Maggie's Farm

You could add 6 pounds of muscle, but you choose not to. That's fine, it's your choice. But don't go around saying things like it's physically impossible for you do to so.

From the first article:
"Investigators found that lifting heavier weights was the best way to gain strength."

From the second article:
"Lifting heavier builds more strength..."

Also in the second article:



That's a stupid program for trying to gain strength. The only decent exercise is the bench. No compound exercises like squat or deadlift, and two machine exercises. That's not how you develop strength, pretty much ignores the entire posterior chain. It's not mentioned if they increased the weight over the 12-week program, but I suspect not. How are you supposed to get stronger if you keep lifting the same weight? And how much time was spent on recovery between all those "heavy" sets taken to failure? You can't gain strength if you don't recover from the effort.

The idea that lifting light weights can make you as strong as if you lifted heavy weights makes absolutely zero sense. Strength is the ability of your muscles to exert force on an outside resistance. Also, your muscles adapt to the stress you apply to them. If you only expose them to 100 pounds on the bench, no matter how many reps you perform, you are not going to be able to bench 315. Your muscles simply have not adapted to that kind of stress because they have never been exposed to that stress. If that actually worked, every bro in the gym would be benching three plates.

And have you ever seen a strong guy (400+ lb squat, 500+ lb deadlift) who was small? No, of course not, because strength and size go together.

Sorry, articles like this just set me off. :-)