Hello, BBM team.
I have recently discovered what I find to be a very strange result of increasing the weight of an athlete. I had always assumed that if I gained 10% of lean body mass, I would be able to lift, at least, 10% more. This might take time, as strength might not be gained as fast as LBM, but in the end, I would be able to lift, at least, the same proportion of my bodyweight as before I gained weight. However, it seems that the opposite is true, I would actually be able to lift less (relative to my bodyweight) than before. This means that if I wanted to be able to perform a lift with a weight that equals, say, 2 times my bodyweight, I would be better off loosing weight, rather than increasing or maintaining my actual weight. Basically, the amount of LBM that I gain is “less efficient” the more I gain, which, at least for me, sounds counterintuitive. I am less (relatively) strong, the more I weigh.
Why am I saying this?
I watched a video which took the world record for the olympic lifts in each weight class and looked at what percentage of bodyweight it represented for the beholder of the record. The results showed that the higher the weight class, the less percentage of bodyweight was being lifted. This could be reasonable if we only compared the smallest weight class with the highest, as in the highest, athletes tend to carry much more body fat and therefore, they would have less useful body mass than the smaller competitors. However, I do not think that this theory can be used to explain the differences between every single weight class, as I doubt that the body fat percentage of and athlete in the smallest weight class is significantly lower than the one in the second smallest.
I was skeptical that this would translate over to powerlifting, as maybe the different types of muscle fibre requirements could explain it. However, having done the same calculations with the current IPF records (https://www.powerlifting.sport/fileadmin/ipf/data/records/records-classic-men.pdf) the results are the same. If we look at the squat, for example, Kevin Gray squats more than 4 times his bodyweight at 57.05kgs, whereas Ray Williams squats a little over 2.6 times his bodyweight at 182.26kgs. Again, taking the extremes might induce to the wrong conclusion but the percentage of bodyweight lifted goes down every single time the weight class goes up.
If I haven’t made any mistake , this would mean that if I want to be able to press overhead my own bodyweight, i am better off loosing weight, even if that means a reduction in LBM and therefore, a reduction in muscle.
This just seems quite weird to me. I hope that you can explain why this happens or show me that I have not taken something into consideration.
Thank you in advance and sorry for the long post.