Is the Correlation Between Hypertrophy and Strength Gains Stronger Than We Realized?

This is going to be a fairly technical article, discussing a recent(ish) study by Marques and colleagues. If this is your first time giving much thought to the subject, you may enjoy reading some of those prior articles: Size vs. Strength: How Important is Muscle Growth For Strength Gains? Exercise-Induced Myofibrillar Hypertrophy is a Contributory Cause of Gains in Muscle Strength Does Muscle Growth Increase Your Potential for Strength Gains? Strength Data Don’t Tell You Much About Hypertrophy More Training, More Gaining: Everything You Need to Know About Training Volume. For our purposes here, the most important thing to note is that, until recently, research investigating the relationship between hypertrophy and strength gains painted a pretty consistent picture. In studies on untrained subjects, we see a pretty weak relationship between hypertrophy and strength gains. However, as training status increases, this relationship gets progressively stronger. Research on highly trained lifters, like the study by Marques and colleagues, suggests that the correlation between hypertrophy and strength gains is stronger than previously thought. The study proposes that prior research on this topic may have underestimated the strength of the relationship between hypertrophy and strength gains by using suboptimal statistical methods. This finding challenges our previous understanding of the relationship between hypertrophy and strength gains, and highlights the importance of using sensitive statistical methods to capture within-participant changes over time. The researchers found that the correlation between hypertrophy and strength gains was stronger in well-trained subjects than in untrained subjects, and that the relationship between hypertrophy and strength gains was more pronounced in studies that used within-participant associations. This study serves as a reminder that the relationship between hypertrophy and strength gains is complex and influenced by a variety of factors, including training status and statistical methods.