Will Big Muscles Make Me Slow?

Hello everybody, this is Jacob Hiller with The Jump Manual. Yesterday we posted a video called ‘Training for Muscle Size vs. Training for Muscle Strength.’ We talked about the differences in training and how that affects the size of your muscles and which one is going to be better for training your strength and which one is going to actually just make you bigger; which is fine too if that’s what you want. So, we had several questions and one of them I thought would be the best to address first, and that question was: Does big muscles mean that I’m going to be slower? So, if I train for big muscles, will that necessarily make me slower? Really, it’s kind of a tricky question because we discuss that there’s two ways to make your muscles a little bigger. One way is to increase the actual fiber size of the muscle and that will actually make your muscle bigger, but it will also make it much more functional; so the increases in size that happen to your muscle will actually make it much stronger, much faster, etc. However, we also talked about another type of training that makes extreme increases in muscle size and that’s by training the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy and that will increase your muscle size but won’t necessarily increase your speed. So, the answer really is if that size comes from sarcomeric hypertrophy and functional muscle size then the increase in size will actually make your muscle much stronger. So, that it’s a necessary evil, that small increase in size, it’s kind of a necessary evil if you will, to make you much stronger much faster much more explosive.
However, if you would like to gain a little more size that’s nonfunctional, as long as it’s not overboard, the difference in weight that it gives you in relative strength so to speak, so yeah, it will make you a little heavier and yeah that may make you a little bit… You now have more weight to overcome because the whole reason you want to be strong is because you need to overcome the resistance of your own body weight. So if that is hindering your ability to overcome the resistance of your own body weight which it will be if your gaining 50, 60 even maybe 10 20 30 40 lbs of additional nonfunctional muscle size then yeah it might make you slower, it might require that you have additional strength. So, now here’s where things get interesting because so you need to have that muscle strength and there’s really two ways in which additional size could slow you down the one is as we said if you gain too much nonfunctional muscle mass but the other thing to think about here is if you already have enough strength to overcome your own body weight. For example with these keys right here my arm is sufficiently strong to overcome this body weight so the only thing that is stopping me from throwing these keys high into the air is the rate at which I can develop that force. It’s not the limit strength of my arm, okay so really any additional strength to my arm is irrelevant to the real question at hand here and that’s my ability to create that force quickly. So, the equation begins to change, and this won’t affect most people because most people aren’t nearly this strong but the equation does begin to change when you are so strong that any additional muscle size becomes superfluous. So, any additional muscle size whether it be from sacromeric or sarcoplasmic hypertrophy so really when you have enough strength you don’t really need any additional muscle size period. So, then it becomes to a point where that additional size even if it’s functional becomes superfluous, and could be make your slower or less explosive etc. However, most of you are never ever going to deal with that because I have yet to meet someone who is really so strong that they don’t need to develop any more strength.
And let me just throw one more twist into this little video and that is if you have excess amounts of power excessive amounts of strength then you can actually afford to develop a little extra superfluous muscle size. So, if you have additional strength go ahead and put on that extra and it won’t affect you because you have already dominated the relative strength equation. I know this is a little bit confusing, I get a little wordy and this is a little bit scientific so if you do have questions about it post them below. If this is just a bunch of me talking and you don’t quite understand any of it then maybe I need to re-post this. But I think if you watch the first video and then if you watch this one it should make sense. If you haven’t downloaded it already go ahead and download the instant vertical jump inches it’s called The How to Jump Higher in 45 min Workbook and its basically step by step method to add 2-6 inches to your vertical in the next 45 mins.
Just so you know right now the location is Rome and uh it’s beautiful here I love it. So, we’re leaving in a couple of weeks and I think we are going to be going back to the states for a little bit and hopefully I’ll be able to resume a little bit of my training in Guana I lost 10 lbs. I don’t know how much I lost a lot of pounds. I lost functional and nonfunctional muscle mass which I cherish both. So, looking forward to having some decent time to work out for myself again, even if it’s for only a couple of months. So, if you guys have questions let me know hope you enjoy this, bye bye.