Honestly they really are. And so are heavy-weight weightlifters and powerlifters and so are gorillas. Well at least according to the people on this site. The thing that people don’t take into account is that someone who is TALL will always be relatively weaker than someone who is short. It is actually height more than anything else that determines your “relative” strength.
Think of it this way… Lightweight weightlifters can lift 3x their own bodyweight over their head. Super heavyweights less than 2x. So if you want great relative strength, make sure you are short, if not, well then you really have to add muscle, because there aren’t any 6 foot 145 pounds strongmen I know of.
Muscle after all will make you stronger. A guy that is 6 foot tall and weighs 140 pounds is not as strong as a guy that is also 6 foot tall and weighs 200 pounds (assuming that it is muscle). There simply is nobody on this earth who is over 6 feet tall that can be considered strong at 145 pounds, no such thing. And I think your “relative” strength will also increase as your bodyweight increases.
Sure enough it will always be lower than that of an equally well trained but shorter individual, but it will be better than what you started with. Case in point, myself. I more than doubled my lifts the first year of training, and I certainly didn’t double my bodyweight.
(On a different note. I even think that the relative strength of short bodybuilders like Lee Priest and Franco Columbu is higher than those of heavyweight power- and weightlifters.)
Also, if you look at men like Rezazadeh you will soon find that he probably has about the same amount of muscle mass as someone like Ronnie Coleman. Interestingly enough I think that if you could teach today’s elite bodybuilders perfect weightlifting technique and gave them a few months(or years) to prepare they would do extremely well in a meet. Probably world class too. If they have the required coordination.
We’ve heard the stories of bodybuilders using relatively light weights such as Paul Dillet and Vince Taylor. However, I am willing to bet that if people would use their techinique, range of motion, tempo and their diet at the time of taping the weights would be suprisingly heavy.
The biggest men are the strongest. And the shortest are the relative strongest. It has nothing to do with bodyweight but with height. If your tall you need the muscle and everything will improve. If you’re short you need less of it because you have better leverages, and of course, you don’t have to lift that much.
I think the entire notion of “relative” strength is bullshit. It’s just something that weighlifting organizations cae up with to compare lifters from different weight classes.
Look at it this way. Relatively an ant is about 100 times as strong as a gorilla. But if you would enlarge the ant to the size of the gorilla the pull of gravity would be too great for its body to bear. Goes to demonstrate how silly “relative” strength is. If the people here would rather be an ant than a gorilla I think it’s safe to assume you went to the wrong site. Do you really wanna be an ant?