Strength vs Muscle Growth What You Need to Know (How You Train Matters)

Strength and hypertrophy or muscle growth will always be connected, but how you train for each isn’t exactly the same.

This is why a guy like Richard Hawthorne, standing 5’3” and 132 lbs, can deadlift 610 pounds 4 times!

There is a genetic component here, too, but strength and muscle mass aren’t directly proportional and depending on how we choose to train, we can emphasize one over the other.

Strength training involves our nervous system, and through neuromuscular adaptations, our nervous system becomes better able to communicate with our muscles to produce movement and create force.

This allows us to increase the weight we’re lifting without increasing muscle size, which happens much slower than our ability to increase strength. Especially when we first start training.

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Richard Hawthorne deadlift https://youtu.be/FkRkPigvO9Y

Strict curl https://youtu.be/1Sc7YdN_Mvk

The average guy who lifts weights wants a bit of both. He wants to build some muscle and get stronger. But when taken to the extreme, you get powerlifting on the strength side and bodybuilding with muscle growth.

One of the most significant differences is strength training focuses on a few compound lifts, primarily the squat, bench and deadlift, as these are the main competitive lifts. I would add to these bent-over rows and shoulder press.

There’s a strict curl competition where you curl the heaviest weight you can for a single repetition with your back up against a wall using perfect form. this is a strength competition, although, in general isolation movements like curls, leg extensions or lateral raises are more associated with muscle growth.

Compound lifts are the foundation of any good program, whether strength or hypertrophy-focused. The difference comes in the intensity, which refers to how heavy you lift. Strength training is done heavy and low rep, typically in the 1 to 5 range, using 85 to 100% of your one rep max.

When your goal is muscle growth, you’ll train with higher repetitions in the 6 to 15 range, but it could be as high as 20. You’ll want to work within 1 to 3 reps of technical failure, which is the last rep you can do with perfect form. You’ll get stronger within this range, but there is no need ever to attempt a one-rep max.

Progressive overload is something both strength and muscle growth share, especially on compound movements. Many strength-focused programs do this by linear progression, where you try to increase the weight every workout and keep the number of repetitions the same.

Double progression is more common with hypertrophy programs, where you’re either attempting to do one more repetition than last time or adding weight to the bar.

Bodybuilding programs have higher training volumes and accomplish this by doing a wider variety of exercises and sets. Much of this extra work is done with isolation moves and is often set up to provide added stimulus to bring up a lagging body part.

Strength programs will have accessory work, too, but they focus on improving a weak link in a lift; for example, if you’re having trouble locking out your bench press, you might add in floor presses to improve that last part of the movement.

The mental focus is different, too, with strength training being about performance, so the focus is more external and on moving the weight from point A to point B.

Hypertrophy is more about the appearance of the muscle, and we’ll want to internally focus, feeling the muscle working as we do the exercise. This ensures we are working the muscle we desire to target.

Diet is important whether you’re strength training or prioritizing muscle growth. The main difference comes down to how lean you want to get.