Hey guys, Amy here on DNews answering your questions about muscles!
Neko recently asked us if we can make a video about why our muscles grow big when we exercise.
We all want to get big and strong, building muscles to have lean bodies and to be able
to squat our coworkers for funsies.
But what actually happens when you workout that makes your muscles grow?
There’s more to muscles than you might think.
We have different types of muscles: cardiac, smooth, and skeletal muscles.
Smooth muscles are responsible for the contracting movements of hollow organs like blood vessels,
the gastrointestinal tract, bladder, and uterus.
Skeletal muscles are made up of bundles of individual muscle fibers that are themselves
strands of proteins that grab onto one another and pull.
These muscle are attached to bones, and it’s the contraction, that pulling, that causes
your bones to move around your joints.
That’s what happens when your muscles contract.
These are controlled by the somatic nervous system.
The cardiac muscle, the one that makes your heart pump blood throughout your body, is
involuntarily controlled.
Your heart and the muscles that control it are obviously an important part of working
out or playing sports, but when we’re talking about building muscles we need to focus on
skeletal muscles.
There’s a little more to skeletal muscles than just the fibers that make them up.
Muscle are broadly categorized into two types.
Type I or slow twitch muscles are more efficient at using oxygen to generate energy.
And as the name suggests they can work longer before being exhausted so these are the ones
that you use for duration sports like long distance running.
Type II or fast twitch muscles rely on anaerobic metabolism to create fuel, or more simply,
they use your body’s stored energy for shorts bursts of activity.
These are the ones your body uses when sprinting or weightlifting.
When you build muscle, you’re actually breaking down these muscle fibres and building them
back up.
There are a couple of ways to do this.
Hypertrophy is an increase in the size of the muscle due to an increase in the size
of the muscle fibers; while hyperplasia happens when you actually split muscle fibers to eventually
grow more of them, though some trainers suspect that this splitting doesn’t actually create
new fibers, it just changes existing ones.
The exact process of muscle growth isn’t entirely understood, but leading theories
say that lifting something heavy, like a weight, breaks the muscle fibers apart, and then those
fibers grow back in a way that allows them to compensate for the damage and protect themselves
against future damage.
This happens naturally, but lifting speeds the cycle up so you rebuild muscle faster,
and the more you breakdown the more you grow back!
Which is why you need to rest between workouts; you need to give your body time to repair
itself, and help that process along with protein.
And that’s where the increase to muscles comes from.
Speaking of bulking up,Toyota has been doing some augmentation of their own with the TRD
line of Toyota Trucks.
Enhanced to rule the off-road!
So does this clear things up or do you still have more questions about muscles?
Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter @DNews.
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