When it comes to the common goal of building muscle, it helps to have an understanding on how muscle building occurs. In itself muscle building is a simple process, it is an adaptive response to any kind of external stimulus, that is more commonly known as weight training.
When you go to the gym and perform any movement against an external resistance, your tissues (biceps, quads, calf’s etc.) experience what’s called mechanical tension.
Mechanical tension – “A type of force that tries to stretch a material. Muscle’s experience stretching forces when trying to contract, but are resisted against by external load, or when lengthening whilst holding an external load”.
As a result, the fibres in a particular muscle like your biceps, quads, hamstrings etc. have to produce force to help manage this mechanical tension, which gets sensed by different receptors within the muscle, that in which will then send a signal to the brain basically saying we’ve experienced all this mechanical tension, the brain then decides to start to build muscle. Assuming that you are hitting the required threshold with nutrition muscle building should occur.
That is muscle building simplified, but we do need to dive deeper to help understand how to maximise your time in the gym, to get the most out of your training as possible.
How muscles Contract
Inside a muscle you have these different sections called fascicles, (Fascicle – A bundle of muscle fibres) the fascicle is separated further into bundles of muscle fibres that are made up of individual myofibrils, (Myofibril – Contractile component of muscle cell) myofibrils are finally made up of these tiny little things called filaments (Filament – Slender thread like structure found in myofibril)
If you were to split these myofibrils in half you are going to see all these red and blue lines, these are the filaments that are making up the myofibril. The blue lines are called myosin, (Myosin – Protein structure found in myofibril) the red lines are called actin. (Actin – Protein structure found in myofibril)
This is where your muscles produce force, this is how movement occurs and how your body generates a signal to the brain to build muscle. What happens is the actin and myosin receive a chemical stimulus, in response to this stimulus the myosin attaches onto the actin and pulls it across, than it detaches then re attaches to a further point along the chain of that actin and pulls it across again and again. What happens as a result of this is what’s called actin myosin cross bridges. (Actin myosin cross bridge – Binding of myosin globular heads to actin, resulting in muscle contractions)
This creates movement, now you can understand why this is important. As the distance between the actin and myosin shorten so does the distance at the myofibril and the muscle fibre and at the fascicle and then ultimately at the muscle. The muscle itself is not just floating around in space, the muscle is attached to tendons to the end points on the bone, when the bicep for instance is shortening its going to tug on theses 2,3 or however many points there are for the given muscle and it will cause in this case flexion to occur. All of that happens because of those actin myosin filaments cross bridging and being pulled closer together.
The best part is the larger amount of these cross bridges that can be formed in any one time will increase the amount of force that you are capable of producing, generally speaking the more force your able to produce at any given time, or the more force you can expose your body to and create, the more muscle building potential there will be in a workout.
References
- Ganbaru Method, Eugene Teo, Published March 2020, Accessed June 30th Hypertrophy Programming – Ganbaru Method
- Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, Allied Health, Seventh Edition. Miller-Keane, published 2003, Accessed June 30th 2021 Muscle filament | definition of muscle filament by Medical dictionary (thefreedictionary.com)
- The Cell, 2nd Edition, A Molecular Approach, Geoffrey M Cooper, published 2000, Accessed June 30th 2021 The Cell – NCBI Bookshelf (nih.gov)
- What Determines Mechanical Tension, Chris Beardsley, Published November 14th 2018, Accessed June 30th What determines mechanical tension during strength training? | by Chris Beardsley | Medium
