What's The Difference: Muscle Building Vs Strength Training

Building muscle versus strength training. To grow bigger, you need to stress your muscles hard and often. To get stronger, it's about heavy lifting for the exercise goal. And we're going to collaboratively come together on this one to give some practical guidelines every step of the way. Cool. So first place to start would be maybe reps. If we're looking purely for muscle building, most of the research says anything between like five to even I think close to 50 reps can induce a similar amount of muscle building responses. But when it comes to trying to get stronger. Yeah, we're biasing more of the neurological adaptations and there needs to be a certain threshold of intensity to bias that to the maximum extent. And generally for regular training, you'd be playing with three to six reps because it's difficult enough to make you stronger. There's a lot of merit to that because I find a lot of people a lot stronger than they think. Like when you have a certain level of muscle mass, even as a complete beginner, you are so much stronger than because you know when you first step foot into the gym, you lift say 100 kilos on exercise, you can come back the next day as a beginner and add 10% to it. Did you build more muscle? Probably not. But your body got more better at the skill of lifting or coordinating things. And that's where, as you say, this neurological component is so important. When you teach your body what heavy weights or what strength really is, it's not about the pump. It's not about burning. It's not about just fatigue. It's about saying you want to lift a heavy one to six rep max on squats. How do we program towards that? And it would be biasing those lower reps. Yeah, for sure. And it's just understanding that it's a spectrum. It's not as if we go to the sixth rep and suddenly we're purely in hypertrophy territory. And if we're below five reps, we're not going to build any muscle at all. It's just that for simplicity, we can use this as a guideline. If you're down here in terms of your reps, it's going to be more strength. If you're going here and above, it's going to buy us more of hypertrophy. Have you ever tried wave loading before? Oh, you're talking about, so if you are looking for more strength, you can do like a top single, so to speak, before. Yeah. And then dip back again. So for you guys, the way that I would approach your wave load is say we have a two rep max that I want to work towards. I would do two sets before that. And then I'll go back to that same six rep max from set one, but go a little bit heavier. And it should feel a lot lighter because I've just done a heavy set. This is the wave, the way that it waves up. Post activation potentiation. So we go six, four, two in this example, and then back again, six, four, two. And the final set of two, that will be where I potentially get a PR if you've loaded it appropriately. And that's where I find a lot of people that are stronger than they think, because you're trying to find little hacks to sort of not cheat your nervous system, but to help your body realize how strong it really is by getting you more potentiated. And more skillful with the pattern. And this is where specificity really comes in as the difference between strength and size training. So if you're trying to improve your squat, deadlift, bench press, lifting as much as possible, you're going to put all, most of your resources into those lifts because it's all about how your body uses, coordinates its muscles in that specific motor pattern. Whereas the luxury of hypertrophy, it's a different game, isn't it? Yeah. When it comes to building muscle, we have the freedom to choose 20 different leg exercises. And as long as we hit the threshold for stimulus for growth, we're going to build muscle. You can come in and do the completely different work at every single time for legs. And as long as the intensity is there, you will build muscle eventually. But for strength, we need to be very specific and say, I want to get stronger on this specific exercise, which means I need to practice this specific exercise quite a bit at a very specific volume, intensity, rep range, weight wise. Very, very skillful to be able to get strong. It's a very challenging thing. Whereas I think it's more of a scientific process where bodybuilding can be a lot looser. And the cool part about getting bigger is that a bigger muscle has the potential to be a stronger muscle. So if in the future you decide, I really want to get my squat, bench, deadlift up, all your hard work on building your muscles bigger, bigger cross-sectional area, bigger force production capacity, you can then teach that in those movements. So you've got such a good base to get strong as well. Have you found much in terms of landmarks for volume, for strength, glenohypertrophy, anywhere between like 10 to 20 sets is the given landmark, but you could even go as low as like one or two a week and still make some progress. For strength, have you noticed anything? It's so difficult because it's exercise dependent. How much volume you can tolerate in a deadlift compared to a bench press. It's night and day different. We know that strength athletes that are improving their deadlift at the top, top level, they're handling such heavy loads. If they're trying to just work with such a high intensity, it's not unusual for them to do a deadlift workout every 10 to 14 days. So it ultimately comes down to how much intensity you're doing relative to your maximum. That dictates the volume. It tends to be a sliding scale on average, doesn't it? So it's like the higher I'm working, let's say like 85 plus percentage, you won't be able to do as much as like your 70% rep range. So I'd love to give a takeaway answer, but it ultimately depends on what exercises people are doing. It's just having that awareness that that's a component. Yeah. I guess another way to say it is, do you have any principles that you use to help for people to find their own threshold for what they can recover from? It comes down to long-term progress, delaying gratification and seeing steady trends in upwards trajectory. If you're an intermediate lifter, you've been going for some time, you can't expect to always get stronger every single workout. You should definitely be trending upwards over time. And a sign of that is the ability to actually make some micro progress each session. If you're not able to do that for multiple weeks, every workout, you're either hitting the exact same thing or getting worse. It's a nice objective indicator that you're probably doing too much volume and intensity probably combined. Now, intensity is a factor as well in terms of effort relative to our maximum. How does that differ with strength versus hypertrophy? Yeah. There's always going to be a little bit of overlap there between the two. So these are just guiding principles, not set rules that you must follow. But generally speaking for muscle building, you want to be getting very close to failure most of the time, if not to failure. By going zero RIR or maybe leaving two to three reps in the tank at most is going to be what you want to shoot for. But for strength, you don't always want to be pushing to a complete failure point because that's where you're going to see some technical failure, which is useful from a strength perspective. You'll see what you need to improve on for the next time. By doing too much of that with very heavy loads, you start running into a lot of potential injury risk issues or just fatigue. It just builds up so, so, so quickly. You don't have the ability to recover and dissipate that fatigue as quickly when you're dealing with a true two to six-ish rep max on a regular basis, which is what you need to be doing, generally speaking, for strength. So you'll typically see, you know, through most of your training blocks for strength, more like two to five-ish reps in the tank a lot of the time. Still using heavy weights though. Yeah. Struggling within that say three to six rep range on, on those key compound movements. Yeah. And there will be top sets, but it won't be the same way that we want for bodybuilding, 20 hard sets to failure. You'll want like one or two sets for strength. Just practice it, get in, get out, and then do more of your skill-based work for the lift at a lower intensity where you can focus on technique. And we can see practically why we wouldn't do that for strength because we're using free weight exercises. Going to technical failure is not only hazardous to joints, increased risk of injury to the muscles involved. It also, you can argue, teaches poor motor patterns. Yes. Yeah. Whereas if we're comparing that with lifting weights for hypertrophy, you will be biasing that effort relative to failure, going to the maximum on machines, on safer movements, isolation as well. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, as much as a lot of the technique crowd like to say, oh, it's got to be perfect technique. The second you see any deviation in form, you, you stop the set. I think for muscle building, there's a lot of merit to letting your technique change and break down as you hit failure points. Definitely try to maintain your perfect technique as much as you can, but don't stop a set just because you can't get a full range of motion. Do those partials, add a little bit of extra like flexion here and there because your body is resilient. You can take it, but it will give you opportunities to expose your body to more stress. Whereas with strength, we can excuse a little bit of that, but there's a lot more risk involved and a lot more fatigue. Especially with the hypertrophy, you're doing the higher rep ranges. You've got external stability. So it's a lot safer to specifically target that muscle. Whereas with the strength training at very low reps, high intensity, the shifting away from your ideal movement pattern, you're going to be, I guess, compensating and then loading up tissues that probably haven't had that experience of just where it is. So it's, especially with strength, you do not want to get injured because you can't do the movement you want to get stronger at. Exactly. So the other differences that we can with hypertrophy programming versus strength programming is frequency, where when it comes to something like trying to get stronger, you can, in some instances, get away with doing something like a squat every single day. Because especially for beginners, you pick up the skill so much quicker. But even for advanced people, like a lot of the Chinese, the Bulgarian weightlifting teams in the past, they'd be doing squat every day, squat a few times a day to get stronger because they want to improve that skill. For muscle building, if you're doing truly hard leg days or back days or whatever, daily is probably not a good idea. You're just going to break down progressively over time because we know that muscle protein synthesis is elevated in naturals for like 48-ish hours, maybe give or take either way. So if you're training two to four times a week, that's going to have that sweet spot of recurring stimulus to growth. Whereas if you did those squats every day, you're perpetually like tearing down, fatiguing those areas, no room for growth per se. Yeah, yeah. And you know, definitely you can do it for a little stint here and there just for a bit of fun or try to push for a lagging body part. But I think, you know, a big mistake people make with a lagging body part, say I want to grow my arms, I'll train arms every day. And it usually just creates a lot more damage, which doesn't help with growth, more fatigue. But if my squat was struggling, I potentially could look at increasing the number of days I squat in a week because it means I can practice it more under the heavy load. And of course I'll taper back on other stuff. It's just really knowing what adaptation you want. Just trying to do both and progress at both at the rate you want. It's a pipe dream. It's impossible trying to sell that you will get as big and as strong as possible by doing both at the same time. You can't. It just goes against the basic science, as we said. So to go now from frequency into body part splits and how to lay this out in a week to maximize hypertrophy versus strength. With muscle building, you can do a lot of things. You can do a bro split, train chest just once a week. A lot of merit to that. You can train it, push pull legs. You can train up or lower. You'll get a ton of results. But with strength, I find it's better to look more at the movement. We've got a squat day, we have a bench day, we have a deadlift day. And then we can look at it more methodically and say, what do you want to bring up now? We want to bring up your squat. Let's go an extra squat day. And it won't be the exact same one, but it could be, instead of doing back squats, we might do front squats. Or I might do back squats with a pause or maybe a different rep range as well. Anything that you might add to that in terms of splits that you've found? Yeah, just understanding with what split you choose dictates the intensity and volume as well. So if you're opting for a bro split, you're really going to send it on that chest day to do in that one session. Whereas if you're doing a push pull split, you'd manage that a bit more because you've got multiple times to hit that muscle. And then, yeah, I just love what you said with the strength. Using variation to get that movement pattern in as well at a different intensity, whereby you don't have to use these really heavy loads, but you're still stressing the pattern that feeds into one another. Yeah. But I don't think there's necessarily an ideal split. It just comes down to where person's at. Generally speaking, in an ideal world, the more you can train, the better. Train every single day, but we know that we can't. But we've got to find what works. Yeah. It comes to your schedule as well as your level of advancement and preference too, because as you get stronger on, say, a leg day, it just becomes brutal to try and do everything in that one session. Splitting it up just makes sense from both a hypertrophy and a strength perspective. So leaning towards leaving some in the tank to do more total is a huge thing that I've learnt as well. One thing, yeah, I took this from Christopher Summer, gymnastics coach, calisthenics. God, there's no amount of work you can do today that will outweigh what you can do in a week. Wow. Yeah, that's a profound quote. Love it. Yeah. Across a week, month, year, decade. So we should always look at leave something in the tank for muscle or strength and just keep doing so you can do more later. Yeah. It's just delaying that satisfaction towards later, just knowing that you're building up towards that. It's not going to show because there's a difference between your fitness and the fatigue that's accrued as well. Just with applying a deload, you'll actualize all your hard work. So it's hard to know that in the moment, but a prudent mindset is really good. So how about progressing over time? Do you include deloads when it comes to strength or muscle building? Yeah, for strength, because of the sheer amount of weights that we're using, you normally find you need some time off. After a six to 12 week block of doing heavy doubles, triples, your joints feel beat up. Your brain feels beat up. You need to take a couple of weeks where you pull back. And I used to think that I needed the same thing for muscle building, but I found that I would take these deloads where I do the same kind of thing and it actually wouldn't help me at all. I wouldn't get better results. I wouldn't feel much better because I could just instead change my exercises out and get better results without having to do a true deload. Instead of a deload week, I would do like an intro week to different exercises. Does that same thing apply if you were to repeat the same workout program, exact same exercises for hypertrophy? So you mean start from day one again? Yeah. Like just say you've done your block, would you still not deload? Yeah. I'll just start a whole new block even though like by the end of a 12 week block for say muscle building, I'm pushing a lot harder than I was at the very start. But if I start a whole new block, I'm going to be starting easier. That's what I wanted people to know. It's not just, if you're not going to deload, don't just keep doing the exact same sets, reps, intensity. You can't perpetually increase. No. Yeah. Something eventually will snap. So don't do that. But usually you don't need to take a schedule where I'm going to take time off or just pull back. It's like, no, just start a training block. Change your barbell row for a dumbbell row. And you'll naturally find that due to the movement pattern, due to the skill involved, you have to go a little bit lighter than your true max. And that week that you spend going a little bit lighter, that's a deload. It's like fatigue, stimulus, gradually rising. And then you start a new program, new things, same thing again. Yeah, absolutely. And that's where like over time you'll find a collection of movements that you can always just rotate between. And then every two to three months, you're changing the majority of your movements up and around a little bit. And that gives you a fresh stimulus, but a different stimulus, which means you're not always pushing the same buttons of fatigue. Whereas with strength training, what does a successful deload look like? Yeah. So I mean, for strength training, because we have to stick with certain exercises because of the skill specificity components, we need to still keep them in. And a successful deload would look like you spend one to two weeks at a lower intensity. And when you come back, you should be a little bit stronger. You should be, and this is where a lot of powerlifters use as part of their peaking strategy. They wouldn't be sending it the day before their meet. They'd spend a week prior to the meet, pulling back a little bit, staying fresh, letting your body recover so they can then peak when it matters. Because we're playing with this really, really fine-tuned machine of, yes, you have the muscle mass to lift 300 kilos, but is your brain prepared to handle it on this specific day? And it needs to tease that out by not being too tired, but also not being too rested. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where the deload timing can be so specific if you're trying to peak for an event. Yes. Many ways to deload when it comes to strength training, but the main thing is, is a reduction in your workload and the fatigue that's accrued. Yeah. Some people like to, by contrast, cut their sets maybe just to one or two sets and keep the intensity quite high, if not similar, but many ways to skin the cat, so to speak, with that, achieving the same objective with those. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some powerlifters or some strength athletes would like to go from say four sets down to one set, exact same weight. Other ones would say, I'll just go same four sets, but go to 80% instead. How about if we want to get the best of both worlds, getting stronger and getting bigger? It's a bit of a strange question because we know that it's impossible to be optimal with doing both, but how can we kind of get some of each benefit? If you took a lot of drugs, you can get both. That's, that's always the answer. Just use a bucket load of Tren and we'll get both. Some of the beep. Yeah. Take a bucket load of beep. If you made it to this point in the video, you get the secrets. Yeah. The real behind the scenes. For the real true followers. Yeah. For the best of both worlds, this whole power building approach, it definitely is possible. It's probably not the most practical if you want to optimize either of the goal, which is fine. You know, like I'm not going to be Mr. Olympia. I don't care to Mr. Olympia. I don't care to hold the world record in squats. That's not made for me. I want to have fun with my training. I want to have some variety. So the way I look at this normally is starting out my session with that heavy lift I care about the squat bench dead or a row or whatever overhead press and hit that for, like we said, at the start of the video, that two to six-ish, three to six-ish rep range. And then the rest of my workout is more muscle building accessories. A lot of variety. Ticks the boxes we spoke about. You've got that strength specificity. You're ticking the box of intensity as well. And finishing off with just muscle building stuff, which you've got more freedom to do different intensities, different volume, different exercises as well. And that's where most people gravitate towards. As you said, you want to be big. You want to be strong. You know you're not going to set world records or compete at the highest level in any domain. Once you've been training for a while, it doesn't take as much work to be strong and to be big. So it's really nice being able to celebrate your body, so to speak. Yeah. I guess it might be helpful for people to understand like what that might look like if we're just trying to optimize, say, strength is say I'm doing bench day and I wanted to just have strength. I would just do my heavy bench, same as the power building approach, but then the rest of my workout, it wouldn't be bodybuilding chest stuff. It would be what is my weak point on the bench? How can I practice it more? And it's just that, which is great. Maybe it's scapular stability. Yeah, it could be, which is going to help you get very, very strong on that one movement. It could be pause, pin presses, whatever. But you wouldn't have the room to go do all the bodybuilding stuff you want to do if you want to build muscle or calisthenics stuff or whatever. Is it because the extra homework you're doing for muscle size would create that fatigue, soreness that would impact subsequent workouts? You only have so many sets. Say we only have, say, 10 sets in a workout to play with. Five of them are taken up with your bench press for your strength. The other five can go towards bench press accessory to improve that bench press if you purely cared about strength, or it could be five sets of just fun stuff for a big pump. Yeah, for sure. That's all you have to play with. So we've got to say, do you want the best of both worlds and a slightly weaker bench, or do you want the biggest bench possible, which is when you need to be very specific there? For sure. And I'd love to hear people's thoughts in the comment section. What's the practical takeaways you apply to your training when it comes to getting stronger, building muscle? Because this is all very conceptual, but it's just interesting to hear what's happening in the trenches too. Let us know in the comments. We'll see you next time. Peace.