Rex wrote:
As I said, strength is closely related to muscle size. You get stronger from progressive overload, which in turn will 'cause' muscle growth. You are just not going to get much stronger without the consequence of adding muscle mass, which is what you were initially saying was a benefit of gymnastics, right? Now, you can do plenty of overload without weights, but you are still going to add muscle mass.
This assumes that the bulk added to your body with hypertrophy weight training and gymnastics training is going to be the same. Like all muscle added by all people have the same mathematical proportions to strength. It's obviously a matter of degrees - you will add muscle with gymnastics training, as you will with weights but to pretend the type and amount of strength you'll gain will be equal across the board is just nonsense. Because, it factors out the role of the CNS in strength. For example, if we hypothetically have one guy only doing bicep curls and another guy only training an iron cross, and both are putting equal amounts of effort into their training the lifter will end up with more gains in mass, whereas the gymnast will end up with more gains in real world, dynamic strength. I'm not an expert on the reasons why, but logically it's how isolated the movement is. The more isolated it is, the more you can focus your energy into fatiguing that particular muscle. The gymnast will be putting the same effort into his workout but his muscles won't experience the same fatigue (and in turn the same hypertrophy) because he's working more muscle groups at once, instead, it's his nervous system which is experiencing the fatigue.
A good example is also grip strength, which is said to be a good indication of overall strength. I've seen with my own eyes how little muscle mass effects people's ability to close grippers, which you can easily find videos of online.
