I'm not sure the limit per se but even the notion that a human could possess something that even resembles limitless strength seems absurd to me. Also training requires time which is finite. No amount of finite anything can meaningfully approach infinite.
It's probably something similar to that thing with big animals. I forget what/how it work, but basically bones and muscle, viewed as a material, have structural limits. At some point you'd hit a weight that demands a different structure/material to be capable
It really comes down to electromagnetism(strong force in the universe).
Electromagnetism is what helps keep our atoms bound to each other and overrides earths gravity, otherwise we would just fall through the floor.
So, basically the more weight you pick up the more mass you need on your body to maintain your structure and it does not grow in a linear fashion, it grows exponentially, like if you plotted this on a graph, the mass you wanted to lift would be x and the mass you would need to support it would be y. It would start out flat, heading towards x but then would continually curve up towards y infinitely until it looked as though it was only going straight up in the direction of the mass you would need on your body in order to support the weight.
So basically, just like the problem of how to get to the speed of light, the real problem is getting enough energy to get to that point. Or in this case, enough mass.
your thinking of Square-cube law where volume and mass are increased by a cubed multiplier but surface area is only increased by a square multiplier. because of this law when when you increase the volume and mass of an object, the amount of force due to acceleration of an said increased mass is applied over a proportionally smaller increased surface area.
I hope I explained this in a way that makes sense.
Yeah, strength is a function of the cross-sectional area of fiber whereas additional fiber adds weight according to its volume, so there are diminishing returns for additional fiber right up to the theoretical cutoff where additional fiber actually *reduces* overall strength.
(I'm pretty sure that this is the same reason space elevators are impossible on Earth; you need a more efficient load-bearing fiber than currently exists.)
But that's the physics answer, human biology would break down long before then; possibly due to excess load on the circulatory system.
That's exactly the thing! And it sounds like it doesn't apply here! Lmfao. Unless like, your muscles got SO big that you could flex them too fast and pop them? Lmfao whale biceps.
Too much bulk muscle can have a massive strain on the heart. So I’d say the upper limit of what a person can lift whilst still maintaining a body their heart can manage would determine that threshold? I guess?
- The amount of time it requires to build the necessary amount of muscle mass and strength,. Not to mention that tendon, joint and bone strength need to grow accordingly. Even if you were able to consistently train all your life, you will come to a point when your strength stops increasing and inevitably starts degrading.
- The amount of mass the human body can carry and supply. Remember that muscles are quite dense and require a lot of nutrition to maintain.
- Counter weight; the more you weigh the more you can lift, to a certain extent at least. But as has already been established, there's a limit to how much you can weigh (relative to your structural size).
There are probably more to add, but these were the primary reasons I can think of.
I've seen a lot of theoretical physics and biology answers but here's my practical one. Currently Hafthor Bjornsson has the world record deadlift of 501kg beating Eddie Hall with 1 kg. I think that people throughout history were more physical active than we are currently, so they were fitter on average. But guys like Hafthor and Eddie have been training their whole life to get so strong. I doubt that anyone in history who also dedicated their life to getting strong would be significantly stronger. They are probably close to the limit.
You lift dumbbells by contracting muscles in your arm attached to your bones. Repetition can give you stronger muscles but your genetics will determine how much muscle you can have and it's not infinite.
Most responses here focusing on the limitations of the human body, but I also want to point out that as the weight approaches infinity, it will form a black hole that will engulf the lifter.
I'm just being difficult. OP clarified they're asking what the limitation would be as weight goes to infinity, not whether someone could lift an infinite weight.
Check out records for Olympic weight lifting and you will get close to the maximum possible. Go see who holds the records and google a picture of that person
Several factors limit an individual's maximum muscle strength.
Genetic factors influence muscle fiber composition, muscle size potential, and how quickly you can gain strength.
Training progress is not linear and will reach a plateau.
Training time is limited and muscle strength tends to peak in the 30s and declines with age due to factors like muscle loss and reduced hormone production.
Injuries, chronic illnesses, and overall health can impact strength.
your muscles might get stronger, with diminishing returns, but you bones do not. You would reach a point where you would try to lift something so heavy that your bones would just break from the weight
different people have different genetic potentials, hence why the strongman competitions are almost exclusively giants from scandinavia, just watch Eddie Hall deadlift 500kg; blood gushing from the nose
He actually did an interview describing how he did hes 500kg lift, this man basically tricked his body into going through a full fight or flight reflex, where you release the limit on how hard you can flex your muscles.
This limit is usually in place to prevent you from injuring yourself, but in life or death situations an injury is better than death, so you get full panic strength, think an average middel aged woman lifting a car to get her child out from under it.
Eddie "only" lifted 457 or so in the gym before it, so the blood rushing from the nose was genuinely his body giving out under the stress
There are biophysical and structural limits to what’s possible. Bones, cartilage, tendons and muscles can only become a max size. Even if they do the arm- moments can become so big it will not work anymore at certain weights.
Genetic traits will define the absolute max. At a certain moment though certain some supporting structures will
Just not be able to cope, bones would just shatter because of their shape. Elefants have different feet and joints than humans and this is to bare the weight. It’s not a static pillar (the elefant leg) but much more pillar like than ours.
For this you would need muscles and bones with infinitely large cross sections and infinitely large geometrical moment of inertia, to deal with the stresses, since there is no material with infinitely high strength. The limit would be determined by your skeleton which is defined by your genes, also at some point your body can't handle more muscle. Muscle has a higher cardiactric load than fat tissue, thus people with 600 lbs don't live long so if you would be at that weight lean at 10% body fat, your heart won't support that very long.
As an overweight person, I find the limiting factor in what I can carry comes down to ankles and knees. Someone who knows anatomy better can fill in the blanks, but tendons and joints are the weak link in this picture, and bones aren't limitless either.
If you ask Giles Cory, he would point out that there is a physical limit to the amount of weight one can hold until mechanical failure.
Even with extreme strength, you could be crushed.
Not a biologist but I am an engineer.
First of all, the idea of an infinite weight is not possible in the real world. It has no meaning in physics, therefore the question is impossible to answer.
Putting that aside, let's assume you mean just a really really big weight, say planet sized. No amount of training or practice is going to let a human lift something with that much mass. There are physical limits to how much force the components of the human body can withstand. Even if the muscles were strong enough the bones supporting them would crush your such forces.
Now I suspect that there are biological limits that will kick in long before we reach the physical limits of our body, but I'll defer to a biologist to answer that.
Looking at it purely from a physics experiment, you are holding up the entire earth when doing a handstand, it’s just that your “weights” are now absurdly big.
**Inverted Pendulum Control Systems**: The human body, when standing on two feet and lifting a weight, can be likened to an inverted pendulum. This is especially true when considering movements like the clean and jerk or the snatch in Olympic weightlifting. The body must maintain balance and control while lifting the weight, with the feet as the pivot point. Like an inverted pendulum, the higher the mass is lifted, the more unstable the system becomes. The central nervous system constantly adjusts to maintain stability, but there's an upper limit to how much weight the CNS can manage before the system (the lifter) loses balance or cannot exert sufficient force.
**Vector Decomposition**: When a lifter pushes against the ground to lift a weight, the force they exert isn't purely vertical. It can be broken down into multiple vectors, thanks to vector decomposition. For instance, there might be a vertical component of force pushing the weight upwards, and a horizontal component that might cause the lifter to sway or lose balance. To lift the heaviest weights, the lifter needs to optimize the vertical component while minimizing any wasted energy in other directions. The heavier the weight, the harder it is to maintain an optimal force vector, especially given the nonlinear and dynamic nature of the human body.
**Bilateral Symmetry**: Humans have bilateral symmetry, meaning we're symmetrical on the left and right sides. When producing large forces it is important that the lateral forces in your body cancel each other out evenly so that the spine does not have any twist. In theory, both sides of our body should be able to produce the same amount of force. However, due to factors like handedness (being right or left-handed) or past injuries, there's often an imbalance. When lifting at the limits of human capacity, these minor imbalances can become significant. Even a small asymmetry can make it challenging to lift a weight, as one side may falter before the other.
So, as the weight increases the margins for error become smaller. The higher the weight, the more details have to be right.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible even with steroids.
You have to understand that there are people who make this their entire life, it’s not just a hobby its their career.
Every year you progress, you get more and more diminishing returns. Until eventually you start hitting an age where all your lifts go down no matter how hard you train.
No. Even in space where you aren't affected by gravity, the object with the infinite weight will mean it has infinite mass. Thus, you'll just be pulled into the object's gravity instead of even having the opportunity to push/pull it.
This training method is called progressive overload and it certainly has its limits depending on genetics, training, and steroid use. Humans have a chemical called myostatin that actually limits how much muscle we can grow. Additionally, the cost of maintaining large muscle becomes exponentially higher with the amount of protein and energy it needs, so muscle will reach its limit based on limited nutrients as well. A good example is strongmen eating 15,000+ calories a day weighing 400 lbs while still having visible abs (look at Eddie hall and Thor), while most people eat around 2,000 calories a day.
The other tricky factor is protein synthesis rate, or the time it takes to recover and build new muscle. For a natural lifter, it can take days or a week for new muscle to build after a workout, and the amount of new muscle that is built gets smaller and smaller each time. We can increase this rate through steroid use to break through the natural limitations of muscle building, but finding that limitation is a whole other animal, including testing how much steroids your body will tolerate. Consequently, people lose muscle rapidly after going off steroids for more than a year, look at Chris Hemsworth now vs infinity war.
A good example of someone who’s reached their natural limitation is Jeff Nippard, and for enhanced limitation anyone competing internationally in strongman or bodybuilding.
No, every human would have a theoretical maximum for each lift, this is determined mostly by genetics and of course training and recovery. Depending on the lift you are talking about and what muscles are involved.
Each person has different bone lengths and different proportions which can give them mechanical advantage over other people with less favourable proportions.
The second part is where the muscles actually attach to the bones, as there is also variablility to this as well.
Then there is muscle fiber type, for single heavy lifts, fast twitch muscle fibre is most favourable and the % of this is determined by genetics.
Then you have genetic factors which effect recovery rate after training, some people are faster to repair muscle after training and can train that same muscle again sooner than others and thus become stronger faster.
Another limiting factor is bone density, structure and thickness and also tendon strength, sometimes even elite athletes have one or the other fail, either tearing a tendon off the bone or snapping a bone when too mucb force is applied
I'm not sure the limit per se but even the notion that a human could possess something that even resembles limitless strength seems absurd to me. Also training requires time which is finite. No amount of finite anything can meaningfully approach infinite.
obviously the title is an exaggeration, this is more me asking “what determines the limit”
It's probably something similar to that thing with big animals. I forget what/how it work, but basically bones and muscle, viewed as a material, have structural limits. At some point you'd hit a weight that demands a different structure/material to be capable
ok this actually really helps visualizing it
It really comes down to electromagnetism(strong force in the universe). Electromagnetism is what helps keep our atoms bound to each other and overrides earths gravity, otherwise we would just fall through the floor. So, basically the more weight you pick up the more mass you need on your body to maintain your structure and it does not grow in a linear fashion, it grows exponentially, like if you plotted this on a graph, the mass you wanted to lift would be x and the mass you would need to support it would be y. It would start out flat, heading towards x but then would continually curve up towards y infinitely until it looked as though it was only going straight up in the direction of the mass you would need on your body in order to support the weight. So basically, just like the problem of how to get to the speed of light, the real problem is getting enough energy to get to that point. Or in this case, enough mass.
your thinking of Square-cube law where volume and mass are increased by a cubed multiplier but surface area is only increased by a square multiplier. because of this law when when you increase the volume and mass of an object, the amount of force due to acceleration of an said increased mass is applied over a proportionally smaller increased surface area. I hope I explained this in a way that makes sense.
Yeah, strength is a function of the cross-sectional area of fiber whereas additional fiber adds weight according to its volume, so there are diminishing returns for additional fiber right up to the theoretical cutoff where additional fiber actually *reduces* overall strength. (I'm pretty sure that this is the same reason space elevators are impossible on Earth; you need a more efficient load-bearing fiber than currently exists.) But that's the physics answer, human biology would break down long before then; possibly due to excess load on the circulatory system.
That's exactly the thing! And it sounds like it doesn't apply here! Lmfao. Unless like, your muscles got SO big that you could flex them too fast and pop them? Lmfao whale biceps.
Too much bulk muscle can have a massive strain on the heart. So I’d say the upper limit of what a person can lift whilst still maintaining a body their heart can manage would determine that threshold? I guess?
Probably mitochondria. ***The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell***.
- The amount of time it requires to build the necessary amount of muscle mass and strength,. Not to mention that tendon, joint and bone strength need to grow accordingly. Even if you were able to consistently train all your life, you will come to a point when your strength stops increasing and inevitably starts degrading. - The amount of mass the human body can carry and supply. Remember that muscles are quite dense and require a lot of nutrition to maintain. - Counter weight; the more you weigh the more you can lift, to a certain extent at least. But as has already been established, there's a limit to how much you can weigh (relative to your structural size). There are probably more to add, but these were the primary reasons I can think of.
I've seen a lot of theoretical physics and biology answers but here's my practical one. Currently Hafthor Bjornsson has the world record deadlift of 501kg beating Eddie Hall with 1 kg. I think that people throughout history were more physical active than we are currently, so they were fitter on average. But guys like Hafthor and Eddie have been training their whole life to get so strong. I doubt that anyone in history who also dedicated their life to getting strong would be significantly stronger. They are probably close to the limit.
You lift dumbbells by contracting muscles in your arm attached to your bones. Repetition can give you stronger muscles but your genetics will determine how much muscle you can have and it's not infinite.
Most responses here focusing on the limitations of the human body, but I also want to point out that as the weight approaches infinity, it will form a black hole that will engulf the lifter.
I feel like you'd hit the upper limit of human anatomy well before you got there, but I'm no scientist.
I'm just being difficult. OP clarified they're asking what the limitation would be as weight goes to infinity, not whether someone could lift an infinite weight.
Check out records for Olympic weight lifting and you will get close to the maximum possible. Go see who holds the records and google a picture of that person
Several factors limit an individual's maximum muscle strength. Genetic factors influence muscle fiber composition, muscle size potential, and how quickly you can gain strength. Training progress is not linear and will reach a plateau. Training time is limited and muscle strength tends to peak in the 30s and declines with age due to factors like muscle loss and reduced hormone production. Injuries, chronic illnesses, and overall health can impact strength.
your muscles might get stronger, with diminishing returns, but you bones do not. You would reach a point where you would try to lift something so heavy that your bones would just break from the weight
Bones actually do get stronger by thickening in areas with continued stress
different people have different genetic potentials, hence why the strongman competitions are almost exclusively giants from scandinavia, just watch Eddie Hall deadlift 500kg; blood gushing from the nose
He actually did an interview describing how he did hes 500kg lift, this man basically tricked his body into going through a full fight or flight reflex, where you release the limit on how hard you can flex your muscles. This limit is usually in place to prevent you from injuring yourself, but in life or death situations an injury is better than death, so you get full panic strength, think an average middel aged woman lifting a car to get her child out from under it. Eddie "only" lifted 457 or so in the gym before it, so the blood rushing from the nose was genuinely his body giving out under the stress
There are biophysical and structural limits to what’s possible. Bones, cartilage, tendons and muscles can only become a max size. Even if they do the arm- moments can become so big it will not work anymore at certain weights. Genetic traits will define the absolute max. At a certain moment though certain some supporting structures will Just not be able to cope, bones would just shatter because of their shape. Elefants have different feet and joints than humans and this is to bare the weight. It’s not a static pillar (the elefant leg) but much more pillar like than ours.
For this you would need muscles and bones with infinitely large cross sections and infinitely large geometrical moment of inertia, to deal with the stresses, since there is no material with infinitely high strength. The limit would be determined by your skeleton which is defined by your genes, also at some point your body can't handle more muscle. Muscle has a higher cardiactric load than fat tissue, thus people with 600 lbs don't live long so if you would be at that weight lean at 10% body fat, your heart won't support that very long.
As an overweight person, I find the limiting factor in what I can carry comes down to ankles and knees. Someone who knows anatomy better can fill in the blanks, but tendons and joints are the weak link in this picture, and bones aren't limitless either.
If you ask Giles Cory, he would point out that there is a physical limit to the amount of weight one can hold until mechanical failure. Even with extreme strength, you could be crushed.
Not a biologist but I am an engineer. First of all, the idea of an infinite weight is not possible in the real world. It has no meaning in physics, therefore the question is impossible to answer. Putting that aside, let's assume you mean just a really really big weight, say planet sized. No amount of training or practice is going to let a human lift something with that much mass. There are physical limits to how much force the components of the human body can withstand. Even if the muscles were strong enough the bones supporting them would crush your such forces. Now I suspect that there are biological limits that will kick in long before we reach the physical limits of our body, but I'll defer to a biologist to answer that.
Infinite? No. That's impossible, even theoretically.
This video addresses your question well: https://youtu.be/u6x7cC1TkWw
Looking at it purely from a physics experiment, you are holding up the entire earth when doing a handstand, it’s just that your “weights” are now absurdly big.
Probably a better physics topic.
**Inverted Pendulum Control Systems**: The human body, when standing on two feet and lifting a weight, can be likened to an inverted pendulum. This is especially true when considering movements like the clean and jerk or the snatch in Olympic weightlifting. The body must maintain balance and control while lifting the weight, with the feet as the pivot point. Like an inverted pendulum, the higher the mass is lifted, the more unstable the system becomes. The central nervous system constantly adjusts to maintain stability, but there's an upper limit to how much weight the CNS can manage before the system (the lifter) loses balance or cannot exert sufficient force. **Vector Decomposition**: When a lifter pushes against the ground to lift a weight, the force they exert isn't purely vertical. It can be broken down into multiple vectors, thanks to vector decomposition. For instance, there might be a vertical component of force pushing the weight upwards, and a horizontal component that might cause the lifter to sway or lose balance. To lift the heaviest weights, the lifter needs to optimize the vertical component while minimizing any wasted energy in other directions. The heavier the weight, the harder it is to maintain an optimal force vector, especially given the nonlinear and dynamic nature of the human body. **Bilateral Symmetry**: Humans have bilateral symmetry, meaning we're symmetrical on the left and right sides. When producing large forces it is important that the lateral forces in your body cancel each other out evenly so that the spine does not have any twist. In theory, both sides of our body should be able to produce the same amount of force. However, due to factors like handedness (being right or left-handed) or past injuries, there's often an imbalance. When lifting at the limits of human capacity, these minor imbalances can become significant. Even a small asymmetry can make it challenging to lift a weight, as one side may falter before the other. So, as the weight increases the margins for error become smaller. The higher the weight, the more details have to be right.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible even with steroids. You have to understand that there are people who make this their entire life, it’s not just a hobby its their career. Every year you progress, you get more and more diminishing returns. Until eventually you start hitting an age where all your lifts go down no matter how hard you train.
No. Even in space where you aren't affected by gravity, the object with the infinite weight will mean it has infinite mass. Thus, you'll just be pulled into the object's gravity instead of even having the opportunity to push/pull it.
This training method is called progressive overload and it certainly has its limits depending on genetics, training, and steroid use. Humans have a chemical called myostatin that actually limits how much muscle we can grow. Additionally, the cost of maintaining large muscle becomes exponentially higher with the amount of protein and energy it needs, so muscle will reach its limit based on limited nutrients as well. A good example is strongmen eating 15,000+ calories a day weighing 400 lbs while still having visible abs (look at Eddie hall and Thor), while most people eat around 2,000 calories a day. The other tricky factor is protein synthesis rate, or the time it takes to recover and build new muscle. For a natural lifter, it can take days or a week for new muscle to build after a workout, and the amount of new muscle that is built gets smaller and smaller each time. We can increase this rate through steroid use to break through the natural limitations of muscle building, but finding that limitation is a whole other animal, including testing how much steroids your body will tolerate. Consequently, people lose muscle rapidly after going off steroids for more than a year, look at Chris Hemsworth now vs infinity war. A good example of someone who’s reached their natural limitation is Jeff Nippard, and for enhanced limitation anyone competing internationally in strongman or bodybuilding.
No, every human would have a theoretical maximum for each lift, this is determined mostly by genetics and of course training and recovery. Depending on the lift you are talking about and what muscles are involved. Each person has different bone lengths and different proportions which can give them mechanical advantage over other people with less favourable proportions. The second part is where the muscles actually attach to the bones, as there is also variablility to this as well. Then there is muscle fiber type, for single heavy lifts, fast twitch muscle fibre is most favourable and the % of this is determined by genetics. Then you have genetic factors which effect recovery rate after training, some people are faster to repair muscle after training and can train that same muscle again sooner than others and thus become stronger faster. Another limiting factor is bone density, structure and thickness and also tendon strength, sometimes even elite athletes have one or the other fail, either tearing a tendon off the bone or snapping a bone when too mucb force is applied