Is strength "more nerves than muscles"?

Had an argument with a friend who's a personal trainer (and I'm a newbie btw) about hypertrophy, muscle adaptation and "neural adaptation".

The core idea was this: she argued strength was purely a nervous system thing, and that muscle hypertrophy was purely an aesthetic thing. I've seen this strange idea float around a few times that "strength is neural." Really curious about where that comes from and if there's any truth to it, and if it changes anything to how we train.

I can't seem to find much reliable info about neural adaptation beyond the fact that new lifters like me experience noob gains from their brains basically learning to use their muscles, and that from there it's a cycle of new muscles fibers being created and the brain learning to recruit them, which suggests that strength is not purely neural. Plus I can't see why evolution would make anyone grow large useless muscles to simply starve faster in the wild because "they look good in 20,000 BC".

submitted by /u/light_bringer777
[link] [comments]

* This article was originally published here