Basically, there are 4 adaptations we can create through strength training.
Endurance:
Endurance is often the first target for an athlete starting a strength and conditioning program, although this changes case by case. Endurance simply refers to your muscles ability to repeat contractions over time. There are two basic factors effecting your muscles ability to do this.
Tissue Capacity
Mitochondrial density
Tissue capacity refers to your muscles ability to withstand repeated contractions from a muscular resilience perspective.
Tissue capacity is often trained at lower loads and higher reps. (Example below)
Mitochondrial density refers to how much mitochondria are present in each muscle cell. If you don't remember from high school science class, the mitochondria are the power house of your cells and they create ATP to facilitate a muscle contraction. So naturally having more of these will allow more endurance to repeated exertion.
Mitochondrial density is trained and adapted through fatigue of muscles.
There are many structures you can employ to create endurance adaptations and often times the line between endurance and hypertrophy is blurred and we end up adapting both since they rely on similar systems.
Potential Tissue Capacity workout structure :
4 sets / 20+ reps / 60% 1RM - short rest
Potential Mirochondrial density workout
structure : 5 sets / 12-15 reps / 65% 1RM - minimal rest or supersets
Hypertrophy:
Hypertrophy refers to muscle size. Metabolic fatigue is the main driver of this adaptation. For beginner lifters, hypertrophy often occurs without putting much thought into specific programming and effort. As you advance however, programming needs to get really specific and volume and intensity become essential to further adaptation. Metabolic fatigue refers to the fatigue of your muscles coming from an inability to produce energy to facilitate contraction of a local muscle. This is different than failing because a weight is just too heavy.
Often times when training hypertrophy we see high rep counts but also relatively high weights to actually reach failure or near maximal fatigue. Because reaching fatigue is the goal, structures of the workouts can vary quite a bit depending on athlete limitations, preferences and training age. A structure of a workout focusing on hypertrophy could look like -
3 sets / 12-14 reps / 75% 1RM
Or
4 sets / 8-10 reps / 80-85% 1RM
Strength:
Contrary to what you might think, muscle size does not always translate directly into muscle strength. Strength relies on your bodies ability to recruit muscles to contract. A term we use in strength and conditioning for this is muscle recruitment.
Neuromuscular connection is often the driver behind muscle recruitment. This is why higher weights and lower repetitions is the best way to create this adaptation. When your brain is tasked with lifting something near maximal it must recruit more muscles throughout the kinetic chain in order to meet that demand. Kinetic chain refers to the synergistic effect of different muscle groups working together to provide joint stability and control of a movement. This is often adapted early on in a program when neuromuscular adaptations occur.
Another consideration for maximizing strength gains is you want to have the ability to lift near maximal each set. So the work to rest ratio is higher here than when training endurance and hypertrophy.
A typical structure of a strength based workout could be - 5 sets / 4-6 reps / 90% 1RM per exercise
Power:
On top of being able to recruit more muscle fibers to contract(strength) your brain can also recruit muscles faster. This is referred to as Rate of Force development in the strength and conditioning world. Power is defined as Force x Velocity. Therefor speed becomes the most important factor for adapting power systems. Because speed of each lift is reliant on maximal effort, athletes are going to rest the most between sets in this scenario.
A typical workout focusing on power adaptations could be structured as - 5 sets / 3 reps / 70% 1RM
This post is intended to outline the difference between adaptations... will go more in depth on the different adaptations in future posts!
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