How to Get Stronger and Faster — Strength Beyond Muscle
Before the internet, building your body to become stronger, faster and fitter was reserved for the dedicated few. These were people who’d either be very involved in a sport or hunted down a (rudimentary) gym and trained with the help of a personal trainer.
As the knowledge of human biology increased, along with technology — techniques and exercises to get stronger were readily available for even those who just want to look good naked. Now, in the comfort of our homes, we can get the ideal diet, equipment and exercises for building strength. Most of us have the opportunity and resources to improve our physical bodies and live a much healthier life than ever possible before.
Despite this, we have only skimmed the surface of utilising true human strength and ability. What DO we know about strength?
The Fundamental Theory
The common mechanism and understanding of increasing our strength is by breaking down and re-building our muscle fibres. Doing any strenuous activity, will break down muscle fibres which are then repaired by our body. In this process, the body builds stronger and thicker protein fibres to withstand the tension.

This means that doing the same strenuous activity repeatedly will gradually get easier as those sets of muscles are constantly broken, repaired and strengthened. As long as the rate of protein synthesis is greater than the rate muscle fibres are broken down, it will lead to muscle growth. Of course, this implies that the greatest muscle growth occurs during rest, when the rate of breakdown is slowed down.
This process is the whole reason behind exercising regularly, we are constantly putting certain muscle groups under stress to regrow them even stronger— be it for aesthetics or strength.
White Muscle vs Red Muscle
An important detail is the differentiation between the kinds of muscle in your body. Depending on what type of strength you want to build, you have to train accordingly to build the respective muscles.
Red muscle, or slow twitch muscle fibres, are the kinds that use oxygen to release the energy required for muscle movement. Without getting too technical, these muscle cells can essentially produce their own energy meaning contraction is sustainable for longer periods of time. However, the force they generate is usually limited so these are usually involved in stabilisation and endurance muscle activity.
When the force is too great for our red muscle fibres, the white muscle fibres or, fast twitch muscles, kick in. These can produce explosive force but fatigue faster due to a quicker build up of lactic acid (the stuff that makes your muscles sore). Because these fibres utilise a different mechanism to provide the energy, they require longer periods for recovery.

Our bodies obviously require a combination of the two muscle fibres but knowing which you are developing with the kind of muscle training you do will help you determine the type of strength you gain.
But this is all well understood by physicians, trainers and sports professionals. What is less known truth is that there is much more to strength than muscle density or size.
Strength Beyond Muscle
Gaining speed and strength with muscle growth has a very definite limit. At a certain point, any further increase in muscle mass (assuming the muscle is as dense as can be) will have a very marginal improvement in overall strength. What’s more is that flexibility reduces as the physical size keeps growing to the point it is counter-productive for strength. This is where we see extreme body builders lacking the ability to even maneuver their bodies properly, let alone utilise their muscle practically. But when muscle growth becomes a limiting factor — where is the room for improvement in building strength?
Tendons
One factor is our tendon strength. This is the connective, flexible tissue attaching the muscle to the bone which, physiologically speaking can act as a spring for any tension. An important feature of a spring is that with slight pressure, you can generate a much greater force, which is exactly the capability tendons have when it comes to strength.

You can think of tendons (and ligaments to some extent, which connect bones) as the structural foundation of the body. When they are weak, inflexible or damaged, the slightest pressure can collapse the whole system. It is the reason why even professional athletes, who train and eat well everyday, can be out for several months with a slight tear in their ligaments/tendons.
Can Tendons Even be Strengthened?
If there is that potential strength dormant in the collagen based tissue and simultaneously a vulnerability, it would make sense for everyone including athletes and sportsmen to train tendons.
Despite the high level of nutritional and training advice available, not everyone appreciates or understands that tendons can/should be strengthened. This is perhaps due to the amount of time they take to grow as opposed to muscle.
Tendons can become thicker naturally over time to adapt to a certain strenuous lifestyle. For example, this paper studying urban-rural differences in physical performance in Japan found that the ‘hand grip strength’ (HGS) was higher in rural areas vs urban areas. Rural areas have a much higher level of manual work and repetitive labour compared to urban ones. Since HGS can best be associated with tendon strength in the hands and forearms, intuitively, we can see there may be a correlation between years of manual labour and tendon growth.
Physiologically speaking, tendons do not grow in the same way as muscle. Collagen fibres are just added to the tendon when muscle tension overwhelms it instead of breaking down any fibres. This highlights two key facts:
- Tendon growth requires an overwhelming force. Overwhelming force does not mean pushing muscle till injury, but to exert enough constant pressure on your muscle that the respective tendon has to work at its limit.
- Similarly to muscle growth, it requires protein, namely collagen to be able to build the tissue.
To consciously train it (without dedicating your life to physical labour) requires repetitive, sometimes static movements for long periods with the above factors in mind. As results are harder see in the short run, professional trainers often resort to stretching and exercises that prevent damage instead of building strength directly.
How Exactly can we Consciously Build Tendons?
So to optimise the spring like function shown above to generate a massive increase in force, exercises in yoga, chigong and traditional martial arts have been utilised for thousands of years.

Take a simple ‘Toe Touching Pose’ in yoga. Doing this stretch for 5 minutes (and up to 30 minutes) can be extremely difficult when done properly. It creates great tension in a handful of important tendons located in the legs, knees and back. The prolonged stretch creates that overwhelming force which is felt beyond the muscle.
Similarly, traditional martial arts such as Kendo, emphasises on repeatedly practising basic strike motions. Holding a sword (or practise wooden sword — ‘Shinai’) with the correct grip and practising a single strike for hundreds of reps creates the same tension but this time in tendons of the hands and arms.

Many of our modern techniques which exercise the tendons follows the same movement patterns as the more ancient art forms, for example the hand grip.
Nerves
The third dimension of strength, perhaps the most significant as it can increase both muscle and tendon strength over time too, is neural activity.
The nervous system is a spectacular display of fireworks which science is still uncovering. It is how the brain communicates with rest of our body so we can not only analyse information but action it too.

Whenever we have a thought, it creates a neural activity, an electrical current in the neurons in our brain. When we perform an action, this impulse will travel through our nerves to stimulate the muscles required. This understanding is how we are able to manifest a thought into an action. But it also plays an important role in strength.
Let’s say we have a thought of lifting a heavy object; it causes neurons associated with lifting to activate and signal our motor nerves (nerves carrying an impulse from the brain/spinal chord to a muscle or gland) to create a muscle contraction. We start lifting.
Then, as expected, depending on how strong our muscle is, lactic acid will build up and cause fatigue. The fatigue causes pain and we want to stop lifting — so the neuron stops firing.
The key here is understanding that so long as the nerves keep firing that impulse, that is, your brain keeps sending that signal; you will continue lifting. All that prevents you from doing so is the willingness to stop due to the natural pain response mechanism.
There are plenty of examples around the world, old and new, of humans capable of overriding the pain mechanism to display seemingly super human feats e.g extreme sport athletes or even shaolin monks. The pain response mechanism is of course a necessary survival tool for humans, just as procreation and hunger. When these are left unchecked however, they can be more limiting than supporting. For example, pain averse individuals may find themselves taking fewer necessary risks in life whilst individuals fixated on their hunger response can become obese.
So learning to continually fire nerve impulses to your muscles by maintaining the intention to do so, despite the pain response, will increase your potential strength dramatically. However, as the deepest part of your body, both literally and figuratively, it requires the most persistence and effort.
The same ancient arts that promote tendon growth also happen to support the nervous system. Some types of stance training, much like what you find in those old Kung Fu movies, forces activity in the most nerves across the body which makes them all the more painful. Often, these are not even taxing on your muscles but specifically designed to target the nerves so it creates an unusual pain sensation.
As these stances are held for long periods of time, it allows the brain to practise constantly firing nerve impulses to the muscle, without giving in to pain.

Repetition of these nerve building exercises over a number of years can thicken the nerve coating (myelin sheath) to allow a more efficient transfer of the current, making the mental/physical activity easier. It also creates a greater number of neural pathways associated with that task which stimulates a stronger response. This means that post the nerve building, regardless of whether you have the muscle capacity to lift that heavy object, your body can learn to accommodate your actions easier.
Again, the process described above is a natural learning mechanism of the brain so it will happen gradually with any repeated activity but consciously pushing it beyond your perceived limitation will speed up the process tenfold.
So when you find yourself looking at the best strength building workouts, you hopefully remember that strength is as much a product of a successfully communicating organism (your body) as it is the individual power of each aspect of it (muscle, tendon, brain).
