Welcome to Marvinspire Fitness! If you are on this blog page, it means you are trying to learn how to does your muscles grow? You must have been doing those squat! Doing those bicep curl and feeling the pump on the arm. How does it work? How does your muscle grow? Let us get into it!
There are 3 main mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy you need to understand. Hypertrophy is the fancy term for muscle growth. If you did not apply these mechanisms in your workout, you would lose of opportunity for muscle growth. And there are;
1. Mechanical Tension is about going heavy progressively. You need to generate the largest muscle force possible through a full range of motion when you are executing the exercise. To be clear, your weight needs to be in a "sweet spot". I suggest to start with an intensity weight of 70%-85% and not at 100%. And to maximize the mechanical tension, you can add a pause in your isometric part of your exercise. The pause is to spice things up!
2. Metabolic Stress is about going for the pump and feeling the burn. It causes the muscle cell to swell, which helps to contribute to muscle growth without necessarily increasing the size of the muscle cells. The main thing is to keep constant tension on your muscles by maintaining continuous reps without resting. You will usually feel this even when you are lifting light weights repetitively and feel the burn.
3. Muscle Damage happens during negative or tempo eccentric movement of the exercise, extended range of motion and high tension in the stretched position of the muscle. It corresponds with muscle soreness. However, it must be done delicately. Too much damage can be counterproductive because it will affect your planned frequency of exercise, and you need more recovery time.
For effective muscle growth, you need to utilize all three mechanisms. You need to plan your workout with proper periodization to used each muscle hypertrophy mechanism.
Finally, one of the most forgotten step! The rest day or you can call it recovery day! Remember this;
Muscles are torn in the gym, fed in the kitchen and built in your bed.
Your body needs to recovery with proper nutrition and adequate rest. Your muscle needs sufficient protein to be repaired to be bigger and stronger. The rule of thumb You need enough rest, which includes adequate sleep daily at least 8 hours.
Let's conclude! For your muscles to grow, you must allow your muscles to adapt by creating stressor that is different than the previous limit your body has already adapted to. This is what also we call progressive overload. You can do this by lifting heavier weights, changing your exercises so that you can work on different muscle group and pushing your muscles to fatigue. There is where all three mechanisms of hypertrophy work. After your workout is completed, the essential part begins, which is proper nutrition and adequate rest so that your muscle can regenerate and grow.
Thanks for reading! I hope this article can help you to achieve your fitness goal! If you are interested in my coaching service, just click Let`s Start on my website. Let`s get stronger everyday.
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