
Strength is generally a better indicator of progress than your own visual perception of hypertrophy, for a number of reasons. 1. Strength adaptations are primarily driven by hypertrophy. If you got a lot stronger, it’s almost certainly because your muscles got bigger 2. Strength is a quantitative measure, while perceived size is qualitative, and thus, far more susceptible to human error
3. Size adaptations happen at about 1/7th the rate of strength adaptations, and are slow and small to the point where the ability to perceive them over shorter periods of time is basically nonexistent. If I showed you a picture of me 4 weeks ago compared to now, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell any difference, but based on the fact that I’ve gotten stronger on every lift, I definitely did experience hypertrophy.
Yeah… I wanted to say it in a more polite way, but strength and hypertrophy are not separate mechanisms. Aside from neural adaptations, which plateau after a few weeks of a new exercise, the only way to get stronger is to get bigger muscles, so if you are consistently getting stronger, you are absolutely growing