Hidden Power: How to Get Strong Without Getting Big

one of the questions i get most often on this channel is how can i get stronger and more powerful without also getting bigger and bulkier it seems that people want this slim of physique that belies their hidden strength and power think one punch man or bruce lee so is this possible well the fact that one of those examples was a real person suggests that it probably is but of course there are some challenges and that's what i'm going to talk about here so the problem with trying to get stronger without necessarily getting bigger is that a lot of the triggers the stimuli that lead to more strength also lead to increased hypertrophy muscle growth they are mechanical tension metabolic stress and muscle damage each of these things is used to build more strength but it will also cause more muscle size fortunately there are some factors some variables that influence strength without having a big impact on size and that's what we're going to focus on here it's not just so much about the muscle you have as it is your ability to use that muscle efficiently obviously there's some low hanging fruit some easy wins that we should focus on first for example you want to cut away fat if you strip back the added layer of subcutaneous fat then you're going to look leaner without losing any strength another thing we can do is to build more tendon strength and there are several ways you can do this i made a video on it in the past i'll link that in the description down below strong attendance will contribute to greater strength and they won't make you look a whole lot bigger similarly building a stronger grip will make you stronger in nearly everything you do without making you look any bigger maybe your hands will look thicker your hand tendons and perhaps your forearms your overall size and physique isn't going to look like that of the hulk there are lots of ways we can train our strength i knew some rock climbers at university who had incredible gripping strength they would do fingerboard pull-ups with tons of weights in a backpack and these guys were very light and slim looking rock climbing is also an example of doing something that will naturally improve your strength to weight ratio something that's much more interested that i'm interested in is a technique that was actually used by bruce lee himself as well as another guy who has a very slight frame but is capable of exerting incredible feats of strength and power that's dennis rogers and i am of course talking about something i've talked about on this channel a fair bit before that's overcoming isometrics so overcoming isometrics are movements where you're pushing or pulling against something that's too heavy for you to move so you might be doing a bench press but the weight's too heavy so you're just pushing against the bar not making any progress likewise you could be trying to tear a piece of rope in half or push a wall down there are plenty of tools you can use to do this you can use resistance machines are locked in place or that have too much weight on them you can use tools from companies like full worker that make a bunch of cool things that are great for training your isometric strength or you can just use your own body weight to try and lift yourself in positions that you aren't able to move yourself in to get the best results i've made views on this in the past but just quickly you want to hold each contraction for about six seconds using maximum force every inch of strength you can muster and you want to make sure you train at three different joint angles at least because it only has an area of effect of about 30 degrees the reason this works is because you're telling your body you need more strength than you have access to normally when we exert strength we're only capable even when we try and be as strong as possible of utilizing around 30 of our muscle fiber if you're an untrained individual up to about 75 for an elite athlete and due to henneman's size principle the last motor units you recruit the last bundles of muscle fibers are actually the ones that contain the fastest and strongest and largest muscle fibers that would give you the my strength so you have all of this untapped power waiting that you can't unlock and you can't utilize in your movements there are plenty of reasons for this such as injury prevention but it also just comes down to practice you aren't able to coordinate that movement well enough you're not able to send a strong enough signal to recruit all those muscle fibers because you haven't practiced doing it and that's exactly what you're doing when you use a one rep max or an overcoming isometric you're pushing or pulling as hard as you can and you're sending the strongest signal possible and you get better at doing this over time such that you have a stronger link between the mind and the muscle using those one rep maximums will do this and that's why that's such a great way to build a lot of strength but at the same time it has limitations due to the strength curve there's only probably one point in that movement we are actually exerting the most force a lot there's going to be momentum some positions are going to be easier than others as you go through the repetition at the same time the repetition itself only takes a very short window of time however with an overcoming isometric you're able to hold that contraction that maximum contraction for as long as possible really sending that neural drive and practicing and strengthening that ability to command your full strength because there's no movement because this is a static contraction because the contractions are still relatively short not causing much metabolic build-up you're not causing much muscle damage you don't tear much of the muscle fiber a lot of this happens during the eccentric portion of a movement you're not building more muscle you're improving your efficiency and your ability to command the muscle that you already have so that is intramuscular coordination your ability to coordinate different muscle fibers within a single muscle what's just as interesting perhaps more so is inter-muscular coordination your ability to utilize multiple different muscle groups together in the right order and with the right synchronicity in order to exert the maximum force through a certain movement pattern so what i'm talking about here is practicing technique this is something we see all the time with martial artists a martial artist can deliver a much more powerful punch than a bodybuilder who's never thrown a punch before because they've rehearsed that movement over and over again unless they're able to engage the right muscles at the right time and even relax the ones that would otherwise slow them down but this also applies to strength movements this is what i talked about in a previous video again on skill acquisition and greasing the groove pavel tatsulin talks about strength as a skill so you can get stronger simply by practicing and if you want to practice more without getting bigger then you just spread that practice throughout the day and this is where the greasing the groove comes in so pavel suggests for example if you have a pull-up bar in your doorway then every time you go through that door do a few pull-ups and you'll get a bit stronger because you'll be rehearsing the movement pattern you're only doing a couple you're not going to fail you're not causing any muscle damage so you're not going to get bulkier from doing this you're just going to get more efficient to do pull-ups and so you get stronger but if you want to be stronger in the real world then rehearsing pull-ups and rehearsing curls isn't quite going to cut it there's this trope in anime where often the biggest and strongest characters are actually weaker than the small and unusual looking characters this is something that toriyama likes to do in particular at last frieza decides to show himself and from here he doesn't look so tough anymore [Music] and at some point there'll be a scene where the big hulking creature will throw this massive punch or blast at the little guy who will just lift a finger and block it without even seeming to move without even seeming to need to get into a defensive stance it can just be strong from that angle with seemingly no effort that's what real wiry unassuming power would look like and perhaps unusually the closest thing we have to that in real life is farmer strength so you might have heard of farmer strength it's this kind of urban myth that farmers and other manual workers have got a whole lot of extra strength they're surprisingly powerful despite not necessarily practicing any kind of strength sport likewise you might have heard of dad's strength this is the notion that dads have got this kind of unusual wiry strength you might remember as a kid your dad grabbing your wrist when you're being naughty and having a seemingly unshakeable vice-like grip where does that come from because they're practicing movements that will help them to build that into muscular coordination at the same time as strengthening tendons and grip strength because they're moving all throughout the day the farmer or the manual laborer is doing manual work and the dad is lifting his kid on his shoulders and running around and carrying heavy bags because you're doing that throughout the day you're rehearsing that movement and strengthening yourself but at the same time you're doing that in standing up positions in moving dynamic changeable positions so for an example go and stand by a wall stand completely straight so your legs are side by side and your arms are down by your side stand about 40 centimeters away from the wall facing it dead on now lift one arm up to about shoulder height and then push against the wall as hard as you can you'll find that even if you have a 150 kilogram bench press normally you're probably not able to exert more than about 30 kilograms of force here and the reason is because you're only as strong as the weakest link and at the same time you have to coordinate lots of different muscles all at once from this mechanically disadvantaged position so what's actually happening is you're stabilizing your shoulder you're engaging your core your ex's up dominating from yourself bending backwards and your obliques to event prevent yourself from twisting you're digging through your glutes to keep your legs straight and even through your feet will be digging into the ground and it's your ability to use these muscles together that exerts that force it's not all just about pecs and tricep like it is in a bench press this is how you use your body in real life this is what we don't really practice but the farmer or the dad is constantly on the move is constantly having to practice these unusual positions and strengthen their movement patterns in ways that are more unpredictable like this imagine digging the hole for a moment each time you dig a hole with a big spade you're jabbing the spade into the ground with a lot of force the ballistic movement then you're leveraging the spade up which is going to feel heavy because of that mound of dirt on the end and then you're moving it twisting your body to one side and dumping it over there then you're performing the movement again and you're doing this again and again throughout the day i don't know if digging holes are something farmers do by the way i'm i'm not a farmer but as you do this hole also gets deeper so you're changing your position you're stooping more then throughout the rest of the day you might be carrying bales of hay pushing tractors wrestling pigs or whatever else it is that farmers probably do point is you're practicing strength in all these different positions without necessarily developing size at the same time you also build intention strength and grip strength which is something else we talked about and as a result you have this wiry unassuming pharma strength of course you don't have to become a professional farmer to get that kind of strength there are ways to incorporate this sort of training into your routine you can do it with cable machines any kind of exercise where you're standing up and at the same time with things like animal movements where you're just moving your body in more dynamic ranges of motion more unpredictable positions training outside makes a huge difference as well of course any kind of movement like this where you're exerting force from a standing position using more functional real world type movements whether that's flipping a tire or hitting it with a sledgehammer or throwing a medicine ball all these things are going to require you to use your core and your limbs in a more cohesive manner the way that you use them in the real world and that will not only help to improve your strength and your ability to coordinate all those muscles together you'll also build up those smaller supportive muscles in your core and other regions that don't add a lot to your overall size but do contribute a lot to your strength and your performance finally we can also combine this all with explosive movements because we don't just want to be strong slowly we want to be strong quickly using plyometric and ballistic movements means things like clapping push-ups clapping pull-ups depth jumps squat jumps and doing this improves our rate of force development so that's the ability to not only recruit maximum muscle fiber but to do so quickly but we're not actually gaining a lot of size because the amount of time where the actin and myosin filaments are engaged there's just not enough time to cause enough muscle damage to stimulate hypertrophy so yeah by leaning out by changing your grip strength by training your tendons and by training lots of different unique positions and practicing strength you can become much more powerful without necessarily adding a whole lot of bulk of course i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with adding bulk as long as it isn't causing you to slow down as long as you keep your strength relative to that size in fact there's lots of advantages to hypertrophy apart from anything else it acts as a kind of armor when you get hit at the same time there are many things that are easier to train if you allow yourself that hypertrophy as well so don't throw the baby out with the bathwater but as a thought experiment i thought this was quite interesting the point is that a lot of the training that focuses on strength without adding size is often overlooked in modern training programs because so many people are more interested in aesthetics it turns out if you're really interested in power the many of these overlooked aspects of training other things that you should really be paying more attention to so you found this video useful interesting guys if you did then please leave a like and share around that helps me out immensely comment down below and let me know whether you're more interested in hypertrophy strength or a combination of the two if you like this philosophical alternative approach to training that's about more than just aesthetics then you'll probably be interested in my ebook and training program super functional training there i go into all kinds of unexplored and different aspects of training relating to strength but also power explosiveness mobility endurance even brain training and then i combine it all into a training program right at the end if that sounds cool then there's a link to that in description down below and there's a discount on whilst we're all in lockdown alternatively you could consider joining the patreon group a huge thank you to all of my current patreons not only will you get access to some exclusive content we also be invited to join the secret bioneer group on facebook where we talk about our own training different and unique trading methods as well as anything interesting that we find on the web so we'd love to see you there i'll put a link to that in description down below also either way thank you so much for watching this one subscribe if you want more like it and i'll see you next time bye for now trees yeah

Channel: The Bioneer

Views: 4,216,406

Keywords: lean power, lean machine, strong not bulky, strength training, power, neural efficiency, strength as a skill, grasing the groove, bruce lee, saitama, one punch man, the batman, batman training, farmer strength, dad strength, strongman, dennis rogers, overcoming isometrics, isometrics, movement patterns

Id: aaI2dNUQamo

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020