Introduction
There’s no question about it, sports and strength go hand in hand. If you want to become a better athlete, you must make sure you are physically strong to have both better performance as well as stay healthy in modern high-intensity sports. Muscular strength is one of the two strength components that athletes require for increased performance. In fact, muscular strength is the best option for you if you are looking to becoming stronger without added muscle mass.
When talking about strength, you might only think of high-intensity activities that require lifting heavy weights or going head-to-head with your opponent. However, that’s not entirely the case. You see, muscular strength is a vital building block of enduranceas well. This is due to the fact that additional strength can provide more power on each step with less effort.
This article explains the basic mechanics of muscular strength and what makes it so important for athletes and active individuals alike. You can also head straight to our muscular strength training post if you want to know how to create your own training program. There are a few free samples too to get you started.
What is muscular strength in sports?
Muscular strength or better known as maximum strength, describes working out with heavy weights that are close to your maximum. And, since you are physically performing at your limit this means that you can only do a few repetitions at a time.
The goal of maximum strength training is to give the biggest stimulus to your muscles through your neuromuscular system. Thus, muscular strength focuses more on recruiting the muscle rather than trying to make the muscle itself bigger and stronger. Because that was muscular hypertrophy, remember?
Overall, your strength is related to two things;
- The strength of a single muscle cell (hypertrophy)
- Your ability to recruit motor units (muscle and its connecting nerves) to work together and at the same time
The amount of force your muscles can produce depends on how fast the movement is, what kind of joint angles you are working with and what kind of movement you are doing.
For example, even though your goal is to lift a heavy weight as fast as possible, it may look painfully slow to everyone else. This is due to the fact that it takes some time for your neuromuscular system (muscles and their connecting nerves) to recruit more help from other motor units (a single motor neuron and the muscle fibres innervated by it). Even though the actual movement might seem slow, maximum strength training requires as big a contraction as possible. In fact, it is a prerequisite for increasing your strength in the first place.
