You know that weight lifting makes you muscles grow, get harder and become more defined. Have you ever wondered just how it goes that? What exactly is happening physiologically when you lift weights?
What weightlifting could do for a person was understood long before anyone knew how it worked. Using opposing forces to work muscles harder made muscles more capable. Not making muscles work caused them to atrophy and weaken. This was simply an observable phenomenon. Ancient people also figured out that as muscle strengthened, it could carry heavier loads – a concept we now refer to as “progressive resistance.”
The science behind muscle development
What actually happens when you lift weights is that your muscles are injured. It sounds unbelievable, but the tissue is actually strained and very slightly torn – what doctors call “microtrauma.” It’s not a serious enough injury to be treated as such, obviously, but it’s the healing process that occurs on these microtraumas that causes muscles to grow. The body naturally rebuilds the torn and weakened muscle fibers to be bigger and stronger than they were originally, in order to prevent future injury.
This explains why progressive resistance is important if you want to build your muscles further. Doing the same workout with the same weight will maintain the current size of your muscles and prevent atrophy, but to grow the muscles, you must use higher weights or more repetitions than what you muscles are now able to handle, thanks to the rebuilding process.
This does not mean you should rush to struggle with the heaviest weight you can begin to lift. In fact, by starting slow, you give your body more chances to rebuild your muscles, bigger each time, before it reaches the maximum your body is capable of.
It’s extremely important to avoid injury, which will slow you down more than a cautious routing. Muscles need time to heal, so work each muscle groups only once every four to seven days, giving them time to heal.
Filed in Strength Training
Updated: August 25, 2010
Copyright: September 2, 2010
