Bodybuilding, Bodybuilders & Muscle Building Techniques
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
What causes muscle growth?
What causes muscle growth?
In order for muscles to grow, three things are required:
1. Stimulus - exercise is needed to make the muscles work, use energy and cause microscopic damage to the fibers.
2. Nutrition - after intense exercise the muscles need to replenish their stores of fuel.
3. Rest - it is during the rest or recovery phase that the muscles repair the microscopic damage and grow.
Muscle size increases due to hypertrophic adaptation and an increase in the cross section area of individual muscle fibers. Intensive exercise impacts more on the strength influencing fast twitch type II fibers, therefore the increase in muscle size is accompanied by greater strength.
This will deplete the muscle's energy stores and cause microscopic damage to the muscle tissue. During recovery, these stores of glycogen and phosphocreatine will replenish from carbohydrates and creatine ingested as food or supplements. Amino acids supplied in the diet will trigger the protein synthesis that repairs the damaged muscle and lead to the creation of bigger muscle fibers.
To achieve continuous improvement you will need to keep reaching for higher levels of training intensity otherwise the improvement process will grind to a halt. Fortunately, this is relatively easy to plan for provided certain basic principles and rules are clearly followed. Subsequent articles in this series will examine these principles in detail.
By Richard Mitchell; the creator of the bodybuildingadvisor.com website that provides guidance and information to athletes at all levels of bodybuilding experience. Go to Bodybuilding Advice to learn more about the issues covered in this article.
THE IMPORTANCE OF
BLOOD MONITORING
Despite the recent trend for sections of the medical community to try and
convince the public of the safety and effectiveness of Testosterone Enanthate as
a contraceptive, once again I think they are lying to us. Isn't it funny how the
same idiots were telling us a few years ago about how anabolic steroids (which
are mostly safer than testosterone) were not only ineffective in improving
athletic performance, but they would kill you? In fact, I'm sad to say there are
still those out there sprouting this crap. But now they tell us that there are
no side effects from 300mg or even 600mg of TE a week. I don't know about you,
but I find that hard to believe (I know I would be wanting to kill everyone if I
was on 600mg TE/week; reported side effects were acne in about 5% of subjects
and breast tenderness in 3%). Oh, and they did notice a slight weight gain (funny
that, I thought they didn't increase muscle mass!!). The unfortunate thing is
they tell you what they want you to believe, which may or may not be the truth.
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