Why Strength Training is a Dead End

Part 7: Except in these 5 cases

Ook beschikbaar in het Nederlands

NB: Part 6 is on the back burner for now, so we immediately proceed to part 7!

Thus far, I haven’t been very positive regarding traditional strength training for enhancing sport performance. In my view it’s far from the holy grail that people often take it for. Nevertheless, there are cases in which the ol’ iron game is the king or at least a prince! This is my top 5.

1. Getting shredded

‘Abs are made in the kitchen’, but in order to get those voluptuous glutes and jacked-up biceps you really have to pick up some weights (although apparently there are implants for just about everything nowadays). For hypertrophy (= muscle growth) your trusty strength exercises are still your best friend. Perform them in sets till failure and you’re well on the way.

Is this valuable for sport performance? Sometimes it is, often it isn’t. The reasons for this are another story altogether, but in the meanwhile let this bomb sink in: an increase in muscle mass does not appear to enhance force production (1).

2. Injury prevention

It’s good to be injury-free and keep it that way. Traditional strength training helps with this (2). How? Presumably in 2 ways:

1. By increasing the structural capacity of muscles, tendons and bones. ‘Strengthening’ isn’t necessarily the right term here, because it seems that — for instance — explosive athletes often benefit from ‘loosening’ up certain structures (think of knee tendons and such). This can be achieved very well with low velocity exercises such as squats (3).
2. By teaching how to handle load in extreme joint angles. In most sports you rarely get into a deep squat position for example, but sometimes something comparable does occur. And when it does, it’s nice to have your body prepared for it.

This preventive effect of strength training may very well be more important than its direct (and limited) effect on sport performance (see part 5). After all, it enables athletes to train consistently and thereby to perform better on the moment of truth.

3. Novice sport performance

Strength exercises such as squats may improve sport performance, but this is especially true for novices (see part 5). When an athlete is able to squat two times his or her own body weight, he or she is often deemed ‘strong enough’. In other words, squatting gains beyond this mark are very unlikely to still make the athlete run faster, jump higher, etc. From this point onward a different training strategy is an absolute requirement. Nevertheless, strength exercises may certainly be of value to athletes in certain phases of their career.

4. Movement Skills

This is more a point of personal preference than of science, but let’s not be discouraged by that! In my ideal image of an athlete, I do not only see a person who excels at his or her own sport, but who is versatile as well. Compared to most sport-specific actions — which require control over a tremendous amount of degrees of freedom — strength exercises are simple movements. As such, a rugby player who is able to float like a butterfly past his opponents but isn’t able to get his ass to the grass properly (read: squat) — just to name something — would catch some flack from me.

I view traditional strength exercises as basic movement skills that in principle everyone needs to master to a certain degree. Do you even lift? Hell yeah.

5. Destressing

Sometimes it just feels good to forget about everything and push yourself to your limits. Old skool strength training is perfect for this. Even — or perhaps especially — for elite athletes. For some reason we often treat elite athletes like machines: we subject them to input that is optimal according to some theory and then expect a corresponding result.

But elite athletes are just people. And if you get one that — with all the pressure of having to perform continuously — really is in the mood to pump some iron, then why not go pumping some iron? After all, I know one thing for certain: a burned-out athlete is a losing athlete.

“Sometimes it just feels good to forget about everything and push yourself to your limits.”

Back to you

Did I miss a point? Or do you have something else to add? Let me know, here or on Twitter. Questions of course are always welcome.

References

1. Buckner, S. L. et al. The problem of muscle hypertrophy: Revisited. Muscle Nerve54, 1012–1014 (2016).
2. Suchomel, T. J., Nimphius, S. & Stone, M. H. The Importance of Muscular Strength in Athletic Performance. Sports Med.46, 1419–1449 (2016).
3. Baar, K. Training and nutrition to prevent soft tissue injuries and accelerate return to play. Sports Science Exchange28, 1–6 (2015).

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