Quote: (01-10-2019 02:43 PM)Kieran Wrote:
Leverages play a greater role at certain parts of the range of motion though, it's not a static thing. Take the bench press for example, I'm sure you would agree that the mechanical advantage offered by having favourable leverages and insertion points is at play to a much greater degree at the bottom of the lift and then decreases until there is a much smaller mechanical advantage at the top of the lift towards the lockout. And yet the lifter with better leverages will be left holding far greater poundages at the top of the lift than the lifter with shit leverages - there's one way already that the lifter with better leverage is being exposed to greater tension.
It depends on the lift. True though, perceived effort should get easier or harder throughout the ROM depending on the lift because that's how leverage works.
I don't agree with the theory that favorable leverages man has an inherent muscle building advantage here because (as mentioned above) nobody does partial ROM movements or lockouts to grow muscle, and favorable leverages are always a way to either reduce the tension on the muscle itself or shorten the ROM, or both - and this results in being able to move bigger weight. When you do things like deficit snatch grip deadlifts, the weight can be light but it will feel heavy and you'll grow like a weed.
Favorable leverages for the bench press, for instance, would basically require short forearms (so the angle between forearm and upper arm never goes below 90 degrees) and a chest with big titties to reduce the ROM as much as possible, and even better with a big, gay 'powerlifting arch' in the back. That way you're never that far from lockout lol.
The crux of your argument here rests with the idea that more weight == bigger muscle gain, and while that can be true plenty of people have gotten big as shit on rep ranges that never went below 10.
We're talking about muscle growth here, not strength, and while no doubt strength (in terms of setting powerlifting or oly records) has a lot to do with leverage (if your arms touch your knees, deadlifting is now rack pulling), in terms of building muscle there should be almost no relationship or even a negative relationship with favorable leverages.
Quote: (01-10-2019 02:43 PM)Kieran Wrote:
Regarding muscle belly length, I find it hard to believe that you could honestly believe that there isn't a relationship between the potential thickness of a muscle and it's length, assuming all other factors are the same (fiber composition, etc.). To illustrate this with some arbitrary numbers, for a muscle that is 10cm long to be 5cm thick it needs to be 50% of it's length. For a muscle that is 5cm long to be 5cm thick it needs to be 100% as thick as it's length. Are you really going to claim that somebody with high calves can get them just as big as somebody with low insertions? Come on now so much real world examples of this just open your eyes
And your argument re 90 year olds isn't very good because most 90 year olds I've seen were not very physically capable and most had a hard time even finding the strength to get up out of a chair.
It depends on what you mean by a big calf. One guy might have a calf muscle weighing eight pounds, another three pounds, but if the muscle and tendons themselves run along the y axis then the x-z axis cross section could be identical at their largest point. Since the internal forces run parallel with muscle itself then those element resisting (or contracting against) normal force are perpendicular to it, making the x-z cross section the only relevant one to the matter at hand. That was the point made and no more and I suggest you reread it.
Since tendons themselves signal to the brain that the muscle might tear I'd assume that they're less likely to break than the muscle itself so it could be supposed that the muscle is the weakest link in the chain. Again, I'm no anatomist but this "cross-sectional area" memery has to be clarified at best.
The guy with longer muscle bellies will have a calf with more mass but given that not even the NFL with millions of dollars can predict with any certainty the genetic limit of any of their athletes then the research is still out on whether or not a shorter muscle belly predisposes somebody to weakness, or in any case, less mass.
A skeleton weighs maybe thirty pounds. If you can move a thirty pound dumbbell around with one hand, what does that say about the theory that heavy skeletons require bigger muscles? Maybe it's the other way around here - perhaps frequently strained musculature causes bones to grow in thickness.