Strength, Hypertrophy, and Soreness

This topic is an unofficial request.

Training for strength and training for hypertrophy exist on two parts of the same continuum. Training sessions that emphasize muscle gain (hypertrophy) will also elicit strength benefits, and conversely, training for strength will trigger muscular growth. This is to say, while you don’t have to exist in a bubble – training ONLY strength or ONLY hypertrophy, and that either modality will provide benefits across the continuum, the difference lies in the prioritized end result. Oftentimes trainees will organize workouts to see benefits from many parts of this continuum.

Conceptually, soreness in a trained muscle is an often-overemphasized metric of effective training. While you likely will feel some degree of soreness from many effective training styles – you can also feel sore but not have had an effective workout at all. Training for soreness in this respect is not the best way of organizing your workouts as they may mask or supress your overall progress.

What causes soreness (and as an adjacent but similar feeling, “tightness”), is microtrauma (damage) incurred upon the muscle and residual metabolic accumulation (see: lactic acid / lactate, etc.) remaining in the muscle(s) in the day(s) following your workouts.

The differentiating factor that may cause a more hypertrophy emphasized training session to produce greater soreness than a strength emphasized training session is the degree of damage and metabolic accumulation that happens when getting closer to technical failure during exercise in each of these training styles.

Strength training being on the heavier side of things requires a coordinated effort (often near maximal effort) of all the musculature involved in the exercise to complete. If a lack of skill, nervous system coordination, or large enough threshold of muscle reaches even a little bit of fatigue, you will no longer be able to complete the exercise. The weight simply won’t move. This isn’t to say that muscle won’t be damaged when this happens, but the degree of engagement required to lift heavy weight means that it requires less damage and thereby “disengaging” muscle per repetition to ultimately prevent you from completing another repetition. There is less opportunity for metabolic accumulation (burn) or muscle damage before hitting a technical failure point because without the vast majority of muscle being active - the repetition simply won’t happen.

During hypertrophy training, the weight being lifted is light enough that we can actually take advantage of metabolic accumulation and muscle damage. Through many sub-maximal, near-failure sets MANY different muscle fibres can reach a damaged or inhibited state and there will still be enough remaining to continue further repetitions. This helps skew our subsequent muscle adaptation towards hypertrophy rather than increasing maximal strength.

There is a point of diminishing returns, where the degree of damage incurred actually delays or reducing the return on investment for muscle growth. This comes down to individual trainee experience and recoverability thresholds.

Programs may also elect to train across a variety of weight and repetition ranges to derive as much progress across many attributes as possible. While the speed of progress on either point of the continuum may be slower than if they had been singularly focused on, progress can be made in muscle and strength gain at the same time.

Best,

Eric