You HAVE to gain muscle mass for more strength right? Not really!

You're going to hear this from people who aren't well informed but they will tell you that in order to get stronger you'll need to gain muscle mass. This is true but it's not the only way to gain strength. You can get stronger without having to gain strength you just have to know some knowledge about muscle activation, fiber types and potentials.

Making strength gains without weight gains
Competitive Olympic lifters and Powerlifters can spend a career in the same weight class all their life and still get stronger as the years go by. How does this happen? It's caused with an improvement in muscle neuron signal transmission.

Muscle excitation

Before a muscle contracts a message is sent from your brain to the muscle traveling from the spinal cord to the diverging nerves. The message is called an Action Potential. The action potential innervates a motor neuron to contract a muscle. The stronger the signal the greater the muscle contracts. At the same time, more muscle fibers will be activated to create the muscle contraction. Greater recruitment usually means more force produced. This can takes years and is not dependent on muscle size gains.

Muscle fiber types
When talking about strength we are interested in Type 2x muscle fibers. There are Type 1, Type 2 a and we Type 2x. There are more than that but to keep it brief let's keep it simple and talk about Type 2x muscle fiber recruitment to maximize strength gains. These fibers produce the highest outputs of force production. They fatigue fast and don't last very long. Usually, no longer than 10 seconds of high max forces do to ATP store reduction. Therefore, you want your training and intensity to stimulate these Type 2x muscle fibers. Usually, it requires max efforts of 95% to 100% of max lifts for 1 to 3 reps of any strength lift.

The picture shows an untrained muscle fiber and how strength training

increases the muscle cell in size do to SR increases.

It doesn't make sense if you're going to be doing 8 to 12 reps of any strength lift and expect great increases in strength. This rep range stops recruiting the Type 2x fibers and switches to Type 2a fibers. These type of rep ranges increase the size of the sarcoplasmic reticulum causing increases in mass and weight allowing for improved signal and binding of actin and myosin cross bridging BUT at the price of potential lower power to weight ratios. You can increase the size of the SR (sarcoplasmic reticulum) but not necessarily gain the strength needed to display higher power to weight ratios.

Coach Cap