What is The Difference in Training For Strength vs. Size?

Strength vs. Size

Many of us are training to maintain general health and physical preparedness.  AKA, warding off the nursing home.  But some of us are training for more specific goals like big strength gains or larger muscle mass.

How we structure our training can skew our results one way or the other.  There is overlap between training for strength and training for hypertrophy (muscle size).  If you get stronger, your muscles are going to get larger and if your muscles gain in size from training, you're going to get stronger.  That being said, the guy with the biggest muscles in the gym may not necessarily be the strongest. 

If you're training for strength, it's imperitive to work with loads that are approaching 85-90% of your 1 rep max on a regular basis.  That is going to limit the total number of sets (volume) you can do.  Typically, strength work is done in the 1-5 rep range per set.  That stress, once recovered from sets your body up to be stronger for the next workout.  Since the volume of total work done is fairly low, there isn't a ton of muscle fiber damage done, therefore the size of the muscle does not dramatically increase over time.  

When training for muscle size, we need to consider a few factors. 

1. Muscle Tension - You can't do a set of bicep curls by swinging the weight with your hips and expect your biceps to grow. You have to control the weight and put tension on the muscle.

2. Metabolic Stress - You know that feeling when your muscles are pumped full of blood and they don't want to do another rep?  That's metabolic stress and it triggers your body to grow.

3. Muscular Damage - Doing high volume with heavy weights breaks down the muscle fibers.  When we rest and recover, those fibers get rebuilt bigger and stronger. 

To summarize, when training for strength, work with heavy heavy weights in the 1-5 rep range.  When training for size, use slightly less weight and focus on quality muscle contractions, high rep ranges that exhaust the muscle and then let your body recover to allow the muscles to grow.