Developing Different Types of Strength

Big lifts and explosive verticals require different kinds of strength.

There are roughly a dozen commonly recognized types and qualities of strength. Some are technical terms found in journals, while others are practical definitions most-used by coaches. Athletes and gym rats alike stand to benefit from being familiar with these variations. To get you started, here are a few of the important ones.

Maximal Strength
When you put about 80% or more of your one-rep maximum on the bar, your body enlists every single fiber in the working muscles to move that weight. Grinding through these heavy loads is known as expressing maximal strength. Besides making sure you wring the most out of your muscles, hitting the maximal strength zone targets your biggest, fastest muscle fibers, which have the most potential for growth. It also tells smaller fibers to start looking and acting more like their big neighbors.

Since strength is as much about your central nervous system as it is about your muscles, training for maximal strength also improves your ability to recruit your muscles, meaning you’ll get stronger while getting bigger. Heavy compound barbell lifts like squats, presses, deadlifts, and rows, performed 3x3 or 5x5, are time-proven tools for training maximal strength.

Explosive Strength
Ever wonder why heavy squats don’t necessarily lead to better “ups”? This is because the most important part of jumping high is explosive strength, which is the ability to apply great amounts of force in as little time as possible. Grinding lifts like heavy squats can improve explosive strength in newbie lifters, but they tend to be too slow to help seasoned gym goers.

Instead, boost your vertical with classic explosive movements like cleans, snatches, jump squats, and box jumps. For upper body explosiveness, try clapping push-ups, push presses, and medicine ball throws and slams. Just like maximal strength lifts, explosive lifts tap into all of your muscle fibers, so they’re valid tools to improve a specific lift/movement, or provide a new training stimulus to spark your progress.

Strength Endurance
During a match, an MMA fighter might work through a series of similar clinches and holds for several minutes at a time. This is an example of strength endurance, or the ability to demonstrate sustained strength over time. On the other end of the spectrum, a receiver in football who fights through coverage on a series of plays also demonstrates strength endurance. Both athletes train strength endurance according to the rhythms and time structure of their sports: the fighter might perform series of lifts for rounds of several minutes, while the receiver will spend more time performing bursts of explosive reps punctuated by brief, frequent rests.

Strength endurance is also a component of lifting weights. When you improve at lifting an amount of weight for more reps, or maintain/improve your lifting volume while reducing rest periods, you’re improving strength endurance. Bodybuilders should look to improve their strength endurance in the traditional hypertrophy range of 7-12 reps per set in order to build muscle while sparing the nervous system.

Relative Strength
In sport, relative strength—or how strong you are in relation to your bodyweight—is an important, but occasionally overlooked, factor. Relative strength is closely tied to explosive strength and strength endurance. Imagine a football lineman who bulks up in the off-season and improves his squat, power clean, and bench press maxes. While his maximal and explosive strength have improved, he adds so much weight his vertical barely budges, and his agility and speed drill times get worse. When two-a-days start, he can’t stay with defenders in pass protection, or get to the alley when pulling on run plays. Worst of all, he’s too winded from the extra weight to actually get better during practice.

Don’t think that bodybuilders are exempt from worrying about relative strength, though. Poor relative strength will keep you from using great bodyweight lifts like pull-ups, push-ups, and one-legged squat variations. “Ladders” are a classic method for improving relative strength. Imagine you can’t perform more than seven pull-ups in a set, but want to get better. Using a generic ladder routine, you’d perform a set of one pull-up, take a quick rest, perform two, rest, perform three, rest, and so on, adding one rep to each subsequent set until you began struggling. This could be anywhere from sets of four to sets of six in this instance. When you reach that struggle point, you stop—this is one “ladder.” After this break, start the process over again beginning with a single pull-up. If you don’t push too hard during the last set of each ladder, you’ll add a great deal of extra volume to your program with less risk of overtraining.

Wrapping-up
For the athletes reading, I hope this has shed a little light on the how’s and why’s behind your S&C coach’s program. For everyone else, properly balancing strength-specific techniques can be vital to your long-term improvement. You probably shouldn’t spend more than a third of your weekly workout volume on maximal and/or explosive strength because of their demanding nature. Conversely, gym rats can focus the majority of their training volume on strength endurance and/or relative strength.