Short version: yes. If you add tissue faster than you add capability, you just built a heavier backpack for your nervous system and joints to carry. Shiny, not useful.
Here’s the practical read, split into muscle and bone:
Muscle: when “more” becomes dead weight
Strength per unit muscle (a.k.a. muscle quality) matters. With age, strength and power fall 2–5× faster than muscle size, mostly because nerves, motor units, and excitation–contraction coupling degrade. So if you inflate mass without fixing the wiring, performance lags and functional capacity drops.
Drug-driven hypertrophy can be lopsided. Myostatin/ActRII blockade often increases lean mass dramatically, yet specific force (strength per CSA) may improve less or even fall. Reviews explicitly note “bigger muscle, lower quality” as a recurring pattern, especially outside neuro-muscular disease contexts. Translation: great DEXA, underwhelming torque.
“Sarcoplasmic” vs “contractile” growth. If growth is mostly fluid, glycogen, enzymes and not myofibrils, strength per unit mass lags. This isn’t a fairy tale; there’s evidence this happens under some protocols. The muscle looks fuller; the barbell remains unimpressed.
Tendon mismatch risk. Rapid muscle-up with slower tendon adaptation can raise local strain and nudge injury risk. Tendons do adapt, just on a different clock, which is why power work and isometrics at longer muscle lengths are often programmed to “teach” the tendon.
Bottom line for muscle: Lower strength per unit mass is usually a liability unless absolute performance improves enough to offset the extra load. Otherwise you’ve added weight without adding useful force.
Bone: density isn’t destiny
Bone strength ≠ BMD. Strength depends on quantity and quality: geometry, microarchitecture, collagen cross-links, mineralization, microdamage, turnover. So higher “mass” can still mean brittle bone if the tissue quality is poor.
When “more bone” backfires. Long-term oversuppression of turnover (e.g., with some antiresorptives) can accumulate microdamage and raise the risk of atypical femur fractures despite decent BMD. That’s a classic case of more material, worse material.
How to track actual bone quality. Tools like trabecular bone score (TBS) and hip structural analysis give microarchitecture and geometry signals that predict fractures partly independent of BMD. If TBS or geometry stagnates while BMD climbs, that’s a red flag that the “growth” isn’t high quality.
Bottom line for bone: If added mass doesn’t come with better architecture and material properties, you may increase fragility, not strength.
Can extra growth block “high‑quality” growth?
Unfortunately, yes. Three ways that happens:
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Resource crowding: Rapid hypertrophy with poor neural adaptation and tendon tuning hogs recovery resources and can blunt myofibrillar accrual or power adaptations. That’s the sarcoplasmic-tilt problem.
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Misleading feedback loops: You see the scale and DEXA move and conclude training or a drug is “working,” so you stop chasing the hard stuff that actually raises quality: rate of force development, coordination, tendon stiffness, and skill. Strength plateaus while mass keeps creeping. Evidence: bigger muscles don’t automatically fix age‑related dynapenia.
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Bone remodeling choke: If bone turnover is chronically suppressed, microarchitecture and toughness can worsen even as density rises. That “growth” can literally compete with, or mask, the right kind of remodeling you wanted.
Guardrails so growth is actually useful
Score by function, not just size. Track relative strength (e.g., 1RM/body mass), peak power (CMJ or med‑ball throw), and grip strength. If these stagnate or fall while lean mass rises, quality is slipping.
For bone, add quality metrics. Ask for TBS on your next DXA, and if available, hip structural analysis. Improvements in TBS/geometry alongside BMD = higher quality growth.
Program for quality: keep 1–2 days/week of heavy strength work and 1–2 days of high‑velocity power work; include long‑length isometrics and carefully dosed impact to bias tendon and bone adaptation, not just muscle swelling.
If you’re using body‑comp‑shifting drugs: remember the pattern from ActRII blockade and GLP‑1 combos: body comp can improve without proportional performance. Treat the drug as a body‑composition tool; treat training as the quality tool.
Net answer: Lower strength per unit mass is usually a bug, not a feature. If the mass you’re adding doesn’t raise force, power, and tissue resilience, it’s misleading at best and counterproductive at worst. Fix the wiring, teach the tendons, improve the architecture. The mirror can lie; the force plate doesn’t.