Why Strength Training is a Dead End
Part 1: Food for thought
Ook beschikbaar in het Nederlands
NB: This series originally appeared in Dutch well over a year ago. As such, some of its hyperlinks direct to Dutch writings. I’m happy to provide clarification should any confusion arise because of this.
Fair enough, there still are plenty of fossils that haven’t the faintest clue of what they are doing, but the true experts agree: strength training is essential for athletic performance. A quick search on Google immediately brings up a few gems: “No doubt about it”, “Nowadays it’s well known that this is an absolute prerequisite”, and “It has been proven now that sport performance directly or indirectly depends on the qualities of muscular strength”.
What a wonderful feeling, such absolute certainty! I had always been told that the only things certain in life were death and paying taxes. But good things come in threes, so this one nicely complements the other two. It just sounds so logical as well: if you want to be good at something, you have to be strong. And thus: the stronger the better. How on earth could there be any doubt about this? Alas, life is seldom this simple, as is the case here…
Setting the stage
The whole rhetoric surrounding strength (training) is one of deceitful obviousness: at first sight it all seems to make perfect sense, but as soon as we start asking questions, we are faced with big problems. Before diving into these problems, however, we should delineate what it is exactly that we refer to when talking about ‘strength’. After all, a lot of (pointless) discussions ensue when people use the same words with completely different meanings. A yard is a place where you have cookouts, but it also is a unit of length (0.9144 m for us SI-folk), just to name something.
Such is the case with strength, where everyday language and more fundamental ideas are often used interchangeably. Of course, there are plenty of times when I call someone ‘strong’ (or the exact opposite); I wouldn’t have it any other way at the bar! But this doesn’t mean that I believe strength or ‘being strong’ is a fundamental property of the body that can and should be trained separately. This last meaning of strength, as a fundamental or ‘biomotor ability’, is the one that I question.
Biomotor abilities for dummies
Perhaps the term biomotor ability sounds like hocus pocus to you or perhaps you could use a quick refresher. Let us therefore take a moment to dwell on this magical term.
You don’t have to be Einstein to see that sport performance is determined by a plethora factors. This is a major reason for sports being so interesting, but it’s also a major cause for headache for those seeking high-level performance. As such, wouldn’t it be great if we could reduce this immensely complex web of (trainable) factors to a handful of fundamental properties, from which everything else more or less automatically emerges?
After all, this would mean that — instead of having to choose from a perhaps infinite amount of options — we would only have to pick from a very succinct menu when designing the programs for our athletes. It would be as if choosing from all the ingredients in the world versus choosing from the menu of your local pop-up restaurant. In other words, fundamental properties would make the training process a lot more manageable.
Behold, the theory of biomotor abilities! The most basic edition tells us that an athlete can work on improving five abilities: strength, speed, endurance, flexibility and coordination. These abilities are essentially independent of one another and together they determine the athlete’s ultimate performance.
But wait a minute, buddy! What about power? And agility? No worries pal, biomotor abilities 2.0 has got your back. In the figure below flexibility and coordination have been omitted for ‘clarity’, because — as you can see — strength plays the central role: ‘strength is foundational’. In other words, serious athletes should give their all to becoming as strong as possible.
A whole lot of questions
For years I too have believed in biomotor abilities. They sound good, are sellable and allow us to navigate an enormously complex reality. The title probably already gave me away though: nowadays I view things completely different.
There simply are too many questions which cannot be answered on the basis of biomotor abilities. In fact, some of these questions reveal fundamental problems with them. Problems that are of such magnitude that the time has come for an entirely different approach (an actual paradigm shift); one that allows us to truly move forward again (until this approach becomes outdated as well, but that’s life!).
But maybe it’s all in my head, so before I try to bombard you with alternative ideas, take a critical look at the following questions and see if the traditional ideas still manage to float your boat:
- How do we measure strength? Do we truly measure a fundamental property of the body or is it perhaps something that varies per movement/task? And is this measured strength itself not dependent on ‘more fundamental’ factors?
- Is there such a thing as the pure strength of a muscle? And is this what you’re trying to improve with strength training or are you also taking into account movement patterns (e.g. by doing squats instead of leg extensions). If the latter is the case, then apparently there is another component that you are factoring in. Is this component then part of strength? Or are you training strength plus something else (technique/coordination?) at the same time?
- A sprinter wants to improve his speed. Therefore he is doing maximal strength training. At the center of this endeavor is — of course — the squat and it’s improving rapidly. Initially his sprint performance was improving as well, but despite the fact that his maximal squat is still improving, his sprint performance has been stagnant for a while now. If strength is such a fundamental ability, then how is it possible that his sprint performance is no longer improving?
- That’s of course because he has to convert his newfound strength into speed! Technique is crucial for this. Okay, so strength and technique together determine (for an important part) the ultimate performance? But how do these two interact? And what are their biophysical bases? Is technique something that is organised by the brain for instance, but strength is not?
- Strength training leads to faster sprints, higher jumps, etc. Is this true for athletes of all levels or mostly for novices? If this differs per level, then how is this possible? And more importantly, how solid is the evidence for this transfer really?
- Is force even the most important mechanical quantity in sports at all or does this depend on the movement/discipline? If another quantity is more important (e.g. power, work or impulse), then to what extent is this quantity related to force?
In short, a whole lot of questions! In this eight-part series, I’ll share my vision on these matters. Take your time to read it through or share your thoughts in advance if you really can’t hold them in any longer ;). You can also do that on Twitter.
References
- Bompa, T. O. & Haff, G. Periodization: Theory and Methodology of Training. (Human Kinetics, 2009).
