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10 Ways to Avoid Losing the Thrill
  15 Rules of Muscle Building
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  6 Muscle Building Tips
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  8 Sets of 8 Muscle Building 1
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  8 x 8 Muscle Building Routine
  Abdominal Exercises
  Aerobic Exericse & Muscle Loss
  Attention to Muscle Pain & Injury
  Basics of Strength Training
  Beach Body Abs
  Beginner Leg Workout Routine
  Benefit of Flexibility Exercise
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  Beginner Ab Exercise Guide - 1
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  Beginner Body Building Workout
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  Best Ab Exercise for 6 Pack Abs
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  Bicep Exercise Tip
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  Build Muscle & Gain Weight 1
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  Building Strong Core Muscles
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  Bodybuilding Race to the Top
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  Don't Want Muscle? - 1
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  Dealing with Sports Injury
  Effective Cardio Exercise - 1
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  Exercising While Sick
  Factors Affecting Strength
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  Form - Weight Lifting & Bodybuilding
  Gain Muscle & Size
  Give the Gift of Fitness
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  Increase Growth Hormone Tip
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  Joy of Natural Bodybuilding
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  Overtraining Syndrome
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  Perfect Rep
  Powerful Leg Workout Routine
  Principles of Effective Weight Gain
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  Strength Training - Part 1
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  The Muscle Code
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Diet & Weight Loss

10 Weight Loss Tips
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  Alcohol and Belly Fat - Beer Belly
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  Clenbuterol for Weight Loss
  Diets Don't Work
  Eating Fat Makes You Fat
  Fast Weight Loss Tips
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  Freshman 15 Weight Gain
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  Hoodia Diet Patch
  Hoodia Gordonii Diet Pill Review
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  How To Lose Love Handles
  Lift Weights to Lose Fat
  Lose Stubborn Belly Fat
  Low Body Fat Secrets
  Low Carbohydrate Diet
  Myth of Fast Weight Loss
  Oolong Tea Weight Loss
  Reducing Fat
  Repair Metabolic Damage
  Secret of Successful Weight Loss
  Stay Committed to Weight Loss Plan
  Stubborn Fat - New Ideas
  Super Sizing Dietary Displacement
  The Truth About Counting Calories
  The Truth About Body Fat -1
  What is the Glycemic Index (GI)
  When Weight Loss Stops
  Whey to Weight Loss

 

The Perfect Rep

What actually causes muscle growth?

By Will Brink
From Will's Free ebook - The Perfect Rep

This is the point in the article where I could go into a long and unusually boring dissertation about muscle physiology: Muscle fiber types, controversies over whether the muscle gets larger or divides into new muscle cells, or both. Number of reps, volume of training, concentric, eccentric, isometric, etc.: this is important information for the research scientist, but not all that relevant to the hard training bodybuilder.

I mean, what are we looking for here? In a nut shell, what we want is the correct level of stimulation to a muscle to make it larger, right? Too little stimulus and the muscle won’t grow. Too much stimulus and the muscle doesn’t grow, or worse yet, gets smaller due to injury or inability to recuperate. The proper stimulus within a given period of time is what we are looking for.

This brings me to another point. It is not the amount of actual weight that is the most important factor to muscle growth, but the actual amount of stress or tension the muscle must endure during the rep that is the crucial stimulus for growth. But some might ask “Doesn’t using more weight mean more stress on the muscle?”

The answer is no.

If you take 405 lbs. off the rack when bench pressing and bring it down quickly without control, bounce it off your chest and lock the elbows out hard at the top for one rep, are you creating more stimulus to the pec muscles than if you took 300 lbs. off the rack and brought it down with full control, pressed it up without any bounce or momentum, and did not lock the
elbows out at the top for ten reps?

I think the answer to that question is obvious, and we will examine this particular topic in the coming sections. The point I am trying to make here is that weight is only a factor within the variable of how the rep itself is performed. All things being equal (i.e., each rep is performed correctly for that exercise) weight does matter.

The more weight you can use in a given exercise, with correct form, in a given time period, for a specified number of reps, the more stimulus for growth the muscle will experience. However, using more weight for the sheer sake of using more weight, not taking into account how the rep is performed, does NOT equal more stress on the muscle.

When we talk about a stimulus for growth, we must look beyond the simple micro-environment of the muscle fiber in question. This is where bodybuilders and scientists often fall short when trying to examine the topic of muscle growth. An examination at the level of the muscle fiber, where the actual damage occurs, is obviously important for any study of why and how
muscles grow from weight training.

However, it is not the only factor involved leading to the increase in size and/or number of muscle fibers in response to weight training.
When we train with weights using sufficient loads and intensity, we cause micro-trauma to the muscle fiber(s). That is, at the level of the fiber itself, we have caused a certain amount of controlled damage to the fibers involved.

However, muscle growth is far more involved than simple breakdown and repair. This is the point in the report where we need to look at the concept known as the “metabolic cost of exercise.” This concept, though complex if you map it all out, can still be reduced to its most basic definition: Muscle growth is not a local event that happens exclusively at the level of the muscle fiber, but is ultimately a systemic response to exercise that leads to muscle growth.

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So what exactly is meant by “systemic?”

It means that when we lift a weight several things happen. At the level of the muscle, there is controlled damage to the myofiber during muscular contraction. This damage (known as micro-trauma) leads to remodeling (growth) of the muscle predominantly takes place during the eccentric (negative) part of the rep.

Simply put, at the local level of the muscle fiber, it is the lowering (negative) part of the exercise that is responsible for most of the damage to the fiber that (hopefully) leads to muscle hypertrophy and increases in strength.

From this information we can conclude that a controlled rep, where the weight is lowered under full control, is a particularly important part of a properly executed rep. Now this is what is happening at the local level of the muscle fiber, but as I said before, muscle growth is ultimately controlled by the effects exercise has on the entire system. For example, as any bodybuilder knows, growth hormone is one of several anabolic hormones important for increasing muscle mass and shedding body fat.

Growth hormone is a key anabolic and lipolytic (fat mobilizing) hormone that many bodybuilders are injecting pre-contest and off season to build additional mass and burn fat. However, growth hormone (GH), insulin, human growth factor one (IGF-1), and to a lesser degree testosterone, can be partially manipulated by diet and exercise, so don’t think an elephant pituitary extract enema is the only way you will ever add new muscle!

The metabolic costs of exercise can be shown in this example: When we lift weights we cause a rise in lactic acid. Research suggests that the signal to release growth hormone in response to exercise is related to the level of lactic acid in the blood. It is a system-wide response to the exercise (i.e. the increasing level of lactic acid in the blood) that causes growth hormone to be released.

In fact, the body produces many metabolites and metabolic byproducts in response to weight lifting that contribute to the growth of lean tissues being trained.

What does this tell us?

It tells us that weight training does not just cause controlled damage to muscle fibers to stimulate growth but has a systemic effect. It suggests weight training has a high metabolic cost that stimulates the entire body to respond to the exercise in a positive way.

Another example of a systemic response to weight training is not commonly appreciated. When a person first starts to train with weights, their strength climbs rather quickly, yet they put on relatively little muscle. What is going on here? Scientists have postulated that this early rise in strength in response to weight lifting takes place from an improved efficiency of the nervous system, that it is a neural adaptive response.

Personally, I believe that the efficiency of the nervous system continues to play an important role in the process of building muscle even after many years of training, but that’s another story.

You see, this is an example that demonstrates it is not only what happens to the muscles themselves when we train, but what happens to our entire system when we train. The nervous system becomes more efficient, the endocrine system responds, and various enzymatic pathways are affected. The body’s response to weight training is clearly not a local event relegated
simply to its direct effects on muscle fiber but is actively promoting a systemic response.

These are a few examples of how the systemic response to exercise leads to increases in size and strength. The metabolic cost of exercise probably plays as crucial a role in muscle growth as does the local stimulation to the muscles (i.e. myofiber damage caused by intense muscle contraction).

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