Vordak said
Just making sure - increasing the thickness of muscle is what makes one stronger, not the overall mass?Also, square cube law and all that jazz applied, a being wouldn't greatly benefit from growing in height - BUT with longer limbs it would have a longer lever to swing, and stronger-than-human muscles would compensate for the volume increase, actualy making such growth efficient, right?
Strength is a little...funny when it comes to various animals native to our world.
For example, a Silverback Gorilla, on average, is shorter than your run-of-the-mill human male (mostly because this particular species of animal is quasi-bipedal, moving about on land via knuckle-walking, so true bipedal locomotion isn't needed for them). The gorilla's immense physical strength comes from its refined arm muscles; it's a top-heavy creature, and requires all of that physical power to swing its hefty mass from tree to tree. It's a factor in a lot of creatures, but automatically coming to the assumption that a tall creature is an immensely strong one is kind of odd when I think about it.
A lot of factors are thrown into calculating muscle power, like how the organism's skeleton is structured, what type of muscle the creature specializes in (either in slow-twitch muscle fibers or fast-twitch muscle fibers), the creature's metabolic rate, how tightly-woven the muscle fibers are, and more. You might even run into an animal that suffers from an unusual condition that causes its body to pack on more muscle than it should, like in the incredibly rare cases where some humans are born with myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy.
It's basically superhuman strength, caused by your body's low sensitivity to myostatin, a protein that restricts muscle growth. Very odd mutation, honestly. What's weird is that, as far as doctors know, it doesn't come with any real risks to the one affected by it.