Build Muscle Size, Strength & Power With Science-Backed Programs

1. Dr. Andy Galpin

   The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. Hello, friends. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor of kinesiology in the Center for Sport Performance at Cal State Fullerton. In today's show, we're going to jump straight into the application of training for muscle hypertrophy and strength and power. In order to do that, what I'd like to spend our time on is to go through a couple of actual programs that are designed to maximize both of those goals. These are programs I have used myself as well as in my laboratory, and they come from some of the world's most foremost experts in training for strength and power, as well as muscle hypertrophy. So as I stated a second ago, today's show is directly about the application, and we'll talk very briefly here in a second about what these terms mean, some overarching principles that are going to be true across both of those programs, and a little bit of context.

2. Dr. Andy Galpin

   But I don't want to spend a lot of time going over the overarching philosophy or background physiology because I've done that in other shows as well as many other places, and you can get that through any of the links in our show notes. So today really is about the program. So we want to get into that, walk you through why they're being built, what the terms mean, how they're structured the way they are, and then of course, give you these samples for free. And so that is to say both of the programs I'm going to discuss today are available completely free and in their entirety in our show notes. Now, before we do that, we have to explain some terms. When I say strength, what I mean more specifically is force production. Think about this as muscular strength or my one-repetition maximum. It doesn't actually have to be a one-repetition maximum. It could be a two or three or five. That's not the point.

3. Dr. Andy Galpin

   It's really differentiating it from muscle size and muscle power. So muscle strength represents your ability to apply force to stop movement from happening when you don't want it to move, to control your joints, to control objects, and to control other people if that's the application. So it really is about that. Muscle size is different. We call that muscle hypertrophy. There's obviously a strong relationship between muscle size and muscle strength, but it's not perfect either. There's clearly an overlap, but just because you maximize strength doesn't mean you maximize size. And the inverse is true as well. Maximizing size does not maximize strength. The easiest, most practical example I can give you here is take two of the sports that spend their most time focusing on these goals. In the one hand, let's just call it bodybuilding, where the goal is to maximize physical size. And we'll contrast that to the sport of powerlifting.

4. Dr. Andy Galpin

   Now, this may sound a little bit confusing, but trust me on the terminology here. Powerlifting is a sport in which they test maximal strength. Okay? Now, in the sake of a bodybuilder, whether you're male or female, it doesn't matter, if you're increasing muscle size and your goal is to optimize for that specific outcome, almost surely you're going to get stronger. Early in the training, medium in the training, probably several years into your training, you're going to be getting a lot stronger. There's no question. But you're not going to be maximizing your strength. If we were to look at the powerlifter, you'd see a similar thing. Oftentimes, they put on muscle along their training journey, but they're maximizing and trying to peak for physical strength. And so maybe six months into training, the amount of muscle size and muscle strength gains would be equal between a powerlifter and a bodybuilder.

5. Dr. Andy Galpin

   But maybe after six months, well, certainly after six years, eventually you'll start seeing separation where the powerlifter will get stronger at a faster rate than the bodybuilder will, but the bodybuilder will add muscle at a faster rate than the powerlifter would be. So I hope that makes sense. They are complementary, but they are really quite different. So if you're at the very beginning of your strength training history, and this is your first jump into it, you may not notice or feel or understand really the functional difference between training for strength versus hypertrophy. But as the months and years go on, you will start to know that. And so that means it's important to apply the right type of programming to make sure you get the right outcome you're looking for. So if you're trying to add muscle, but you're using concepts that are better applied for strength and power, you're probably going to be leaving some gains on the table, which means you'll be unhappy with your results.

6. Dr. Andy Galpin

   Right? You won't be getting the progress you're looking for. The same thing could be said if you're trying to gain strength, but you're using hypertrophy or muscle size principles. Again, you might be going, "Man, I'm not getting stronger. I'm not getting faster or more powerful. I'm doing the things that I saw. They're supposed to be correct. They're scientifically validated," et cetera. But you're applying the wrong principle because it came from a different body of literature. So that alone can hopefully save you quite a bit of headache and can get you to your results much faster. So with all that in mind, the last variable to talk about here is muscle power, and that differs from strength in that it is force multiplied by velocity. So again, as I said a second ago, strength is effectively force production. Power is force multiplied by velocity. Another way you could come up with this equation is work over time.

7. Dr. Andy Galpin

   So how much work can you complete over a certain amount of time? Power tends to be most important for sport application, though not always, but typically is the one you're more concerned with. Almost all sports, if you had to choose between being more powerful or more strong, or stronger rather, you would choose power. And the reason is sports typically work on a time domain. So think about it this way. Let's say I'm going up against you, and we're going to collide together. Rugby, doesn't matter, right? And you can produce 1,000 newtons into the ground, and I can produce 500. But it takes you two seconds to produce your 1,000, and it takes me 300 milliseconds, so a third of one second, to produce my 500. Well, by the time we actually collide, most sports occur in the 200 to 400-millisecond range, I will have maybe 400 newtons produced. You've only produced 300 newtons because you're not even halfway to your peak time.

8. Dr. Andy Galpin

   And now I'll own that exchange because I'm actually much functionally stronger than you Lots of different examples we can think about there, but that's really what we're talking about when we're differentiating strength and power. The majority of the application I'm going to give you here, this program was actually developed for someone looking to maximize both strength and power, so we're not going to split that up into individual programs right now because there is clearly an overlap there. In fact, if you were to dive into this a little bit more deeply, you'll realize that actually power is simply force times velocity. So if I know how much force you can produce, now I need to know your velocity. I can generate what's called a force velocity curve, such that where on that curve of if it's too heavy and I slow down, that's not a lot of power. But if it's really, really, really fast, but that means I have to go to a light weight, it's not a lot of power either.

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