Muscle for Life

Spend enough time in the gym and you’ll inevitably notice that the biggest guys and gals are also often the strongest. Sure, some people are stronger than they look, but for the most part, strength and size seem to be directly correlated. The bigger someone is, the bigger his weights tend to be. This begs a question, then: Is muscle growth simply a byproduct of strength? If you just focus on getting stronger and stronger, will your muscles just get bigger and bigger? Advocates of strength training have been saying this for decades, but their detractors say that muscle growth isn’t that simple. They point to stringbeans that can push, pull, and squat tremendous amounts of weight, and to research that appears to demonstrate that heavy weightlifting–the bread and butter of all strength programs–simply isn’t necessary for getting big muscles. Instead, they counter, you can focus on other training variables, such as volume, time under tension, metabolic fatigue, and others, and achieve the same results. Who’s righ