The Importance of Strength (Part II)

This is a two-part article that first looks at the science and mechanics behind the terms 'Strength' and 'Fitness', and then explains a very important phenomenon, and that is why Strength is such an important attribute in everyone's lives.
If you haven't already read it, please read Part I of this article first in order to understand all the concepts we are talking about below.

So far we have just discussed the science and meaning of Strength, but we haven't really discussed why it is so important, or why it is the most important of all the five attributes of Fitness, which is the primary topic of the article. Let's delve into that now.

Greater Strength provides the following benefits -

1) It is better to be strong than weak.
"The best thing I can do for an athlete, is to make him strong. Strength is king, and you're fucking little-girl weak." - Coach Rob Shaul.
Let's face it, being weak is no matter of pride, nor did it ever help anyone. Who doesn't want to be strong and capable? To quote a character from the movie, Enter the Dragon, "It is strength that makes all other values possible. Nothing survives without it. Who knows what delicate wonders have died out of the world for want of strength to survive? Civilization's highest ideas - justice - could not exist without strong men to enforce it."
Besides, if you are a man, when your kids call you 'the strongest daddy in the world', you certainly wanna live up to it, don't you? You wouldn't wanna disappoint that brightly shining light in the eyes of your little ones, would you?

2) Retain the body's structure and function.
The primary function of the human body is locomotion. Human bodies were designed to move. Therefore, it is very important to train that system of the body that facilitates movement, which is the musclo-skeletal system. Therefore, muscular strength is very crucial in retaining the body's structure and function. Else our bones will get worn out too quickly, and in the absence of a well-developed set of locomotion facilitators, i.e. strong muscles, your body's primary faculty of locomotion will also suffer and degenerate. If it's not strong, it's weak. And a weak system does not function very well.

3) Better able to perform day to day activities with less effort.
When your muscles are able to produce a greater amount of force, performing day to day activities becomes much easier. This is because it requires far less effort on your part to produce smaller forces when interacting with your environment when your muscles are capable of producing much larger maximal magnitude of forces. Suddenly, tasks like carrying heavy grocery bags, climbing a set of stairs, helping that hot chick next door move her furniture into her new apartment, or carrying your kids around or even playing with them, or playing a sport at the age of 40 without worrying about creaking joints don't seem like highly-dreaded chores any more.

4) Better Joint Health.
Stronger muscles surrounding any joint promote better joint health. A weak muscle surrounding a joint forces the joint to perform the task of the muscle, since the muscle is incapable of doing the job itself. This forces a compensatory action on the joint which is not made for that kind of work, which leads to degeneration of the joint over time.
Also, if you have an existing injury, weakness, or pathology in the joint itself, if the surrounding muscles are also weak, it leads to degeneration of the entire body part, and also forces other joints and muscles surrounding this particular joint to compensate for the action of this joint, creating biomechanical imbalances. However, when you strengthen the muscles surrounding this weak joint, they help in holding that joint firmly in place, and serve to counter-act the debilitating condition of the joint. In fact, strengthening the muscles around a weakened or injured joint (in case of cartilage or ligament pathologies, or bone fractures) is something that is always recommended even by physical therapists, for the same reason.

5) Prevents Overuse or Impact-Related Injury.
Muscles not only produce force, but also resist and absorb force. Stronger muscles are better able to withstand higher forces placed upon them. A stronger muscle is therefore less prone to muscle-pulls and other related pathologies resulting from any high-impact movement.
This is a very important concept that people need to understand, given the kind of activities they engage in the name of Fitness. When you pound yourself to the ground doing Crossfit, or any other muscle-endurance exercise, or anything that exhausts you, a stronger muscle will withstand that repeated damage to your bones, joints, and muscles, much more than a weaker muscle will. In the absence of strength this just opens you up to injuries - both outright injuries arising from accidents (which happen because of fatigue or weakened muscles unable to withstand forces and pressure over time); and joint-overuse injuries that occur from repeatedly pounding your joints through high-impact or high-force activities.

6) Promotes Better Posture.
Stronger muscles correct biomechanical deficiencies, and improve posture. Remember when your gym teacher in school used to say, "fix that slouch, keep your back erect, stand up straight!"? Easier said than done, because it isn't really feasible to straighten your back when you have weak muscles that want to collapse, or over-developed imbalanced muscles that want to pull on the joint from the wrong side. Who wouldn't want to fix their slouch and walk proud and erect, and enjoy the confidence and other benefits that come with taking the world in their stride?

7) Gets rid of most body-aches.
Weaker muscles, and biomechanical deficiencies result in body-aches and creaking joints that develop over time. Not just that, but a weak muscle is more prone to ache than a strong muscle. Strength serves to alleviate a lot of symptoms of pain that creep up in the body's musculo-skeletal system over time.

8) Better control.
The stronger your muscles, the more you can fine-tune your skeletal movements, and exert more control over your movements, especially in tasks that require precision.
For instance, I have been driving cars for over 15 years. People tell me I have 'insane control' over the vehicle when I drive. From personal experience, I have noted that my driving skills and control over steering improved ten-fold after I got stronger ever since I started weight training 8 years ago. Because I can grab the wheel hard and firm, I can make finer adjustments to the wheel with much more ease, which makes for a far smoother driving experience. And making sharp and abrupt 180 degree (or more) turns with the steering wheel do not feel too strenuous on the muscles either, making navigating through tight traffic very easy. When negotiating sharp turns even at higher speeds, my vehicle does not slip and slide, because I do not allow the greater torque produced by the car's wheels when turning at a faster speed to be transmitted to the steering wheel which I hold firmly in place with a strong grip, turned to the exact degree I want the car to turn toward, without letting it deviate even by a fraction of a degree. And all of this precision-control is possible solely because of superior strength.

9) Better quality of life.
Having a stronger body therefore leads to better overall quality of life precisely because of all the other attributes mentioned above.

10) Strength gives a great amount of athletic capability and sporting performance.
"Strength means how much you can lift once, and it's the backbone of every sport on Earth, from the crouch-holding power of a skier to the one-finger pull-up of a climber." - Daniel Duane
Strength is the most important component of Fitness, and also of Athletic ability. A stronger athlete is ALWAYS a better athlete. When pitting two athletes of equal skill and other physical attributes against each other, it is always the stronger athlete that will prevail. This is because strong means greater force production. Greater force production means the athlete can run faster, jump higher, throw longer, apply more force when rowing a canoe, swing a bat harder, kick a ball further, punch and kick harder (and faster), subdue a weaker opponent in wrestling, etc, all of which contribute to improved and superior athletic performance.
(I'm only listing this here last, because the article is meant to show to the general public that Strength is important for everyone, and not just for those looking to improve sporting and athletic performance. Strength is THE MOST important attribute of Fitness or Athletic Training, and without Strength, the other attributes mean nothing.)

Strength is best built by a system of training we call Strength Training. Strength Training is a very simple and powerful concept - we first select a few basic compound, multi-joint exercises which mimic the four basic body motions (upper and lower body push and pull), which can be performed by an implement called the Barbell (which is why it is also called Barbell Training). These are usually the Squat, Deadlift, and some form of upper body pressing movement (Bench Presses, Overhead Presses, Dips), and some form of upper body pulling movement (Rows, Pull-ups), which cover a broad range of the body's common activities, and also train the vast majority of muscles in the body in an efficient manner. We then perform these exercises for a smaller number of repetitions (usually between 1 to 5), and train them thrice a week. Now the key to increasing Strength, as we discussed during the last paragraphs of Part I of this article, is to force the body to adapt to an increasing magnitude of load that provides resistance to the muscles. Which means we try to increase the amount of resistance/weight in the exercises mentioned above by a little bit on a periodic basis. (Usually this is a 5 lb increment every session for each exercise for most novices to Strength Training, although this becomes a very complex topic in itself once you reach advanced stages of training.)

"Muscle withers away if you're not constantly building it, and muscle withers faster as a man ages. Fading muscle mass gives way to fat gain, stiff joints, stumbling-old-man balance, and a serious drop-off in weekend fun, not to mention self-esteem. But if you fight back right, it can all go the other way. And this means getting strong. The bottom line is that not only can lifting weights do as much for your heart health as cardio workouts, but it also provides you with a lean-muscle coat of armor against life's inevitable blows - the way it did for my own father, who broke his back in a climbing accident at age 69, spent months in bed, and recovered strong only because he'd been lifting for 35 years." - Daniel Duane

This system of Strength Training has been scientifically established to be the best and most efficient way of building Strength. And this system of training has also been shown to have a lot of benefits apart from the obvious one of building Strength and conferring the benefits that superior strength in-turn offers.

1) Builds Muscle.
In addition to making one strong, Strength Training also builds muscle very effectively, in fact, more effectively than professional Bodybuilding based methods. This is because Strength Training promotes true myofibrillar hypertrophy instead of the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy that is triggered by the professional bodybuilding way of attacking 'each muscle in the body with tons of isolation exercises with many sets and higher rep-ranges'. To understand myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, however, you will have to search for the meaning of these terms online, as it is beyond the scope of this article to explain these concepts. Strength Training not only builds the muscles targeted by the exercise, but also triggers muscle gains all over the body, because heavy lifting (especially Squats and Deadlifts) releases huge amounts of Testosterone and Human Growth Hormone into the body, more than any other activity.

2) Improves Metabolism and Body Composition, Helps Lose Fat.
The rate at which the human body burns calories for all the processes of life while the musculo-skeletal system is at relative rest, as in when we sleep or sit or even simply stand stationary in one spot, is known as the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). When we talk about the 'body's metabolism', this BMR is what we are referring to. Fat gain in the body always happens when the Basal Metabolic Rate drops. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue contributing a lot to the caloric expenditure of a body at physical rest. That is why if people are fat, or prone to gaining fatty weight easily, that has a lot to do with the fact that they have very little muscle in their bodies to keep the BMR elevated. Age related loss of muscle also causes the BMR to drop, thus making the body more prone to getting fat. Thus the belly, or the hips and thighs that expand with age, also happen due to the related loss of muscle. We can prevent this and be as lean at 40 as we were at 18, only if we engage in muscle building activity, which happens through Strength Training.
Not just this, but intense strength training has another immediate effect on the BMR for which we do not have to wait for the increase in muscle to happen. Excess Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC) is way higher post intense Strength Training than it is post low intensity long duration Cardiovascular Aerobic workouts (like long duration/distance jogging or cycling or swimming). Oxygen consumption is a tangible marker of the rate of metabolism. Thus in simpler words, Strength Training spikes the metabolic rate a lot in the immediate aftermath of a workout. This spike in BMR does not happen post Cardio Aerobic workouts.
The take home message here is that to lose fat you have to first build muscle. The quantum of muscle in the body is largely inversely proportional to the quantum of fat. So building muscle hugely alters your metabolism and body composition for the better. And again, as demonstrated in point #1 above, this building of muscle, or myofibrillar hypertrophy, best happens through Strength Training.

3) Improves Bone Density.
Strength Training plays a great role in preventing the degeneration of muscle and bone that comes with age. It does this not just by improving the strength of the muscles, but heavy Strength Training has also shown to have a profound impact on improving bone density, even among older individuals, thereby preventing the onset of degenerative bone diseases like osteopenia and osteoporosis that come with age. If you've been training with heavy weights all your life before you get old, nothing like it. But even if you begin lifting weights in your old age, you do not have to worry, because you can still set the clock back, as studies have proven that beginning Strength Training at any age begins the process of muscle building and increasing bone density, thereby helping you fight back age. You will definitely feel stronger and look younger.

4) Anti-Aging.
Building your body by hypertrophying muscles via intense resistance training and a bodybuilding diet is probably the only real Anti-Aging bullet known to man.
The physical and visible signs of aging are solely characterized by age related degeneration of the musculo-skeletal system. These are specifically called as Sarcopenia, which relates to the loss of skeletal muscle; and Osteopenia, which relates to the beginning of loss of bone density, which if kept unchecked could result in full blown Osteoporosis. If a 50 year old looks like a 30 year old, it's only because at 50 he has retained the muscle he carried when he was 30. To retain muscle through the years you have to build muscle, and age breaks you down. But an abusive and sedentary lifestyle could accelerate sarcopenia and make you look and function like a 50 year old at the age of 30. So to preserve youth, preserve muscle. And to preserve muscle you have to aim to build. Which is only possible through the kind of hypertrophy that comes from Strength Training.

5) Corrects Biomechanical Deficiencies.
A biomechanical deficiency arises when one or more muscle groups in the body are weak and atrophied, and one or more other muscle groups are forced to do the job of the weak ones. Or when one muscle group on one side of the joint has been over-developed whereas the antagonistic muscle group is left under-developed, creating a stronger pull by the over-developed muscle on one side of the joint, leading to muscle-pulls and strains, excessive joint wear-and-tear, and postural problems. For example, this is often seen with most people who have over-developed quadriceps, and weak and inhibited glutes and hamstrings, which in fact happen to the be primary driving force of lower body movement. This leads to many pelvic joint related problems and lower-back issues which are common around the world. (To understand the concept of antagonistic muscle groups, you can read the 'Primer on Anatomy' section of this article.) Biomechanical deficiencies also arise when people do not maintain a good balance of strength in their prime-mover muscles and stabilizer muscles, over-developing either one at the cost of the other, either through excessive isolation exercises and machine exercises; or through excessive 'functional fitness bosu-ball stability' work.
Basically, these joint and biomechanical deficiencies are a matter of compensatory action. Think of it in terms of what usually happens in your office - there are a few lazy, demotivated co-workers, and a few hard-working co-workers. And most of the times the hard-working ones end up doing the work that the lazy ones shun, because at the end of the day, the work can't be left incomplete; somebody has to do it! The same applies inside your body. All of which gets fixed through proper Strength Training.
"Yes, if you squat wrong it fucks things up. If you squat correctly, those same fucked-up things will unfuck themselves." - Mark Rippetoe.

6) Builds Mental Strength.
Most people shy away from heavy lifting because it's physically and mentally hard. That's why doing Squats and Deadlifts will build your mental strength and character like no other exercise.

7) Builds other attributes of fitness as well.
"But I'm an Endurance Athlete, I don't need to train for Strength."
Nothing could be further from the truth. Here's a little secret - not only does Strength Training build the obvious Strength, but it also has a foundation in improving Muscular Endurance as well, whereas Muscular Endurance training cannot improve Strength in-turn. And Strength Training forces adaptations to the Cardio-respiratory system as well. By taking the muscles through a complete range of motion through its exercises, Strength Training also lays the foundation for better Mobility and Flexibility. Strength Training forces such wide-ranging adaptations throughout the body, that it ends up laying the foundations for, and training all the other systems of fitness as well. However, the same does not work in reverse. Doing Endurance Training, or Cardiovascular Training, or Flexibility Training alone does not have any bearing on Strength, nor do they provide the plethora of other benefits also listed above.
For the Endurance athletes wondering why they need Strength as well, as we've explained through this entire article, no one can ever have enough Strength, and a little bit of additional Strength always helps, no matter what sport you are in. Also, as discussed above, Endurance athletes who also have strong muscles will be much more resistant to the incessant pounding their joints receive through repeated execution of the movements of their activity, something a weak muscle will not be able to stand without injury for long.
Additionally, Strength gains have the maximum progression and associated physiological adaptations (structural changes), due to which these gains can be retained for a longer time. Adaptations to flexibility training, or cardiovascular stamina, or muscular endurance training are not as drastic, and hence get de-trained very easily. An elite level strength athlete can easily be 5 times stronger than a beginner, whereas an elite level marathon runner will only cover about twice or thrice the distance a beginner would cover. Percentages of gains with strength cannot be compared to endurance training, flexibility training or cardiovascular training.

We hope that this article has been informative enough, and has convinced you of the importance that the attribute of Strength plays not just in sporting performance, but also from the point of view of general Fitness and well-being, and motivates you to take up serious Strength Training as soon as you can.