Relationship between Strength and Performance

Want to jump higher?, run faster?, or boost your explosiveness? Well, the key is simple:

You gotta get stronger!

In recent years, there’s been a rise in records regarding speed, magnitude, capacity, and power across all sports. Athletes have become bigger, stronger, and faster than their predecessors from back in the day. And this is due to a common denominator in all sports disciplines: strength training, the main factor that helps athletes improve their abilities.

Nowadays, strength training is part of the sports planning for any sport. Athletes now get why lifting weights and physical conditioning are necessary to better prepare their seasons and give their best in competitions.

Sports performance depends directly or indirectly on the quality of muscle strength, and this is a well-established fact.

The main job of the body’s 600+ muscles is to contract to create movement. Only muscles can make you move.

The stronger your muscles are, the more powerful those contractions will be, and with that: you’ll be faster, jump higher, throw farther, and hit harder, …

Plus, a muscular conditioning program is key to injury prevention. Many injuries affect knee ligaments, especially the anterior cruciate ligament, often caused by muscle imbalances or weakness in the lower body.

It’s maximal strength that all the above variables revolve around. Running, throwing, pulling, hitting, jumping… all depend on the strength of muscle fibers.

For these reasons, absolute strength should be the first to reach optimal levels, and at the same time, blend with the abilities specific to a sport, thus becoming what’s called functional strength.

Concentric and Eccentric Strength

Maximal strength can be divided into 2 types of muscle actions:

• Concentric strength: the ability to overcome resistance through muscle contraction, where the muscle shortens as tension develops – this is the movement when lifting weights
• Eccentric strength: occurs when a muscle lengthens, yielding to the resistance it’s offering to the load. It’s the final part of a movement, like in the bench press.

Eccentric strength is usually 30-50% greater than concentric strength…

Regardless of other training types, like plyometric exercises, doing basic and heavy movements is the most efficient way to improve basic sports qualities like speed, strength, agility, jumping, and explosiveness.

Maximal Strength

The maximal strength that can be exerted in any sport movement is called maximal strength. For explosive sports, the greater the explosive strength, the better the development. Then, the time to develop that strength in almost all sports is so short that it’s unlikely to reach full potential. But in just one sport, this phenomenon does happen.

Mostly, different sports require movements at high speed (dribbling, sprints, …) where maximal strength can’t be fully developed.

So, even though maximal strength work is very important, there are nuances. One of them is speed.

Having great strength is useless if you’re not fast enough to show it.

We’re talking about functional strength, or the amount of strength needed to apply in a movement, as fast as possible, and adapted to the specific sport.

Relative Strength

Closely related is relative strength, which measures the ratio between maximal strength and the athlete’s body weight.

How do we know if our relative strength (strength relative to body weight) is optimal? Simple. If strength increases faster than body weight and performance improves, you’re on the right track, and those extra gains are functional gains.

In trained athletes, about a 10% increase in body weight can bring strength gains of around 30% or even more…

How do we know if we’ve reached a point where we’re strong enough in terms of Relative Strength? This will be noticed eventually, not immediately. In other words, increases in strength and body size or weight can negatively affect speed and relative strength. However, you’ll “feel” this much earlier as you monitor your performance and see it decline. Also, you’ll notice that further strength gains will interfere with your sport-specific training.

A pro sprinter can squat 2-3 times their body weight…

Improving Strength and Relative Strength

Since strength training targets the neuromuscular system, strength can be developed through two different approaches: stressing the muscular system or the nervous system.

Functional Hypertrophy

The first method uses bodybuilding-style techniques (6-12 reps to failure, using TUT, i.e., Time Under Tension techniques, …). This promotes muscle size increase.

Then, we apply methods aimed at recruiting the highest number of motor units (fibers), i.e., true strength training, with rep ranges between 1-5, full rest between sets, and prioritizing basic exercises.