The Strength We Feel — and the Strength We Can Use
Why feeling solid does not always reveal how the body is producing force
“I’m strong. That cannot be the problem.”
Sometimes the evidence seems obvious. A person can hold, push, carry, resist, or make their whole body feel solid. They may describe themselves as naturally strong. Friends and family may say the same thing: nothing moves them.
That interpretation is understandable. The feeling is real. But a felt sense of strength does not necessarily reveal how the body had to organize itself to create it.
Often, feeling strong does reflect genuine capacity. The nervous system recruits the right amount of muscular effort, in the right places, and the body responds efficiently. At other times, however, the same feeling of solidity can come from a different strategy: more areas contract together, movement becomes less differentiated, breathing changes, and the body creates stability by reducing its available options.
The feeling of strength is real information. It is simply not the whole story. |
Protection does not have only one expression
We often imagine protection as inhibition: an area becomes difficult to recruit, movement loses power, or the body limits how much force is available. That can happen. Pain, perceived threat, fatigue, or uncertain sensory information can change muscle activation, timing, and load distribution.
But the body can also protect itself through the opposite-looking response. It may increase global activation, recruit opposing muscles together, stiffen a joint, or hold several regions as one unit. Research on motor adaptation shows that protective responses are not identical from one person to another. Muscle activity may increase in some areas, decrease in others, or be redistributed while the system works toward a similar goal: maintaining control and reducing perceived risk (Van Dieën et al., 2019; Hodges et al., 2013).
Co-contraction can be useful. Activating muscles on both sides of a joint increases stiffness and can improve short-term stability. It is an intelligent option when the system does not fully trust the movement or the environment. Yet the same strategy can also require more effort, restrict movement, and make force less economical when it becomes the default response (Latash, 2018).
This is why a person can genuinely feel strong and still be relying on protection. Their strength is not fake. It may simply be expensive strength—force produced by involving more of the body than the task actually requires.
When being solid and being adaptable are confused
A body that does not yield can feel dependable. In a single moment, rigidity may even improve performance. But human movement rarely asks us to remain fixed. We need to accelerate, stop, change direction, absorb load, breathe, adjust, and then release what is no longer needed.
That creates an important distinction: the ability to resist is not always the same as the ability to adapt. A person may produce substantial force while still having difficulty accessing it quickly, directing it precisely, maintaining it without excessive tension, or letting it go after the effort.
What Kinvent adds to the observation
This is where my observations with Kinvent have added another layer. A handheld dynamometer does not read the nervous system directly, and a graph cannot diagnose a protective strategy. What it can do is make external force visible over time.
Instead of relying only on what a contraction feels like—or on the highest value reached—we can observe how the force appears.
One person may reach force quickly, hold it steadily, repeat it, and release cleanly. Another may eventually reach a similar level but take longer to get there, fluctuate throughout the contraction, or begin losing output almost immediately. The endpoint can look similar while access to that force is completely different.
The scientific literature makes the same distinction. Rate of force development describes how quickly force becomes available and is not interchangeable with maximal force (Maffiuletti et al., 2016). Force steadiness—the ability to maintain controlled output around a target—adds another dimension to motor function. Kinvent handheld dynamometry has also demonstrated good reliability for force measurement, with more recent research supporting reliable assessment of both maximal voluntary contraction and rate of force development in standardized tests (Olds et al., 2023; Trybulski et al., 2025).
The value is not in giving one graph absolute authority. It is in combining the graph with position, movement quality, compensation, symptoms, breathing, repeatability, and what changes when the system is given different information.
The peak shows how much. The curve helps reveal how. |
From maximum strength to usable strength
This leads to the idea of usable strength.
Usable strength is not defined only by how high the output becomes. It is force that is available in the right place, at the right time, and for the duration the situation requires. It can be directed without every part of the body needing to brace. It remains stable enough to support the task, adaptable enough to respond to change, and releasable when the work is finished.
This also changes how progress can look. Sometimes reorganization produces a higher force result. Sometimes the maximum changes very little, but the force appears sooner, holds more steadily, or requires less global tension. At other times, once a broad compensation decreases, a more specific limitation becomes visible. What initially looks like a new weakness may be a clearer view of how force was being distributed all along. That possibility must be assessed rather than assumed—but it is one reason a single strength impression can be misleading.
Questions that reveal more than “Am I strong?”
Even without measurement equipment, a person can begin noticing the organization behind the sensation. Does the effort require holding the breath? Does the jaw, neck, opposite shoulder, or entire trunk join a task that should be local? Is the force available immediately? Can it be sustained without shaking or fading? Can the body release afterward? Does the same capacity remain available when the position or demand changes?
These questions are not a way to diagnose yourself. They simply create a wider lens. They move the conversation from “How strong am I?” toward “How does my body access and organize its strength?”
Strength with more options
The goal is not to make the body less strong or to remove protection by force. Protection exists for a reason. The goal is to help the system discover that stability does not always require the same amount of global tension.
When organization changes, strength can become clearer, faster, more precise, easier to sustain, and easier to release. The person has not simply gained more output. They have gained more ways to use what is already available.
That is the difference between strength we can feel in one moment and strength we can truly use across life: not only more force, but more freedom inside the force.
Do you feel strong while your movement remains rigid, costly or difficult to release? It may be useful to observe how your body organizes and makes its strength available.
Andy Audet – Un Corps Équilibré
Spécialiste De La Recalibration Corporelle Et Performance Humaine
Saint-Bruno-De-Montarville, Québec
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