To live a long, healthy life, age well, and enjoy the years you spend on earth, you need strength. This is the ability of your muscles to generate enough force for full functionality. Strength training is the key to building muscle strength, preserving muscle mass, and staying fit and functional.
What you might not realize is that there are different types of strength. According to the American Council on Exercise (ACE), there are seven main types of strength. Let’s look at each one and how they differ.
Strength Endurance
Humans can maintain muscle contraction for long periods. This is vital for activities like walking and running where you are moving from one place to another in a controlled manner. That’s where strength endurance comes in. Strength endurance is the ability of muscles to produce force repeatedly over time without total failure.
There are two types of strength-endurance training: muscular and cardiovascular. The ability to perform repeated contractions against resistance for an extended period is called muscular strength endurance. For example, repeated repetitions with dumbbells or a barbell until your muscles fatigue are examples of muscular strength endurance. The ability to exercise continuously at a moderate intensity is cardiovascular strength-endurance training. Jogging for long distances is an example.
The human body can maintain muscle contractions for prolonged periods of time. This is vital for activities such as walking and running where you are moving from one place to another in a controlled manner. That’s where strength endurance comes in. Strength endurance is the ability of muscles to exert force repeatedly over time, without reaching total failure.
How can you build this type of strength? Do a variety of single- and multi-joint exercises using a resistance between 40% and 60% of your one-repetition max. Using this approach, you should be able to do between 10 and 15 repetitions before muscle fatigue sets in. Because you’re doing a higher number of repetitions, your muscles become more fatigue resistance, and endurance increases.
Explosive Strength
Explosive strength is the ability to exert maximum muscular contraction instantly in an explosive burst of movements. The goal is to move an object as fast as possible or to move your own body with maximum speed. Explosive strength is a combination of strength, speed, and power. Various athletic activities like sprinting, football, basketball, volleyball, and weightlifting use explosive strength.
Performing an exercise at a faster pace often will use more explosive strength than performing the same exercise slowly. For example, pushing a heavy weight up in a bench press quickly uses more explosive strength than pushing it up slowly. This is because your nervous system must stimulate more muscle fibers to contract rapidly to move the weight faster.
Athletes often use exercises that train explosive strength because they’re considered transferable to improved performance on the field. These movements include plyometrics, which are body-weight exercises that involve rapid stretching and contraction of muscles. For example:
- Plyometric pushups
- Plyometric squats
- Depth jumps
You could lift weights using a fast tempo or include a dynamic strength exercise like kettlebell swings in your routine.
Agile Strength
Agile strength is the capacity to generate muscle force in multiple planes. If you think about it, most strength training exercises, such as squats and biceps curls, occur in one plane. However, everyday tasks like carrying heavy objects in your hands require you to move the object through more than one plane of motion. Agile strength enhances that ability.
How do you train for agile strength? The American Council on Exercise suggests performing exercises that involve moving heavy objects through multiple planes. Examples are medicine ball exercises, lateral lunge (multiplanar lunge), rotational medicine ball throw (against a wall, partner, or on the floor), or working with cables. Traditional strength training with barbells and dumbbells is not as effective for building agile strength.
Maximal Strength
Maximal strength is the greatest amount of force you can generate with a single muscle contraction. An example is the amount of weight you can lift during a one-rep max test. A program geared toward maximal strength would involve lifting heavy weights with few repetitions and long rest periods of two to five minutes between sets. The long rest period gives your muscles a chance to recover so they can generate maximal strength again.
How do you train to improve maximal strength? Lift at 90% to 100% of your one-repetition max, low repetitions, and long rest periods between sets. This is the best approach to building maximal strength.
Relative Strength
Relative strength is how strong you are relative to your body size, whereas absolute strength is your ability to generate force irrespective of your body size. For example, a person who weighs 150 pounds and can lift 200 pounds has a higher relative strength than someone who weighs 170 pounds and can lift a 200-pound weight.
To train in a way that maximizes relative strength, use a resistance of between 80% and 90% of your one-repetition max, allowing you to complete between three and five repetitions before your muscles become thoroughly fatigued. By increasing tendon stiffness and neurological efficiency, you can boost your relative strength.
Speed Strength
Speed strength refers to the ability to exert maximum force in the shortest period of time. An example would be sprinting 100 meters in 10 seconds versus doing it in 15 seconds, swinging a tennis racket, or throwing a baseball.
To improve speed strength, focus on compound movements using free weights or doing bodyweight exercises without added resistance. Speed strength is designed to improve athletic performance in certain sports.
Starting Strength
Starting strength is the amount of force that a muscle or group of muscles can produce at the beginning of a lift. You can also think of it as the force you must generate to move from a stationary position.
Imagine you are performing a barbell bench press exercise. The barbell is on your chest, and you have not yet begun to push it up. At this point in time, before you begin to push up on the barbell, you are using starting strength.
This type of muscular strength is known as “isometric” muscular contraction because your muscles are contracting but not moving (or changing length). Starting or isometric muscular strength is especially important for athletes who play sports such as football or rugby where there is a lot of pushing off from stationary positions.
The way to build starting strength is to do a variety of single- and multi-joint exercises using varying amounts of resistance with the purpose of boosting force generation in the initial part of the exercise.
The Bottom Line
Now you know the seven types of strength and how to train to build them. Each type of strength has different benefits and is targeted toward a different goal and can be important for your workouts.
References:
- “Different Types of Strength | 7 Types and Their Benefits ….” 29 Jun. 2015, acefitness.org/education-and-resources/professional/expert-articles/5495/7-different-types-of-strength-and-their-benefits/.
- “Developing Relative Strength – Clean Health.” cleanhealth.edu.au/blog/developing-relative-strength/.
- Tramel W, Lockie RG, Lindsay KG, Dawes JJ. Associations between Absolute and Relative Lower Body Strength to Measures of Power and Change of Direction Speed in Division II Female Volleyball Players. Sports. 2019;7(7):160. doi:10.3390/sports7070160.
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