The muscle-building principles

In this post, we’ll talk about how most people get muscle-building wrong, and how to actually produce growth, from a logical standpoint.

Let’s start from the ground up: what is muscle? What is its purpose, from a physiological perspective?

Muscle is but a bodily tissue, whose fuction, primary and only, is to produce force, and thus, either movement or the prevention thereof. Period.

This tissue is comprised of cells of great length, connected to nerves that signal when movement is to take place. These cells contract, by virtue of proteins in their structure that shorten via a chemical reaction in the presence of an electrical impulse.

And, muscles being comprised of cells, like any tissue, they are mostly water; thus, the importance of being well-hydrated and consuming a decent amount of protein becomes obvious, for both maintenance and building purposes.

Therefore, the more muscle one has, the greater the force one is capable of producing; not only this, but having more muscle is also incredibly beneficial for overall health, since a greater amount thereof increases metabolism (you burn more calories by simple existing) due to the energetic needs for maintaining it, and it lessens the atrophy that comes with age and usually weakens you over time. Also, the training necessary to build it and keep it regulates hormones and mood, thus increasing one’s quality of life.

One could go on and on explaining the health benefits of having more muscle, even more so all of the other effects such as increased confidence and physiacl attractiveness. But that requires a post of its own.

Now, on to how to actually get more of it.

As the function of muscle tissue is to produce force, the only way you can trigger the body to produce a greater amount of muscle is by requiring it to produce an amount of force beyond its current capabilities.

In other words, muscles will grow as an adaptation to the necessity of producing an effort which the current amount of tissue is unable to exert.

But this provides only the stimulus, the incentive, for growth; actual growth happens afterwards, while you rest, and the body over-compensates for the stimulus.

And with respect to resting, one needs a decent bit more than is commonly accepted. The local fatigue in a muscle can take up to 4 days to go away fully; but there is also a systemic, global response to the intense stimulus that takes about 48 hours to recharge.

That is why one should always leave one rest day between any two workouts, and preferentially not train the same muscle groups two workouts in a row.

Now, this may seem all too scientific and abstract, so, let me discuss it in more common, practical terms below.