How much can you lift? This is a phrase athletes are all too familiar with. I can guarantee if you’ve been around a gym with adolescent athletes (usually male) you've heard people arguing over who the stronger person is “How much can you deadlift? “, “I can bench 225lbs 15 times”, “What’s your 1RM?”, it goes on and on. It’s no secret that athletes are competitive so understandably they compare themselves to their teammates, other players or even people who don’t play sports. It’s all part of their competitive nature to be better. With that being said, it’s a common misconception that people need to lift a certain amount of weight to be competitive. Look at any team and you will find an athlete on the bench who is stronger than one of their teammates who is on the field or ice or what have you. This is because the amount of weight you lift doesn’t really matter. In fact, this ego-fuelling misconception can really take away from what really matters in the gym, intent.
Researchers from McMaster University performed a 12-week study on 49 athletes and randomly allocated them into one of two groups. Group 1 lifted heavier weights with low repetitions and group 2 lifted lighter weights over high repetitions. Both groups were instructed to train until the point of exhaustion. They concluded that the muscle adaptations between both groups were almost identical (1). This study highlights that even with light weights, hypertrophy and strength gains can happen so long athletes push themselves to failure or train with intent to move the weight as fast as possible. Granted there are several problems with going to failure every workout so I'm not recommending that. For the purpose of this article let's focus on the speed of the lift which was likely much faster for group 2 in this study.
Traditional strength training approaches might be problematic for athletes due to the inverse relationship between force and velocity, that is as force production is increased velocity will decrease. As a result, when an athlete only trains for strength gains or constantly chases heavy loads, they are also training their muscles to contract more slowly. This is a problem because athletic performance frequently necessitates rapid muscle contraction or power. This is a significant concept to understand as an athlete because it shows that lifting lighter weights at similar speeds to those used in their sport can be an effective tool for performance enhancement.
This notion of training similar to the demands of the sport with the goal to directly affect sporting performance was first published by Verkhoshansky in 1993 and is called dynamic correspondence (2). This is a popular and effective training modality for higher-level athletes that aims to mimic the physiological and biomechanical demands of the sport through specific exercises. For example, a basketball athlete would spend time working on single leg jumps as they mimic the movement of jumping up for a lay-up.
In conclusion, I think the mindset of chasing heavy weights needs to evolve into something more practical and relevant for athletes. The goal for training should be to apply maximal intent to every rep regardless of how much weight is on the bar. If the ultimate goal is sport performance the last thing, we need to do is hurt ourselves trying to lift something too heavy. There is a time and place for lifting heavy loads relative to your body weight and capabilities, although time also needs to be spent moving light weights fast. Perhaps we need a new catchy gym phrase “What’s your average set velocity for your ½ body weight bench press?” I guess it just doesn't have the same ring to it.
References
1) Burd, N. A., West, D. W., Staples, A. W., Atherton, P. J., Baker, J. M., Moore, D. R., Holwerda, A. M., Parise, G., Rennie, M. J., Baker, S. K., & Phillips, S. M. (2010). Low-load high volume resistance exercise stimulates muscle protein synthesis more than high-load low volume resistance exercise in young men. PloS one, 5(8), e12033. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0012033
2) Verkhoshansky, Y. (2009). Supertraining [Paperback]. First Edition.
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