When it comes to strength, the ultimate goal is to improve ones ability to lift heavier or with harder difficulties. Whilst hypertrophy, it depends more on how you provide enough stimulus for your muscle to grow. Often done by individuals tht wish to improve better body composition or gain weight in a healthy way.

What is actually the difference between training for strength and hyperthrophy? While both of them seems similar from the outside, it isn’t. Even some of them that into weight training can’t realised that actually both of these is different.

Different goal required different solution. Therefore by knowing a specific training type could help you reach your goal faster. It will set you into a clear position to look for which one is best suits your current goal.

Strength Training

The ultimate of strength training is to grow stronger and stronger through lifting heavier over time.

Since there isn’t a specific muscle to train in terms of strength training, it does less contribution for the appearance. However, strength is more functional and applicable to more aspects. You found individual that focus more on strength training will have overall muscle growth. Which means they often develop full body muscular force.

Why Strength Training?

The take away from strength training is to become stronger overtime. You are able to hold heavier weight through constantly challenging for new weight. The principal behind the progression is because your body had become more and more efficiently for handling the intensity. As our body is always trying to adapt to every challenge over time. This is much of the psysionogical aspects and how your body works (it builds up a mechanical solution automatically) to complete certain function.

You’ll developed more explosive force through strength training. Often time you’ll found people The movement or weight is often harder for your current ability. But more strength means more explosive force, you’ll be able to generate more force from the movement.

Strength training also best for individual that wish to improve overall strength. This is due to the big involvement of different muscle group in a single exercise–compound movement. Therefore you’ll find you able to progress to heavier weight at the beginning when you training with heavy weights. many beginners found that they gained strength although they still don’t have much muscle definition.

You don’t necessary become bigger. Well, althought for some of us this means less muscle size increase, but it is one of the benefits for those that are not looking forward to look big. In fact, to develop strength muscle development is not much of the concern but the efficiency. That’s why often time you’ll found perople that able to lift heavy weight not necesarry like as big as you expect.

How Strength training look like?

Althought every weight training looks alike from the first sight, but in the case of strength training, things look a little bit different.

You’ll found people that perform powerlifting moves really challenge with heavy weight. Those weights that just above their current capability to handle with confort. In the session, they will trying to break the limit from last session of how much they could lift. Often times the improvement is done by honing their skills to finish specific movement.

Strength training is mostly trained using compound movements. This is because in order to lift heavier, oftentimes we need to involved multiple muscles in just a single moves. There will be less targeting on certain muscle group in strength training compared with hyperthrophy training.

Another distinction is that trainers will use low reps but more sets in a single exercise (about or under 5 sets). This is because as you need to handle heavier weight, you’ll probably unable to repeat it for too many time under the same set. The rest between sets also will be longer to restore energy after a heavy training.

Movements that applies in strength training woften involve more driving force, trainers usually will use momentum to perform the move rather than merely rely on their muscularity. It isn’t said that strength training don’t care about form, it just less concern about it, but more on the technique.

Hyperthrophy

Hyperthrophy training is more of a biological aspect than strength. The goal for hypertrophy training is to incrrease muscle mass. The training is done by putting enough stimulus on your muscle in order to let them grow. Nutrition and adequate rest often come together with training to make sure muscle growth takes place.

Hypertrophy is often come behind strength, that is you will work on the weight that you are capable to handle on, do more and forcing more mind-muscle connection. That’s the moment where muscle growth comes into place.

Why Hyperthrophy Training?

People often use hyperthrophy training to change their body composition. Since hyperthrophy training is more effective to actually increase your muscle mass and size. People have less than average muscle mass should consider start with hyperthrophy training. One of the reason is because it help build up new muscle mass, improve their overall health.

Hyperthrophy training is also a saftier option when compares with strength training. It is because the weight that we use in hyperthrophy training is tend to be lighter and within ones capability to handle. It will have lower risk of injury.

For body builders or for normal people like us, that wish to achieve certain physique proportion, hyperthrophy training is the way to go. As the nature of hyperthrophy training is to developing specific muscle group by putting it on muscle stress. Another use of hyperthrophy training is to help trainers to lean out. Since hyperthrophy training allows trainers to complete the exercise with higher volume, more energy will be required, then it achieved the purpose of burning more fat.

How Hypertrophy training looks like?

The hypertrophy training will need lighter weight with more reps. These individuals often use a weight that they are able to handle, but still, feel challenged after repeating for 8 reps and above. They focus more on the specific muscle throughout the movement and trying to train to failure.

Training to failure will make sure you are training with hyperthrophy properly. Whilst you are using moderate weight, the whole set of the exercise could still be really intense if you focus on the movement. And by adding more volume in the exercise overtime will achieve hyperthrophy.

When you train with hypertrophy, there is much more variation for progressive overload. Whilst the most common way is to increase the weight, in terms of hypertrophy, the key is to ‘stress out the muscle‘. This could be done by changing of tempo, increasing reps or focusing on form for full muscle activation.

Hypertrophy training is applicable on both compound and isolation movement. It is because isolation movement often involves a smaller muscle groups, and we are encouraged to train with a higher rep but lighter weight to avoid injury.

Which should you choose?

For begineers, it is recommended to start with hyperthrophy. It is because for begineers that are new to all sort of weight lifitng program, their ability to even handle weight from hyperthrophy level is still lacking. In this case, training with the typical range between 10-15 is the most recommended way (more on hyperthrophic) and strength is less of a concern.This is because when you had mastered even the hyperthrophic range, your overall strength had increases ad the same time.

However, overtime when trainers had passed the ‘begineer phrase‘, things will be a bit different. We can start moving on building more strength or continue on building more muscle.

To train on strength do provides benefit for you to progress more hyperthrophy. This is because when you able to lift heavier, often time you’ll find you able to complete more reps and have more control with the movements. Strength training also does assist when an individual reaches plateau where they had stuck on the same weight for too long.

Best way to mixed them up

Both of them do provided benefits for each type of person. Therefore, it is better to mixed them up (hybrid training for both strength and hyperthrophy) to get beneficial from both aspects. I usually have at least 1 strength session throughout the week that I will challenge the big, compound, explosive moves. Then for the other day, I’ll work on hyperthrophy moves.

In the strength training day, the goal for that specific session will focus on how to progress with heavier weight rather that stressing much on mind muscle connection. I will do things like clean and jerk, overhead press etc. (of course you can do typical powerlifting moves such as squats, deadlifts etc.) but I’ll found some Olympic powerlifting movements enjoyable.

Another way to do so is the hybrid way. Whichto spread those powerlifting movement througout the weeks. By placing 1 explosive heavy move before you start your normal hyperthrophy training. In this, you can have the maximal energy to finish the powerlifting exercise but still reap the opportunity for more muscle building synthesis.