Where I go all Sciencey about Muscle Growth
Are you trying to tone up? Build Muscle? Look sexy? Guess what, they’re all the same thing.
When you look at a ‘toned’ body, what you are seeing is muscle with very little body fat. After training for many months/years your muscles stay in a state of slight tension giving you the look of firm body.
Muscle also gives you shape.
Shape comes from your skeleton, fat and muscle. We can’t change our Skeleton but we can change fat and muscle. If you want to look lean and still have shape to your muscle is a must. Very low body fat with very low muscle will give you the Skeletor look. Build muscle and you reshape your body.
So, if you’re in the camp of looking hot and sexy (just like me 🤣), you need to build muscle.
What is Muscle Growth
Muscle growth is sometimes known as HYPERTROPHY (AKA - Jacked - Hench - Buff - Toned - God-like - Sexy-as-Fuck) is the development of mass, density and shape, and function of muscle cells. Adaptation through muscle stimulus (weight training) allows the muscle to rebuild itself stronger when stressed. It also needs adequate rest and good nutrition too.
Ready for some real serious sciencey stuff?
Muscle cells are like bunches of sticks bundled together just like firewood. Myofibrils are cylindrical bundles of filaments composed of sarcomeres.
Sarcomeres are the fundamental unit of muscle contraction and are composed of two protein filaments, myosin and actin.
All of these proteins comprise about 20% of muscle. Water, phosphates, and minerals comprise the other 80% of muscle. You see why we need to stay hydrated and drink lots of water.
Where does muscle growth come from?
When someone performs resistance training (lifts weights) regularly and consistently, muscle growth occurs. This growth is due to an increased water, number of myofibrils (remember those from above), and connective tissue.
Another word for muscle growth is Hypertrophy. Clever Scientist people often break hypertrophy down into two types:
Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy increases muscle size by increasing the volume of sarcoplasmic fluid in the muscle cell. In word words more water and stuffs.
Myofibrillar hypertrophy (sometimes called “functional hypertrophy”) increases muscle size by increasing the contractile proteins. In other words more muscle fibre.
To put it in black and white, ‘bodybuilders’ tend to have more sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, and that their muscles look “puffy”.
While people that purely strength train with heavier weights and low reps like Olympic weightlifters, have more myofibrillar hypertrophy, and their muscles are “denser”.
Ladies the typical rep range (8-15) women tend to train with actually gives you bigger looking muscles (if you’re training hard). Strength training isn’t that bad when you think it like this.
Big deep breath as we’re going deeper into science.
Muscle growth and fibre types
To ensure we’re growing the muscle to the best capacity we need to understand that there’s more than one muscle fibre type.
Slow Twitch 1 (slow contraction)
Fast Twitch 2 (fast contraction). Which can be broken down even more into
Fast Twitch Type 2a
Fast Twitch Type 2b
There is much more to it with regards to fibre types, but we won’t go into all the details now, as it would take another blog post to cover everything.
Muscle growth can occur in all muscle fibre types, different types of muscle fibres vary in there actual growth and size. This is one of the reasons you should utilise a large rep (1-20 reps) range to get the most muscle growth.
Fast twitch fibres are more likely than slow-twitch fibres to grow with intense strength training.
This may be one reason why athletes such as sprinters, for example, tend to be bigger and more muscular than endurance athletes, and why heavier loads tend to stimulate more muscle growth than light loads.
Muscle growth
To grow bigger, sexier muscles (and look toned) there are several things that influence this
Type of exercise
Nutritional intake
Hormones*
*Ladies, you’re at a serious disadvantage as you have 10x less testosterone (one of the main hormones that build muscle) than a man does. Its hard for a man to build muscle, women even harder, so please don’t think you’re going to look like a bodybuilder if you regularly resistance train.
To put simply
Eat a lot, train hard, and get lots of recovery, and you’ll put on muscle.
Eat under than what your body needs, be sedentary, and be stressed out — and you won’t.
What you should know about growing muscle in the quickest time.
Muscles respond to intense training.
Muscles respond to the demands put upon them. If you ask it to continually lift heavy loads, they adapt getting bigger and stronger. Although everyone can build muscle, to what extent and size could be genetic.
Intense weight training damages muscle which then rebuilds itself bigger and stronger. No matter what age you are, this type of training is essential to keep yourself injury free, metabolically active (burn more calories) and also reduces muscle wastage.
Muscles respond to calories
If you restrict your calories too much, you risk muscle loss and metabolic slowdown. In word words, fewer calories burnt in a day.
Dropping your calories too low will result in muscle loss. If muscle gain is your aim (which we should all be doing) you need to eat enough food (all food, not just protein) to maintain and build muscle.
Some studies show that people who restrict their calories (dieting) without also doing resistance training will lose weight, but it’s an even distribution of muscle and fat, not what you want. So dieters who don’t exercise actually end up fatter (as a %) than when they started!
How many calories to build muscle?
Around 2800 calories are needed to build a pound of muscle.
If you’re doing intense weight training, your body requires more calories to ensure it has enough nutrients to maintain bodily functions, as well as build muscle. And no, that doesn’t mean you should eat 2800 calories extra per day to build muscle. This would be over a period of time of many months.
You can still build muscle when your body is on a restricted calorie diet, but this would be very slow and would reach a limit.
If you’re new to a programme or simply a beginner starting something new muscle growth will happen no matter what.
If you’re more experienced and looking to get big and strong, you’ll probably have to eat more.
Muscles need protein
Hormones (not just testosterone) play a huge role in muscle building and this can depend on nutritional status, not just calorie intake
Adding more protein to your daily (and I mean every day, not just training days) can increase protein synthesis.
Protein synthesis simply leads to building muscle.
If we are trying to build muscle through weight training, we need to get enough protein to do this. We also need enough calories to ensure our body is using protein for rebuilding, not as fuel.
Resistance training helps increase protein synthesis.
One bout of resistance training can stimulate protein turnover for at least 48 hours. During this time, if energy intake is adequate, along with increased protein intake muscle growth can occur.
In other words eat, eat and eat some more to ensure all those hard workouts result in more muscle.
How much protein?
To ensure you get enough protein each day aim for these guidelines.
Basic protein needs for muscle recovery and growth should be kept to 1.5 – 2.0 grams of protein/kg of body weight. Less if you’re not training.
That works out to be around 1-2 palm-sized portions of protein at every meal. This will also depend on body size too.
Some recommendations to help grow muscle in the quickest time.
As we mentioned before all muscles can grow but if you want the best gains, muscle growth seems to occur best when training with higher volumes, close to muscle fatigue, and with shorter rest periods between sets/reps.
When training, use a wide repetition range of 3-20 per set.
Train towards contraction failure (not being able to do any more reps in a set).
Take relatively short rest periods — 30 – 90 seconds. We are looking for fatigue.
Perform 12 – 20 sets per muscle group. Use things like Supersets, drop-sets, giant sets etc. to add volume
Be consistent with training. I cannot emphasise this enough.
Ensure you eat enough food so your body can recover. Aim to get 1.5-2g of protein/kg of body weight each and every day. Don’t forget to eat enough carbs and fat too.
Sleep 7 – 9 hours per night. Another super important one people forget.
Many sports supplements and products make you believe building muscle is easy, but really it isn’t. It takes time, some seriously intense training sessions and commitment to re-shape your body.
Good nutrition and training will get you there I promise, you just need to be patient and enjoy the process.