Relative Strength

Peter Chamberlain: โ€œFor the average crossfitter, whose only goal is overall fitness, what do you think is important to understand about the relationship between the athlete’s weight and the power s/he is able to generate; is it as simple as “mass moves mass”?  And also, how would you compare the power generated by athletes of different sizes, like Simone Biles versus Lasha Talakhadzhe?โ€

There are some definitions I want to square away so we are all speaking the same language. Mass is the measure of the matter that makes up an object while weight is the measure of the amount of gravitational force exerted on the object. For all intents and purposes outside of science, โ€œmassโ€ and โ€œweightโ€ are synonymous. Power is the amount of work performed on or by an object over time while strength is the measure of how much mass or weight can be moved irrespective of time. Both strength and power are specific to the task being performed.

For the person whose goal is overall fitness or lifestyle training, you do not need to know too much about this relationship, but it is not as simple as โ€œmass moves massโ€ with regards to improving strength or power. Yes, the bigger the person, the more weight that they can move simply by nature of being larger. The person who weighs 200lbs will have an easier time performing wallballs with a 20# ball than the 150lbs person with the same medicine ball. 

However, simply adding mass to your frame does not necessarily correlate to actual increases in strength. Why is that? Strength is a skill. There is a physiological (intra- and intermuscular coordination) and psychological component (decreasing the sensation of โ€œheavynessโ€) to maximum strength that takes practice in order to demonstrate it. For example โ€“ and to burst many peopleโ€™s bubbles โ€“ we are able to increase weight on the barbell almost every single workout when we first started to exercise for the first several weeks or months even. We did not actually dramatically increase our muscle mass in those weeks. Those exposures were practice for our nervous system, resulting in improved intramuscular coordination (more synchronous firing of muscle fibers) and intermuscular coordination (improved coordination between muscles to execute a new skill). This is why as we become more advanced, we have periods of time increasing our general fitness/strength and periods where you peak or realize those gains made (think of the testing week in our training cycles).

Now let us talk about comparing Simone Biles to Lasha Talakhadzhe. It is impossible to compare these two because โ€“ as stated earlier โ€“ strength and power are specific to the task we are measuring, and both athletes complete vastly different tasks in their respective sports. We can only compare the two by comparing their relative strength/power (the relationship between bodyweight to absolute strength/power) amongst different standardized tests such as standing vertical/broad jump, 1RM barbell tests, and isometric force production. Since we do not have that data, it is not possible to comment on it.

It would be more apt to compare Lasha Talakhadzhe with another weightlifter, Anatoly Pisarenko. Pisarenko lifted a world record for the clean & jerk in 1984 at 265kg and Lasha Talakhadzhe holds the current record at 267kg. Lasha may have lifted more weight, but the difference between their bodyweights is quite massive. Pisarenko weighed 128kg compared to Lashaโ€™s 183kg at the time of said lifts. We can definitely say that Pisarenko is the relatively stronger athlete.

Only 2kg separate these liftersโ€™ best clean & jerk, but there is a 55kg difference between their bodyweights.

For the gen-pop at this gym, measuring relative strength is useful if you are increasing your bodyweight (hypertrophy) or are decreasing your bodyweight (fatloss). You can then ask yourself, am I getting proportionally stronger with the increase in my bodyweight or am I maintaining or improving my strength as I lose bodyweight?

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