- Wolverine wouldn't look like Wolverine
without his signature claws.
They're real, snikt!
But he wouldn't have these without his original
mutant ability, a superhuman (groans) healing factor
that allowed him to survive an incredibly invasive
adamantium graft job.
But Wolverine also wouldn't look like Wolverine
unless he was totally jacked, bro!
So if his power is to repair cells and make new ones
in response to damage, wouldn't any exercise routine
quickly turn Wolverine into the ultimate bodybuilder?
(energetic music)
Yeah, come on!
Today's question comes from LukeHaas22 on Instagram,
and I love it because it plays into our assumptions
about fitness and how our bodies work.
You've probably heard from someone who eats kale
that getting bigger muscles
means damaging those muscles more,
like lifting weights to tear muscle tissue,
which then grows back bigger and stronger.
But if repairing damage is what makes big muscles,
wouldn't Wolverine put on muscle faster and easier
than any human?
First you have three different kinds of muscle tissue
in your body: cardiac, which you can find in your heart;
smooth, which you can find in the hollow visceral organs
of your body, like your stomach; and skeletal muscle.
Now. that is the muscle that we can workout and make bigger,
and your body has around 640 of those muscles,
the biggest of which is the old gluty max back here,
and the smallest of which is the stapedius muscle,
which is as long as these blades are thick,
just a millimeter, and its right here,
right here in your inner ...
Oh, I'm tang-- (moaning)
No matter how big or how small skeletal muscle is,
it gets its strength from its structure.
Inside of a skeletal muscle are bundles of muscle cells.
And inside each muscle cell
is a bundle of so-called myofibrils.
And inside of those bundles of myofibrils
are bundles of myofilaments.
Now, when the body wants a muscle to move,
a neuron signals it to
through a lot of complicated chemistry,
and these long protein chains of myofilaments
move past each other and contract,
which contracts the myofibrils,
which contracts the muscle cells,
which contracts the muscle as a whole.
Now, by bundling like this,
skeletal muscle can generate a lot of force
in not a lot of cross-sectional area,
which is good for Wolverine because,
canonically, he's just 5'3".
(growling)
Okay, calm down, dude.
You're short, all right, stay in your panel.
(screaming)
Wolverine's healing factor is more or less
the ability to repair and replace tissue.
But getting yoked, bro,
is not about creating more muscle cells.
Shortly after you are born, your muscles cells mature
and become post-miotic, meaning that they no longer
undergo mitosis, they no longer divide.
So, for example, if I was to take a muscle biopsy
from someone like me, (groans)
and from an expert bodybuilder --
oh, yeah, come on (groans) --
you would find the same number of muscle cells,
proportionally speaking.
Cells don't divide to make muscles bigger.
Instead, the number of muscle cells stays the same,
and the cell size gets bigger.
(metal clanking)
That doesn't sound like snikt at all, does it?
(metal scraping)
I mean, kind ...
Misleading onomatopoeia!
(metal scraping)
The biological mechanism through which
one becomes a brolossus is called muscle hypertrophy.
Very generally speaking, muscle hypertrophy --
getting bigger muscle cells --
occurs when your muscles are adding more protein
to themselves than they are removing.
This is the process of adding more of those protein chains,
which increases the diameter of the cells themselves,
thereby increasing the size of the muscle.
Oh, yeah, come on!
That's good!
Keep it going!
Come on, one more!
Two more!
Nice!
Let's go get coffee!
We haven't yet established
what makes muscle hypertrophy happen --
the body is really complicated --
but we know it has to be some combination of hormones,
of the immune system, of growth factors,
of genetics, and of exercise, and exercise
is what is popularly associated with tissue damage.
Now, when we workout ...
(groans) Oh, it's over a thousand kilograms!
When we workout, there is tiny, microscopic damage
done to our muscle fibers.
And when muscle fibers are damaged, the body activates
a legion of dormant satellite cells,
and these satellite cells move to the location of the injury
and then donate their own genetic material
to the muscle cells.
These muscle cells then use that material
to synthesize more protein to repair the injury
and make the muscle cells themselves bigger
and more able to handle the stress of working out.
In theory, Wolverine would be better at this.
However, because skeletal muscle cells don't divide,
there is a limit on how much they can regenerate.
When a muscle cell is damaged enough to die,
other muscle cells don't divide to replace it
like Wolverine's skin cells would do
if he got a really bad cut.
No, instead, that muscle tissue
is just replaced with scar tissue,
which does not function as well,
which is why, in a really bad muscle injury,
there is permanent loss of muscle strength.
Ow.
So the relationship between muscle damage
and muscle hypertrophy is complicated.
Damage, and Wolverine's superhuman ability
to recover from it, may not even matter.
I already cut myself with these things,
right in between ...
I punctured in between my knuckles.
It hurt ...
every time, which was once, but it hurt.
Because growing more muscle cells
isn't how swole works, to become the ultimate bodybuilder
Wolverine would want there to be a direct relationship
between muscle growth and muscle damage.
That is to say, the more you damage the muscles,
the more they regenerate, and the bigger
and stronger muscles that you get.
But we already know this isn't true.
Think about it.
Who has the biggest muscles among athletes,
the humans who are really good at putting on muscle?
Well, it's bodybuilders who use resistance training,
like Arnold. (garbled speech)
And who has the smallest muscles among athletes?
Well, it's endurance trainers, like marathon runners.
Now, which kind of training
do you think causes more muscle damage?
Well, you may be surprised to learn
that it is in fact endurance training.
Running many, many kilometers
is a lot more damaging to your muscles
than lifting a couple of kilograms a few times a week.
That changes this relationship from one
that is potentially direct to one that is inverse,
meaning that more muscle damage
is actually related to less muscle growth.
Now, we don't know why this is the case exactly,
but one explanation could be that there's not enough
body resources to grow the muscle --
they're all being spent on repairing it.
What this all means for Wolverine is that,
even if he could repair a lot of muscle damage,
even very rapidly, that wouldn't necessarily
lead to him becoming a huge, jacked man.
Some studies have even shown
that if you eliminate the satellite cells,
the cells that actually do the regenerating,
the cells that Wolverine would be really good at producing,
your muscles can still get bigger.
(paper shredding)
Okay, all right.
Okay, okay.
Yeah!
So, because of his healing factor,
could Wolverine become the ultimate bodybuilder?
Well, I don't think so.
Despite what you may have heard at a gym
or on the internet, more muscle damage
does not directly lead to more muscle mass,
even though we know it has to play some role.
And muscle cells don't divide like skin cells do,
and so Wolverine main ability to repair and replace cells
after a grievous wounding
wouldn't lead to crazy swoleness.
Although, Wolverine probably would be
more naturally jacked than you or me because
he has to carry around a very heavy adamantium skeleton ...
his entire life.
Because science!
(dynamic electronic music)
There is no greater source of health nonsense than a gym.
You walk into a gym, some guy's like,
"You know what you gotta do?
"It's three reps for two minutes, resting for 30 seconds,
"and then you ingest some bull shark testosterone
"and some whey protein, organic, and that's the way you ..."
Shut up.
There's so few studies that establish anything specific
about what is the best approach to be healthy.
If anything, it's very generic.
It's don't eat a lot of meat,
or a lot of sugar, or a lot of fat.
Eat a lot of fruits and vegetable.
Don't smoke.
Exercise.
Everyone else is trying to sell you something.
Speaking of which, if you want to get jacked,
you can check out ...
Thank you so much for watching, Frida.
Make sure to like and subscribe if you liked this video.
And follow me on social media
where I post a bunch of cool science stuff.
And you can checkout me and Dan Casey on Muskwatch.
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Subscribe to ProjectAlpha.com
and you get a free 30-day trial and me soon-er.
(jangly electronic music)