Reddit mentions of Strength is Specific: The key to optimal strength training for sports

Lots of people nattering about strength and jiujitsu, so for the time being I'd just like to talk about some of the little things you've asked about and hopefully shed some light on some things that often get misunderstood.

1. What makes someone strong?
   First I'm gonna be annoying and define strength as the ability to voluntarily produce maximum force in a given movement regardless of speed or duration. This is an important distinction because the qualities that make a person athletically successful in a sport such as jiujitsu when technical ability, timing, size, and psychological factors (grit, motivation, fear management, etc.) are equal is NOT simply strength, and people often lump several qualities together as a catch-all either because they're unaware of other qualities, or because it's an easy shorthand. A lot of people look at endurance, strength, speed/velocity, and often power (force * speed) as other qualities but it even goes beyond that (starting strength, reactivity/elastic strength, rate of force production) and there are mixed qualities (Speed-endurance, power-endurance, strength-endurance, all of these being your ability to sustain these other qualities submaximally), and then you have whether or not these qualities are expressed isometrically (without movement) or through movement, or maybe they're static in one component and move in another and hooooly shit does it all get needlessly complex if you really want to get into the deeper end of understanding performance. Ultimately though, particularly in sports like jiujitsu, a person may feel very strong but they actually are NOT very strong and have good strength-endurance isometrically, able to sustain a submaximal force for a very long time in one position, so when they go up against someone very strong but without the mixed quality, they may be a brick wall for all of 3 seconds, but then they lose. Similarly, if you have a person who is very strong, or has good strength-endurance, but they have poor rate of force development, it's not the STRONGEST Person who is succesful, but the person who can generate the greatest force FIRST; for instance, say I can push into someone with 10lbs of force at my absolute best and they can push into me with 12lbs of force at their absolute best, but I can reach my peak much faster, so whilst they're still only just reaching 6lbs of force, I have reached 8lbs, even though they are STRONGER, I have expressed my strength quicker than they can express theirs, I win (arm wrestling is a sport where RFD is hugely important and you can see this playing out quite a lot). So rather than asking "what makes a person strong?" it's useful to ask "what is the most appropriate strength quality for this sport and how can I develop it?"
   
2. Is it their nervous system?
   Yes, but not in the way people thought. In the older models of neural influence on strength, absolute increases in neural drive were a proposed method by which force production increases. Turns out, however, this isn't the case, although there may be some increase in ability to voluntarily recruit high threshold motor units when encountering greater loads. What happens neurally appears to be more related to inter-muscular co-ordination, everything working together in a synchronized manner to effectively produce greater amounts of force: the more familiar you are with the movement, the better you are at expressing strength when performing it as everything can work together in a co-ordinated manner: conversely, the shitter you are at it, the harder it will be to express strength when performing it (there are some fun lectures on motor engrams and strength by Natalia Verkhoshansky that expand upon these ideas if you want to learn more about this but they're really heavy and dry and long).
   
3. Is it their tendon strength?
   Tendon strength isn't really a *thing* in the way you've put it. Tendons do play a part in strength, but there is no contractile tissue in them, so they cannot produce force independently of your muscles. Think of tendons as somewhere between an anchor to bone and a bunjee chord... but smarter. They essentially have three jobs, all of which contribute to strength in some way or another:
   - providing an attachment point to your bones for your muscles to pull upon during a movement (the anchor). If your tendons are not particularly dense and have poor stiffness, then their ability to buttress or transmit the forces produced by your muscles are going to be impaired, imagine trying to pick up 100kg with a piece of string vs picking up 100kg with a big thick rope: neither of them actually produce the force, but you'd still want the rope over the string.
   - To store up potential energy during movement to allow for the elastic tissue within the tendon (there is elastic tissue in muscle and it's surrounding fascia as well that also contributes to this, if you want to learn more, get yourself a copy of Supertraining by Mel Siff and have a look at the series and parallel elastic components of non-contractile force production) to go "ping", just like a bunjee cord when you jump off a bridge.
   - To use their specialized receptors (golgi tendon organs) to detect the relative position of muscle/tendons to inhibit muscle contraction, causing it to relax and lengthen. This goes hand in hand with the stretch reflex in the opposing muscle (causing it to rapidly contract) and the previously mentioned elastic tissue to produce even greater forces. This also aids the tendon to act as a mechanical buffer to prevent injury to the muscle.So, in essence, tendons don't have strength, but they facilitate it.
   
4. Is it their musculature/muscles?
   Yes. The greater the cross sectional area of a muscles mass, the more force it can produce. Keeping in mind that strength is multi-faceted, it cannot be ignored that if a muscle has greater sarcomere density (the contractile units), it can produce more force REGARDLESS of the other factors. As long as you keep in mind that there are other considerations (sustained forces are gonna be harder if you focus exclusively on being a big bastard, for one example), having more muscle mass WILL make you stronger, this is indisputable. It used to be that any form of bodybuilding was shunned in sports that focused on performance, INCLUDING strength and power sports, because of the idea that it made you "musclebound" and ineffective or that it took away capacity from more useful training, but nowadays the idea of "functional bodybuilding" is gaining a lot of traction, and athletes that understand when and how selective growth should be used are having enormous success in their respective sports. For more on this, look up Jian Ping Ma, a chinese olymic weightlifting coach, and virtually any currently successful chinese weightlifter in the olympics (Lu Xiaojun is the quintessential example) and how they use bodybuilding as a component of their training.
   
5. Is it their stabiliser muscles?
   Somewhat, yes. You can't produce force effectively if you cannot control a joint, but people do often excessively focus on the idea of stability and often get it confused with balance and do all sorts of circus acrobatics on balls not noticing that even though their balance has improved their knees wobble around like a jelly in a hurricane despite this. Stability matters, improving it through your training matters, and SOMETIMES smaller deep muscles that are responsible for detecting joint position more than they are producing force do get inhibited and as a result cause shitty co-ordination in the bigger stronger muscles responsible for force production and make things go a bit shit. For most uninjured healthy athletic people, joint stability can be easily addressed through normal strength training (bilateral and unilateral work is advised, less for balance as a whole, but more for learning how to steer forces through a single limb, although it helps with balance too, but balance is quite specific, but that's a whole other story).
   
6. Is it their leverages?
   Yup. Big influence on strength, power, endurance, speed, etc. Somewhere I've got a table talking about optimal proportions for athlete selection in sports. That being said though, it's pretty irrelevant. You can't change your proportions or individual leverages, but you can still get stronger, and in jiujitsu you can select techniques and approaches that maximize the advantages of your specific body type (in theory, easier said than done! I wish I knew how to do this!).
   
   ​
   
   Hope that was useful! If I've rambled like a prick and anything doesn't make sense, let me know and I'll clarify a bit.
   
   If you want a great book on strength training, this one is £3 and my current favouritehttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Strength-Specific-optimal-strength-training-ebook/dp/B07FGG4LNC

I recommend reading this. Strength is general to a degree, but not to the degree that that wheezing red faced Texan keeps telling us.

https://www.amazon.com/Strength-Specific-optimal-strength-training-ebook/dp/B07FGG4LNC
This book is a good explaination of what you're asking for. All of what you mentioned contributes to your definition of "Functional Strength".


As for what you can do to train it, short answer, mimic as closely to the movement as you can and apply increasing intensity and volume when not able to train the specific movements of grappling. You can do all the "bro lifts" as you find relatable to the specific movements as long as you do intelligent programming of progression which you can either get a coach or get to studying. There's also skill and technique involved in being strong.


​