a bar and do a few snatches or cleans, just for fun, and I know I'm not really disturbing my body's recuperation because I didn't annilihate the muscle on the last work out.
