The 4 Types Of Strength
Contents
- Introduction
- Absolute Strength — “How much do you lift, bro?”
- Endurance — Maintaining Muscular Tension
- Relative Strength — Strength against your Bodyweight
- Plyometrics — Explosive Strength
- How to use this information
- Passive Effects
- You must focus on one at a time!
- Final Thoughts
Introduction
When most people hear the word “strength”, they’re probably thinking something along the lines of how heavy an object a person can move. Turns out, there’s a whole lot more to it.
In this post, you’re going to learn about the different types of strength you have in your arsenal; you may be strong in ways you didn’t even realise.
Why is this important? Because learning more about what you’re working with allows you to tailor your training. Fine-tuning the stimuli you’re exposing yourself to allows you to develop the results you want.
For the gamers out there, think of it like your own personal strength skill tree! The more you upgrade each of the branches, the more abilities you gain.
Without further ado, here are the 4 main types of strength:
- Absolute
- Endurance
- Relative
- Plyometric
You’re going to learn about each of these in the coming sections.
Absolute Strength — “How much do you lift, bro?”
Absolute strength is probably the easiest to understand as it is simply how much mass you are able to move. And that’s it. It is literally how heavy you can lift.
Your absolute strength is exemplified by all the traditional lifts that you’re familiar with such as deadlifts, squats, bench-press, or any push or pull exercise where you are moving heavy objects.
This type of strength is sought after by the likes of strongmen/women, or powerlifters, wrestlers, or any sports person who needs to move something very heavy.
Endurance — Maintaining Muscular Tension
Strength endurance is your ability to hold “strong” positions, or maintain muscular tension, for prolonged periods of time.
Think planks, hanging from a bar, standing up. Yes, you heard me right, standing up counts as a display of strength endurance. If you don’t believe me, try standing in one spot for a long time, you will eventually get tired and want to sit down again.
From experience, it’s the hardest to train, because, depending on how you train, it can cause a lot of discomfort. However, if learn to train this properly and you’re willing to stick it out, then it can yield great strength gains.
Relative Strength — Strength Against Your Bodyweight
Relative strength is your strength relative to your bodyweight. People who exhibit a high level of relative strength are able to effortless move their body around.
This strength is illustrated by the skills performed by calisthenics athletes or gymnasts. People who can perform muscle-ups, planches, handstand pushups, etc…
It is important to know the distinction between relative and absolute strength. You may think they sound the same, but you shouldn’t think of them that way.
Imagine you’re a powerlifter who can deadlift 300 kg. You’re a powerhouse with a high level of absolute strength. But being a walking mountain of muscle means that you yourself are quite heavy and, as such, you find it quite difficult to do a set of 10 pull ups.
Now we introduce someone who is half your size. They may not be able to deadlift anywhere near the amount you can, but they are easily able to do more than 30 pull ups. Not only that, they are able to perform a muscle up.
You are able to overhead press 100 kg, but they are able to do 20 handstand pushups.
See the difference? In terms of absolute strength, you are much stronger as you are able to move a greater amount of mass. But in terms of relative strength, the other person is undoubtably stronger, because they find it much easier to move their own body around.
Both types of strength simply use muscles in different ways and as a results you get different outcomes from training them.
Plyometrics — Explosive Strength
Plyometrics is essentially your acceleration, or your ability to reach max power output in the shortest time frame.
This type of strength pertains to skills like jumping, backflipping, striking, kicking, muscle-ups (non-strict), etc… It is also closely linked with your ability to change direction of travel (agility).
Since power is a function of speed and strength (Power = Speed x Strength), dedicated training to either aspects on the righthand side of the equation will yield an increase in overall power. This affords you some flexibility on how you can train.
Training explosive and relative strength together has the potential of turning you in quite the trickster. You’d be amazed at how your body is able to move when you’ve advanced enough in either of these strength types.
How To Use This Information
Hopefully, now you realise that strength comes in different forms. Maybe you’ve learned that you’re actually quite strong in one or more of these types.
But there is no point in learning this if it doesn’t add any value to your fitness endeavours. As such, I will share with you how I use this knowledge to get stronger.
Passive Effects
One very important relation between the 4 types of strength: Getting stronger in one type can also incrementally strengthen the others.
In other words, actively training one strength type will make you stronger in that type, but there is also the added benefit of passively increasing the other 3.
I experienced this when I overcame my bench press plateau. For the longest time, my one rep max was stuck at 120 kg. Then I started training in calisthenics, which focussed on exercises that trained endurance and relative strength. I trained using several variations of pushups, which uses similar muscles as the bench press.
I did this for a few months, then, one day, I found myself missing the bench press (I know that sounds weird). So I decided to try it again and I felt much stronger than the last time I tried it! In fact, my new PR was 130 kg!
I know 10 kg in a few months doesn’t sound like much but, keep in mind, I had not trained on the bench press for MONTHS! Yet, the first time I went back to it, I managed to break through my plateau. Think about that, I was able to bench a heavier weight without actually training on the bench press.
Here are some variation on the pushup that you can do to target the different type of strength:
- Plyometrics — Explosive Pushup: Push yourself off the ground as fast as you can, launching your torso upwards and your hands are no longer touch the ground.
- Absolute — Weighted Pushup: Add weights. Personally I use a weighted vest but you can put plates on your back. Remember to be careful
- Endurance — Slow Pushup: Start with your chest to the floor and push yourself up over the course of 10–20 seconds. Do the same on the way down.
- Relative — Change Hand Position: You can raise the difficulty by placing your hands closer to your waist (centre of mass).
You Must Focus On One At A Time!
The last thing you need to understand is, although variety is important — you’re body and mind crave it, lest you get bored — what’s equally important is FOCUS!
Do not cycle through different strength exercises in a single training session. Instead, choose one strength type to work on and focus on it. Train it a few times a week for at least a few weeks, maybe a month.
This is important because your body needs time to acclimate to the stress that you’re putting it through. Changing things around too frequently doesn’t give your body enough time to adapt to what you’re training for.
I saw a considerable increase, especially to my relative strength, when I moved away from the “bro-split” paradigm, and started focussing on one thing at a time. I cannot stress this enough, please focus and put adequate time into training what you’ve chosen, before moving on to something else.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you now understand the strength is much more to strength than heavy lifting. To recap, the 4 type of strength are
- Absolute
- Endurance
- Relative
- Playmetric
Introducing variations can breath new life into your training routine. The more ways you challenge yourself, the more ways you can grow, so long as you spend enough time focussing on that particular variation. It also wards off monotony.
I encourage you to introduce these concepts into your own workout routine. Take an exercise you enjoy and try to come up with variations that focuses on developing a certain type of strength. It might be just what you need to bust through any plateaus.
