“ Gotta lift big to get big!”
A well-meaning sentence which can be heard in nearly any gym around the world at most times of the day or being espoused by your favourite fitness influencer to millions of followers.
But is it true?
The long story short, overly simplified answer is no, you do not have to lift “big” weights to get bigger muscles. It is not a requirement to develop the level of strength needed to lift very heavy things for you to develop more muscle mass. So if the answer is this cut and dry, why does this myth continue to this day and why do people swear by it as a key piece of gym and fitness knowledge above reproach?
To explain this, we must first understand what the differences between muscle growth and strength gain are, how they work together and finally, why they are different things despite being somewhat intertwined. So let’s begin with everyone’s (my) favourite: Muscle Hypertrophy or the process of growing muscle.
Muscle hypertrophy
Gaining muscle is a goal highly sought after, to varying degrees, by athletes and fitness enthusiasts of all kinds: From bodybuilders to gymnasts, sprinters to Sumo wrestlers, having more muscle allows you to perform better, work harder and yes, even get stronger.But wait, wasn’t the purpose of this to show how strength and muscle growth are different things? It sure is, but it would be scientifically incorrect to say that the 2 are unrelated or don’t work together to a large degree.
Muscle Hypertrophy is the result of primarily 3 things that work together (there are compounding factors such as genetics, training experience, diet, etc that assist with amounts of muscle growth but generally don’t enable or disable the ability to grow muscle unless extreme cases) : Mechanical tension, which is the amount of stress that you are able to put on a specific muscle group, generally by lifting weights. Intensity, which is to say the relative effort of an exercise that puts mechanical tension on a muscle and how close you take that muscle to its limit. And finally, the recovery and adaptation ability of the muscle.
Putting a muscle in a position where it has to work against a weight, taking the muscle through its full range of motion until it is almost or completely unable to perform another rep and doing this enough that the muscle can still recover and begins to adapt but not so much that it cannot recover is the baseline explanation of how to get bigger muscles. Over time, your muscles will hypertrophy which will mean that they can contract harder which means you must lift heavier weights or impose more tension than when you started to continue to grow more muscle. This is how building more muscle can help you become stronger and it certainly does help your strength expression to be more muscular but strength itself differs from the muscle growth process.
Strength
Strength is the expression of your ability to produce force against an opposing force. A powerlifter deadlifting 800lbs is likely going to have a good deal of muscle on their body but nowhere near the amount a bodybuilder would have, despite likely being able to lift 200-400lbs more than them.
So how does that work?
This is because strength is a skill.
The ability to use muscles, joints, leverages, technique and adapting your nervous system to maximal efforts takes practice, effort and time. This isn’t to say that someonewho is very muscular is not quite strong, because they likely are, but more so that they have not had the practice of technique and drive required to use their muscles in a way that would allow them to be as strong as they could be. The technique for strength expression also differs from that of muscle hypertrophy in that it attempts to spread the amount of tension caused by very heavy weights across as many muscles and joints as possible, allowing them all to take less total strain and work together to push against the weight.
So to summarize, why all this description and nitpicking matters?
Muscle growth relies on putting as much tension in a muscle as possible, while strength training aims to spread tension as much as possible across many muscle groups. Both training for hypertrophy and strength will make you stronger and bigger up to a point, however they both do a far better job at one and a far worse job at the other because they are 2 different goals that often run inline with each other but are separate things all together. So if you are starting a program, and you’d like to be as big and as strong as possible, identify which is more important to you and aim for the style of training that makes most sense. But never forget, you don’t have to lift big weights to get big.