Have you ever thought of how some people who look weaker than you can still lift massive weights even after never hitting the gym in their lives?
Well, we bet you’ll see lots of people like that if you look. And that is where the question pops up: when it comes to natural strength vs gym strength, which one is better?
Natural strength is better for sure compared to gym strength as that’s what you’re going to need more in the real world. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t go for bodybuilding and better strength altogether.
How about we tell you the differences between building muscles and strength and at the same time, give you some advice on muscle building and strength training?
What’s the Difference between Building Muscle and Strength?
Muscle building is mostly about giving the muscle a particular shape, whereas strength training is all about boosting up the muscle’s functional ability.
When it comes to improving your muscle mass and becoming a bodybuilder, you need to make sure that you’re making hypertrophy training a part of your everyday life. Needless to say, it requires frequent training sessions with short rest time.
In these sessions, you’ll have to include workouts with compound lifts such as bench press, where the larger muscles need to produce the most force.
But if you’re planning to go into strength training, it comes with a lower training volume where you need to train for fewer days and a short period for resting. And the intensity? It’ll be higher as you’ll have to lift heavier weights and under a lower number of reps.
Natural Strength: Does Weight Training Help?
Natural strength or real-world strength is your natural ability to handle manual labor. But can weight lifting help you improve that?
Well, there’s no way to deny that lifting weights or resistance training comes with a ton of benefits, including both physical and mental. Yes, it does help you gain strength and muscle mass and does a lot more at the same time.
It also burns the calories efficiently, leading you to lower body fat. As a result, the risk of ending up with certain chronic diseases goes down. On the other hand, lifting free weights can improve your mental health too, as it lowers anxiety and stress.
Weight room exercise routine also minimizes the chance of injury as it develops the strength of your muscles and their range of motion. Not only that, but it also makes the mobility of those muscles better along with tendons and ligaments.
Lifted weights allow the reinforcing strength around joints, including hips, knees, and ankles. This way, you’ll have all the additional protection you need against injury over different muscle groups.
Lifting weights comes with another significant benefit: keeping blood pressure in control. Not only that, but heavy lifting also takes down LDL cholesterol and brings improvement over blood circulation as it strengthens your blood vessels and heart.
Is It Possible to Build Muscle without Lifting Any Weight?
Adrianne Oye, the creator at Ufiit.com says, “You could build muscles without lifting by doing bodyweight and band resistance training. If you look at Gymnastics, for example, you would be hard-pressed to find a gymnast that is not lean, ripped, or muscular. And they primarily only do bodyweight exercises.”
Bodyweight workouts are enough to help you build muscles. We’ve become so much dependent on equipment that we often end up underestimating our body weight can also be useful for giving muscles a better edge.
Exercises like pull-ups, push-up, Bosu ball workouts, groiners, spider crawl, etc., can bring in massive changes to the muscles if they’re done with proper intensity, posture, and routine.
The best parts of these kinds of bodyweight exercises are while working out; you can put total focus on the form as you won’t have to deal with any added resistance. If you follow the routine regularly, you will get stronger and make your joints better.
Cons of Lifting Weights
Indeed, lifting weights has tons of benefits, but that doesn’t mean there’s no black dot on the whiteboard. Here are a few things you might have to consider on the ‘disadvantage’ part.
- Workout with weight is all about precision, even if you’re giving it fewer reps or appearing as the new guy in the gym. So, to ensure maximum precision, it’s better to do exercise under the supervision of a personal trainer, whether you’re carrying heavier weight or lighter.
- There’s always a chance of getting injured in exercise machines and equipment.
- The rate of calorie burning is not that high as well, even if you lift heavy.
Best Forms of Strength Training Workouts
The kind of workout you see most people do in the gym is called hypertrophy training which is focused on increasing muscle size. But when it comes to strength training, it works for building strength. So, for obvious reasons, you can stick to the same exercises that you would’ve followed for hypertrophy.
If you’re asking for maximum strength, Brute Strength Power Lifting works amazingly well. It involves extremely heavyweights but with total precision. For gaining strength and increasing endurance, circuit training is another excellent form of training, especially when you want to burn fat simultaneously.
Final Words
When it’s about natural strength vs. gym strength, the natural one is better compared to gym strength as that’s what you’re going to need more in the real world. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t go for bodybuilding and better strength altogether.
Things we’ve shared with you here are totally based on informational and educational purposes. So, don’t count them as medical advice and try taking the help of professionals when you need but following them can get you some benefits over the process.
