Would you say having shorter limbs give an advantage in regards to strength than a taller person? Shorter range of motion,better leverage and all that crap?
Relatively speaking I don't believe that there is any advantage to being short in the strength department. You take an average proportioned short guy and tall guy and it doesn't matter how tall/short they are if their bodies are proportioned the same. Muscle size, yes, muscle strength, no. BUT, if you take a short guy with a large torso, or something along those lines, he will be predisposed, if you will, to have a mechanical advantage on things like deadlifts. Same could be said for a taller guy. I posted this thread asking very generally and I think people are getting too specific highlighting certain qualities without realizing it.
Edt: Or maybe better yet, this isn't a type of question you can ask generally. There are a lot of factors at play, mostly how a person is proportioned.
Shorter guys appear "bigger" at lower weights because the way the muscle gets displaced across the frame. You stick 280lbs on me and it's no big deal, but on someone that's 5'-6' and you have a yolked up mothersucka. With that being said, us tall guys can comfortably hold a lot more muscle. Obviously, that gives us a strength advantage. Our muscles are bigger
, that's just the way it is. Our disadvantage is how long it takes to achieve that kind of physique. I often get very discouraged.
Oh, I also HATE the people that bust out a calculator and take percentages of weight and try to say they're stronger than me. I had some homo one time who took out his calculator and was like I bench some low number and I only weigh peanuts. He continued to divide his bench (low number) by his weight (peanuts) and he came up with a decimal that happened to be higher than mine. Then he ran around saying he was stronger than me. I don't think strength is relative like that. How can you divide your bench by your body weight when you aren't using your entire weight to move the weight? When you lay down on the bench you take your body weight out of the equation. I think people sell themselves short when they do that calculation. That guy has the capacity to lift the same weight that I do. When I started lifting I was smaller than he was, now I'm big and move a lot of weight. I earned every pound I lift, it's not just some factor solely based off my weight.