10 reasons why bodybuilders are more muscular than powerlifters
We all know that there are some really freaky looking powerlifters out there. In general, however, powerlifters are not as muscular as bodybuilders.
Tell me your favorite muscular powerlifter and I'll show you a bodybuilder who will look skinny in comparison.
Admittedly, many powerlifters carry around way too much body fat to accurately gauge their level of muscularity. This also applies to guys like Donnie Thompson, Ryan Kennelly and Benedikt Magnusson, who are some of the strongest powerlifters in the world.
Sure, these guys are real monsters in terms of their strength and performance, but they are definitely not the most muscular guys on the planet. If they were to reduce their body fat percentage to a reasonable level, they would probably also lose a lot of muscle mass in the process.
When comparing powerlifters to bodybuilders, it is noticeable that many powerlifters have mediocre lower body development by bodybuilding standards.
In 1993, Tom Platz, who probably had the bulkiest legs in the history of bodybuilding, competed in a squat competition with Fred Hatfield, the first person to move 1000 pounds doing squats.
Even though Tom's legs were much bigger and bulkier than Fred's, he got his butt kicked by Fred, whose 855 pounds outweighed Tom's 765 by classes. But when they took a few plates off the bar and reduced the weight to 525 pounds for a lower body endurance test, Tom, who did 23 reps, dwarfed Fred with his 11 reps.
The bottom line is that bodybuilders seem to be better at higher reps with a steady cadence, while powerlifters seem to be better at explosively performed heavy reps with low reps.
Former Mr. Olympia Jay Cutler has written some very open and honest papers on the subject of strength and muscle size. He listed his all-time best performances in relation to his strength at the time.
Years ago he trained with much heavier weights, but he became more muscular by using lighter weights. Even though he continued to train heavy, he decided to focus more on quality than quantity.
Muscular differences between bodybuilders and powerlifters
Many strength athletes and trainers believe that "muscles only know tension." However, this is a far too simplistic view of things. In reality, a whole range of factors need to be taken into account.
What is the degree of tension? How long is the duration of the tension? What is the frequency of the tension? What kind of tension is the muscle exposed to? And certainly passive tension is not as effective as active tension when it comes to building lean muscle mass.
Many believe that the continuous pursuit of increased maximal strength is the key to developing massive muscles. However, even though increased strength is associated with increased muscle cross-sectional area, there are multiple adaptations that can increase strength without increased muscle hypertrophy.
Of these adaptations, an improvement in basic coordination between muscles is by far the strongest contributor to strength gains unrelated to muscle hypertrophy.
In addition to neurological adaptations, adaptations that involve increased stiffening of the tissues that connect bone to bone (including tendons, extracellular matrix, etc.) can also contribute to increased muscle-to-bone force transmission and play a significant role in strength gains.
Follicular angle
The angle that the individual muscle fibers form with the line of action of a muscle, also known as the fascicle angle, has a significant effect on strength independent of muscle hypertrophy.
An increased fascicle angle appears to have a negative correlation with muscle strength - as the fascicle angle increases, the capacity of the muscle to produce force decreases.
Interestingly, studies have shown that bodybuilders have larger fascicle angles than powerlifters, which is probably related to their training methods.
Types of hypertrophy
There are several ways in which muscles can grow without significant changes in strength. One of the ways is an increase in the amount of non-contractile elements in the muscle cell.
Non-contractile hypertrophy involves an increase in collagen, glycogen and other cellular subunits - a phenomenon commonly referred to as "sarcoplasmic hypertrophy".
Since strength production is generated by the sarcomeres, sarcoplasmic hypertrophy has no effect on 1RM weight or maximum strength. However, the increased mass generated by the non-contractile elements still has a significant effect on muscle size.
Growth of the slowly contracting muscle fibers
An increase in the size of slowly contracting type I fibers can also influence muscle hypertrophy without a strong effect on maximum muscle strength. Type I muscle fibers are endurance-oriented fibers that have a limited ability to produce high levels of force.
Type I muscle fibers can increase in size when exposed to a resistance training stimulus, but their hypertrophy capacity is about 50% less than that of fast contracting muscle fibers.
It has been shown that bodybuilders have a larger cross-sectional area of type I muscle fibers than powerlifters. This could help explain why Tom Platz had greater muscle endurance than Fred Hatfield, but was not as strong in absolute terms.
If maximal strength was all that was necessary for muscle hypertrophy, then powerlifters would be the most muscular people on the planet and bodybuilders would be performing maximal single reps instead of chasing the muscle pump.
Simply put, stronger is not the same as more muscular and more muscular does not necessarily mean stronger.
So what makes bodybuilders more muscular than powerlifters?
It's not genetics?
Sure, people naturally tend to do things they are good at.
In the strength training world, those with a better predisposition for strength will be more inclined to train like a powerlifter or become a powerlifter, while those with a better predisposition for building muscle mass will be more inclined to train like a bodybuilder or become a bodybuilder.
Powerlifting has more to do with leverage, the nervous system and improving technique, while bodybuilding has more to do with aesthetics, symmetry, muscularity and conditioning.
Strength depends on a whole range of factors, but the attachment points of the tendons to the bones play a very large role in the ability to release maximum force.
Let's use bicep curls as an example. Let's say you're curling a 60 pound dumbbell and you've moved the dumbbell up so far that your upper and lower arm form a 90 degree angle and you're moving the dumbbell very slowly.
To get a general estimate of the muscle strength requirements of the biceps, you need to divide the moment of the resistance arm by the length of the muscle arm.
This means that you multiply the resistance (60 pounds) by the resistance arm (say 15 inches from the elbow to the dumbbell) and divide the result by the muscle arm (say 1 inch from the elbow to the base of the biceps).
This would be 900 inch-pounds - a measure of torque. In this example, the biceps must produce 900 inch-pounds of force.
What happens if the strength athlete's biceps tendon attaches 2 inches from the fulcrum? Now divide by 2 instead of 1, which means that the biceps now only need to produce 450 inch-pounds of force to hold the dumbbell at a 90 degree elbow angle.
This shows how beneficial tendon attachment points can be for external force production - two strength athletes could have the same strength in their biceps, with one of them being able to move twice the amount of weight due to their better leverage ratios.
Also, the lengths and proportions of the torso, arm, femur and humerus all play an important role in force production. Obviously, the sample size of professional powerlifters and professional bodybuilders will be skewed. There is simply more money to be made in bodybuilding.
But that alone doesn't explain why bodybuilders are more muscular than powerlifters. And it's important to note an interesting observation - when powerlifters start training like bodybuilders, they almost always build more muscle!
It's not the chemical support
Sure, professional bodybuilders use large amounts of performance-enhancing compounds, but it's not much different for powerlifters. Perhaps bodybuilders use higher dosages and a wider range of compounds, but many claim to use moderate dosages and stick to the basics, so it's not known if this really matters.
Let's compare the bodies of natural bodybuilders with those of natural powerlifters. In this case, the result is quite clear. WNBF bodybuilders make WNPF powerlifters look puny from a hypertrophy standpoint.
10 reasons that bodybuilding makes you more muscular
Bodybuilders are masters of building muscle. Although everyone responds quickly to different exercises, weights, variations in volume, training frequencies, intensities, variations in training density and variations in training duration, there are certain rules that apply to bodybuilding.
If your goal is to maximize your muscle development, then you would be a fool to ignore these rules. Even though mechanical tension plays the most important role in stimulating hypertrophy, here are some candidates that could explain the superior musculature of bodybuilders compared to powerlifters.
1. higher repetitions and chasing the pump
Powerlifters generally train in a low repetition range (1 to 5 reps), while bodybuilders tend to favor a moderate repetition range (6 to 12 reps). The adaptations associated with these repetition ranges may explain at least part of the hypertrophy differences between these two classes of athletes.
Performing an exercise at the higher repetition range would theoretically result in greater hypertrophy of Type I muscle fibers. As previously mentioned, Type I muscle fibers are endurance oriented and thus respond best to prolonged time under tension.
The low repetition training used by powerlifters simply does not allow sufficient time under tension for significant development of these fibers.
The pump serves a purpose
Although the pump is often seen as a short-term training effect, it can result in better muscle development. Studies show that cellular swelling can cause both increased synthesis of protein and reduced protein breakdown.
It is hypothesized that an increase in water in the muscle cell - consistent with the mechanism associated with the pump - is perceived as a threat to the integrity of the cell. In response, the cell initiates a signaling cascade that ultimately causes the muscle to grow to protect its structures.
In addition to this, greater occlusion and hypoxia can be associated with higher repetition pump-style training, which can induce growth through increased production of growth factors and possibly fusion of muscle cells with satellite cells.
Chasing the pump with moderate repetitions promotes sarcoplasmic hypertrophy - an increase in non-contractile elements in the muscle cells. In addition to manifesting in an increase in muscle size, it may also promote an additional increase in contractile hypertrophy.
Glycogen is hydrophilic, which means that it binds water. Each gram of glycogen draws three grams of water into the muscle cell. This increased hydration could therefore lead to greater myofibrillar growth via the aforementioned cell swelling mechanism, whereby more muscle glycogen could promote increased hypertrophy gains in two ways.
2. time under tension
It's also important to consider the higher levels of total load (weight * reps) and longer time under tension in bodybuilders compared to powerlifters.
Let's say a bodybuilder performs a bench press workout consisting of 225 x 12, 275 x 10, 315 x 8, and 335 x 6, while a powerlifter performs: 315 x 5, 365 x 3, 405 x 1, and 415 x 1. In this scenario, the bodybuilder moved a total load of 9,980 pounds, while the powerlifter moved 3,490 pounds.
Assuming that a repetition lasts 2 seconds, the bodybuilder accumulated 72 seconds of time under tension, compared to only 20 seconds for the powerlifter, which is a significant difference!
3. high repetition numbers until muscle failure
High repetitions to muscle failure are better for myofibrillar, sarcoplasmic and mixed protein synthesis than low repetitions to muscle failure.
It is also interesting to note that further research is needed as acute protein synthesis does not necessarily correlate with greater hypertrophy over time and previous studies have found that very high repetition programs are suboptimal for increased muscle growth.
More repetitions also equate to more eccentric contractions, which have been shown to cause more muscle damage. There is a lot of scientific data to suggest that muscle damage is associated with increased muscle growth, although the research results in this area are inconclusive.
4 Muscle isolation and machines
Bodybuilders use a lot of isolation exercises in their training. This is in direct contrast to powerlifters who stick to a few basic multi-joint exercises.
Large muscles such as the quadriceps, pectorals, shoulders and latissimus are made up of many thousands of thread-like muscle fibers that have different attachment points. These fibers are sometimes subdivided or controlled by different nerves.
This means that muscles are not always trained evenly over their entire length during an exercise. A certain exercise can train an area closer to one or the other attachment point of the muscle more intensely. Only by training a muscle from different angles with a series of different exercises can you fully stimulate all of these fibers and maximize their development.
Using machine-based training, which reduces the involvement of the stabilizing muscle fibers and allows you to target different aspects of a muscle, can further maximize muscle development.
Machines can also be beneficial as they allow for more favorable strength curves and can help maintain constant tension on the trained muscle through the use of different technologies. Constant tension can lead to stronger mechanical signaling and a better pump, which can support muscle growth.
5. the way the exercise is performed
Bodybuilders have been saying for years that it's not just the amount of resistance used, but also the way an exercise is performed that matters.
EMG experiments have shown that bodybuilding-style bench presses with 100 kilos (wide grip, elbows out, bar lowered towards the middle chest) activated more fibers of the pectoralis major (large chest muscle) than powerlifting-style bench presses (tighter grip, elbows closer to the body, weight lowered towards the lower chest) with the same weight.
Frequently, maximal attempts at squats and deadlifts showed weaker EMG activation than submaximal repetitions. This is because the body instinctively twists and bends to move heavy weights and these postural changes often involve support from passive structures such as ligaments.
For example, a powerlifter may excessively arch their upper back to utilize their ligament structures, which increase passive support while reducing active muscle demands.
Professional bodybuilders typically control the weight and use a steady tempo, while many powerlifters allow some deflection of the movement during maximal attempts. In addition, many bodybuilders avoid an end position with hyperextended limbs to maintain constant tension on the target muscle.
For example, let's say a bodybuilder performs dumbbell incline bench presses. He will probably only move the weight 5/6 of the way up and then reverse the direction of movement and lower the weight again. During flying movements, a bodybuilder will only move the dumbbells 2/3 of the way up. This will maintain tension on the pecs to promote a better pump.
6. the mind-muscle connection
Bodybuilders are always preaching the importance of feeling the muscle working and scientific research has shown that activation training can increase relative EMG activity during workouts.
For example, a two-month focus on gluteus activation resulted in a trainee being able to use more gluteus muscles during a multi-joint exercise such as squats or lunges, while reducing the involvement of synergistic muscles such as the leg flexors.
Bodybuilders intentionally target a target muscle and manipulate their form of exercise execution to maximize tension on that muscle.
On the other hand, all powerlifters care about is moving maximum weights. Therefore, they try to use as many muscles as possible to generate maximum force.
During the bench press, for example, a powerlifter tries to maximize the pressure from the legs and the activation of the pectorals, latissimus, anterior shoulder muscles and triceps to move the heaviest weight possible. For a powerlifter, optimal mechanics are more important than actual muscle activation.
While the powerlifting method is excellent for full body stimulation, the bodybuilding method maximizes a specific area and can induce more muscle damage and a stronger pump while reducing CNS overload.
7 Instinctive training and biofeedback
Bodybuilders incorporate as much variety as possible into their training sessions and do not have a set plan when they enter the gym.
Many have a general idea of what they want to achieve, but typically leave room for spontaneity based on biofeedback. This variety and loose training structure could theoretically lead to greater muscle growth over time due to a reduced likelihood of injury.
The exerciser who can go to the gym week after week for many years and perform productive, pain-free workouts will accumulate more lean muscle mass than an exerciser who is always sore, training through pain and suffering from strains and muscle fiber tears.
Since absolute strength is the most important thing to a powerlifter, a powerlifter will often ignore any biofeedback that tells them to back off a bit. For example, it could be that the lower back doesn't feel good on deadlift day. The powerlifter will usually stick to their plan and train through any pain, whereas the bodybuilder will train around the pain.
Since the bodybuilder is concerned with training a muscle and not improving performance on specific exercises, they are more likely to listen to their body's warning signals and find an exercise that doesn't set off alarm bells.
Powerlifters are naturally obsessed with maximizing strength on the big three exercises, while bodybuilders see strength as a means to an end for building muscle, so they don't care as much about how much weight they can max on the bench press, squat and deadlift.
8. intensification methods
Occasionally, bodybuilders will use intensification methods such as training to muscle failure, negative reps, descending sets, rest-pause, burnouts, supersets, triple sets and quadruple sets to continue a set to the limit.
When used sparingly, these methods can send additional hypertrophy-stimulating signals that could theoretically lead to greater muscle growth over time. However, these methods should be properly periodized to avoid overtraining.
9. shorter rests between sets
Bodybuilders generally use fairly short rest intervals between sets - in the range of one or two minutes on average - while powerlifters often rest up to five minutes between heavy sets. Shorter rest intervals are associated with an increased anabolic response - particularly in terms of testosterone and growth hormone.
Although it has not yet been conclusively determined whether the acute hormonal effects of resistance training contribute to greater muscle growth, several studies have reported a significant correlation with the amount of growth in type I and type II muscle fibers.
In any case, shorter rest intervals will increase training density, increase pumps and improve the hormonal environment. The improved anabolic environment should promote an improved environment for increased protein synthesis and possibly also increased satellite cell activity, although the results of studies in this area are inconclusive.
10. training splits
Bodybuilders tend to arrange their training sessions to target one or two muscle groups with multiple sets of different exercises. Bodybuilders will then wait several days and often up to a week before training the same group again.
Scientific research shows that it takes up to 7 days for a muscle to fully recover from performing multiple sets and there is evidence that training too frequently can result in reduced hypertrophy.
However, further research needs to be done considering that bodybuilders who are trying to improve the appearance of a particular muscle group or compensate for a weak point in their body development usually increase the training frequency up to two or three times a week with great success.
The power bodybuilder
Can we train for powerlifting and bodybuilding at the same time and achieve a win-win situation? In other words, can we maximize strength and mass by doing a little bit of both?
The authors of this article believe that this is not possible.
As you have seen, the signals sent to muscles are very specific and if you mix these signals then you are sending conflicting messages that will affect your body's responses. Johnnie Jackson was successful as a powerlifter and bodybuilder, but to maximize his leg development, he trains like a bodybuilder.
This in no way implies that you should not periodize your training by incorporating periods of heavier training with lower repetitions into your workout - on the contrary, this is a very beneficial strategy.
For example, let's assume that you can perform 3 sets of deadlifts of 8 reps at 405 pounds and that your 1RM weight for deadlifts is 515 pounds. Let's say you spend five weeks doing heavy sets of 3 reps or less and increase your 1RM weight to 585 pounds.
After that, you go back to doing 3 sets of 8 reps, but you'll find that you're now able to do those 3 sets of 8 reps at 425 pounds. This will definitely help your muscle hypertrophy as you can generate more muscle tension within the same repetition range.
However, you shouldn't get too obsessed with your powerlifting max weights and try to incorporate too many powerlifting techniques into your hypertrophy training if your primary goal is to build muscle mass.
It seems pretty clear that it's important to never stray too far from proven bodybuilding principles if your goal is to maximize your muscle development.
By Bret Contreras, Brad Schoenfeld
Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/why-bodybuilders-are-more-jacked-than-powerlifters
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