Absolute strength vs. relative strength. The classic battle. What are they, and how can we improve them? Find out here.
How do you define strength?
It’s actually harder to define than you might think. In a basic sense, strength is the ability to exert force. But how do you measure it? Most would say strength is measured by how much weight you can lift. That’s a good start. But for how many reps? One, three, five, twenty? What about gymnasts who easily bang out muscle-ups and iron crosses on the rings? Surely, they are strong.
You may be getting the hint that there are many ways to look at strength. In this article, we will focus on absolute and relative strength: what they are, what impacts them, and, most importantly, how we can improve them. Sit back, relax, and enjoy.
What is Absolute Strength?
Absolute strength is an individual’s maximum force capability, regardless of body size or weight. Put another way, it’s the maximum weight a person can lift for one repetition.
When you think of absolute strength, think of the sport of powerlifting. In powerlifting, the winner is the athlete who can lift the most weight for one repetition in the squat, bench press, and deadlift.
It’s funny, but powerlifting really should be called absolute strength lifting. It doesn’t roll off the tongue, but it’s a more accurate description. In fact, the sport of weightlifting (Olympic lifting) should be called powerlifting since it has a higher power component due to the higher movement velocities. But that’s a subject for another time.
Absolute strength tends to favor bigger people. It’s why weight classes exist in sports like MMA, wrestling, and even powerlifting. Without weight classes, the larger athletes would have a significant advantage. It’s also why NFL offensive and defensive linemen typically weigh three hundred pounds or more.
What is Relative Strength?
Relative strength is an individual’s ability to produce force compared to their size. It reflects how much strength a person has relative to their body weight. A strength-to-mass ratio is one way to look at relative strength.
Strength-to-mass ratio directly impacts an athlete’s ability to accelerate their body through space, making it important for any sport that involves sprinting, jumping, or bodyweight movements. It’s also a significant factor in weight-class sports because the strongest athletes will have an advantage if all competitors have the same body weight.
For a real-world example, if two people can bench press 405 pounds, but one weighs 165 pounds and the other weighs 205 pounds, the person who weighs 165 pounds has a higher relative strength.
Unlike absolute strength, relative strength favors smaller athletes. That’s why powerlifting uses a formula, formerly the Wilks Coefficient, now the DOTS formula, to compare athletes’ performances across different weight classes.
The Factors That Impact Absolute and Relative Strength
So, what impacts absolute and relative strength?
Muscle Cross-Sectional Area
All things being equal, the force a muscle can produce is related to its cross-sectional area rather than its volume. For example, if two people have the same upper arm circumference and body fat percentage, their biceps strength potential should be about the same. However, if one was 6ft tall and the other was 5’5, the guy who was 6ft would have bigger arms by volume.
Strength gains do not occur in weight training from growing longer muscles. Muscles grow wider. At the muscle fiber level, increasing the number of fibers side by side and parallel to each other increases strength. This ignores leverages and neurological efficiency, but the cross-section of a muscle is more important than the total size.
The size of your muscles measured by their cross-sectional area directly impacts your absolute strength because larger muscles can produce more force. Think of it like having a bigger engine in a car; a bigger engine can generate more power. However, while larger muscles boost absolute strength, they may not always improve relative strength.
Neural Control
Neural control refers to how efficiently your brain communicates with your muscles to contract. Better neural control means your muscles can generate force more effectively, increasing both absolute and relative strength.
Strength is a skill; like any skill, it improves with practice. When you first start doing an exercise, your body is inefficient. You have more strength in your muscles than you can utilize. In fact, much of the strength gained in the first few weeks of lifting is just the brain learning how to generate more force from the muscles. In essence, this is neural control.
Better neurological efficiency is one reason a smaller person can sometimes outlift someone larger and more muscular.
Body Composition
Body composition is the ratio of muscle to fat in your body. Most people think of it as body fat percentage. From an absolute strength perspective, mass moves mass. If you are lifting heavy weights and gaining muscle, adding some fat along the way won’t negatively impact your absolute strength. It will probably help it.
However, since relative strength measures your strength compared to your body weight, having more muscle and less fat makes you more efficient at generating force for your size. Essentially, if you reduce excess fat while maintaining or increasing muscle mass, you can lift more weight relative to your body weight.
Training for Absolute Strength
Training for absolute strength looks a lot like powerlifting training. Here are the top three things you need to focus on.
- Build Muscle: A bigger muscle has the potential to be a stronger muscle. To improve absolute strength, we want to increase the cross-sectional areas of the muscles involved in the desired activities. For example, the bench press primarily involves the chest, shoulders, and triceps. Any movement that increases muscle development in those muscles can potentially improve absolute strength in the bench press.
- Lift Heavy: Peak session intensity is more impactful than average session intensity. This means that heavy singles and top sets of 2-5 should be your bread and butter to get strong. Plus, specificity matters. If you want to get strong on the squat, bench press, and deadlift, you need to perform those movements a lot. If you want to get strong on other exercises, do those.
- Technique Optimization: To maximize your absolute strength, you must master the movements you want to be strong at. I’m not just speaking about knowing how to perform the exercise. There is bench pressing and then bench pressing to maximize how much weight you can move. Those are two different things. This is where getting a coach can be beneficial. If nothing else, record your lifts and watch them back yourself. How the lift feels is not always how it looks.
Training for Relative Strength
Training for relative strength requires a few little tweaks. Here are three things to focus on.
- Maximize Absolute Strength: Improving absolute strength increases relative strength as long as body weight doesn’t outpace strength gains. Of course, nutrition plays a significant role in keeping your body weight down. However, from a training perspective, we want to focus on strength gains over hypertrophy work. Hammer the 1-5 rep range on the compound lifts.
- Emphasize Bodyweight Exercises: Bodyweight training should be the backbone of training for relative strength. Exercises like pull-ups, push-ups, handstand push-ups, rope climbs, and dips are great for improving relative strength because they require you to move your own body weight.
- Avoid Gaining Unnecessary Muscle: Building muscle is great but is not always necessary. There is a reason why special forces warriors don’t look like bodybuilders. The more you weigh, even if it is mostly muscle, the more you need to carry. Being big and jacked is great until it’s not. You don’t see many bodybuilders on a hiking trail or out mountain biking. Being that big requires a lot of energy to move around. You can rarely be too strong, but you can be too big. Staying lean is also essential, as maintaining a low body fat improves your strength-to-weight ratio.
Is Absolute or Relative Strength More Important for Sports?
Whether absolute or relative strength is more important for sports depends on the specific demands of the sport. Absolute strength is crucial for a football lineman or a strongman competitor, whose goal is to lift the maximum amount of weight, regardless of body size. On the other hand, relative strength is often more important in sports where efficiently moving your own body weight is key, such as gymnastics, rock climbing, or any sport with weight classes like wrestling. In these sports, being strong for your size—having high relative strength—gives you a significant advantage. Generally, relative strength is also more important in sports that require speed, agility, jumping, and body control.
Who is the Strongest?
So, who is the strongest? I have to admit that I’m biased toward relative strength. As a 160-pound guy, I won’t be capable of hitting an all-time world record lift. It’s just not possible. However, I can put up big numbers in terms of relative strength. For example, at 160 pounds, I bench-pressed 425 pounds. That is 2.65 times my body weight. As a reference, if a 300-pound guy bench pressed 2.65 times his body weight, it would be 795 pounds, 13 pounds over Julius Maddox’s 782 world record.
But, in the end, it comes down to your goals. What do you want to accomplish with your training? Strong is strong. Big lifts are impressive regardless of your body weight. That said, being capable of doing crazy calisthenics is super impressive, too.
If you made it this far, thank you!
Before you go, if you want to learn more about training for absolute strength, I wrote an entire book on it. Absolute Strength is a powerlifting book and program designed to get you as strong as possible in 9 weeks. Grab a copy here: https://kylehuntfitness.shop/collections/programs/products/absolute-strength
One last thing: I also have a podcast called Absolute Strength. You can find that anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Author: Kyle Hunt
Email: KyleHuntFitness@gmail.com
Hire Kyle as your coach: http://www.kylehuntfitness.com/services/