The body has about 650 different muscles, and it does not matter if you only take care about five or six of them, you need every one of them to perform normal functions such as breathing, eating, walking, or holding your stomach in at the beach. The good news is, you do not have to consciously take care of every one of them, every day. For example, your heart will continue to beat even if you stop exercising, but it will work more efficiently if you treat it right. Muscles involved in walking (200 of them) will do the job even if you do not monitor them, but your walking pace is going to improve if you use those muscles more often.
Since we’re talking about muscles, you could try to amaze your friends at a party by informing them that the gluteus maximus is your strongest muscle, or the latissimus dorsi (the middle back muscle) is the largest, or the stapedius (the middle-ear muscle) is the smallest. However, the fact is that this will not work not unless you have some really special friends.
Besides that, a quiz about muscles will not do wonders when it comes to increasing strength or physical capabilities. The thing that will work is the splendor of well-built muscles as well as the cleverness of synchronized muscles, working together in harmony to achieve the task at hand.
When you are working out, the body muscles tear, and they essentially become damaged (Source). However, as you are resting, the body will repair and replace damaged muscle fibers through a cellular process by fusing muscle fibers together to form new muscle protein strands (also known as myofibrils). These repaired tissues increase in thickness. This is what most people would call muscle growth.
• Sarcomere Hypertrophy: This is the growth in the size of the muscle contractile portion of the muscle. It involves a slight muscle increase in diameter, but the muscle intensity increases significantly.
• Sarcoplasmic Hypertrophy: This is the increase in the Non-contractile portion of the muscles. This form is only relevant or beneficial when an increase in body weight is more important rather than the improvement in performance.
The hypertrophy technique involves both of the above methods. The ratio mainly depends on training intensity as well as frequency. A person training heavily on a regular basis will feel stable whereas someone who trains with lightweight will feel soft. What does this mean? Well, it simply means that if you are training for performance, then you should consider going for sarcomere hypertrophy. On the other hand, if you are looking for size only, then you should consider sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.
This form of muscle building is the most popular and often preferred by professional muscle builders and fitness trainers.
Hyperplasia can be defined as the increase in the number of muscle fibers. In other words, it is the growth of muscle tissue caused by cell reproduction rate. One Russian sports scientist claims that hyperplasia is what occurs in a swimmer’s shoulders. Swimming is considered a form of training with little resistance.
Other scientists experimented in geese and chicken populations for hyperplasia. They hung them by their wings for 3 days and notated muscle development over the course of the test. Changes were noted which lead scientists to concur that hyperplasia was taking place.
While the Russian scientist studying swimmers would disagree, it is not actually known if hyperplasia is possible in humans. However, if you are willing to perform a little experiment, consider making your workout fast as opposed to hanging yourself for a whole weekend as these researchers did with their fine feathered friends.
If you want to develop more muscles, then you better get ready to do some hard work and prepare to gain them slowly. While there are a lot of discussions regarding the best way to build muscle, one thing is very clear; muscle building is a process of tissue repair and building. The body is naturally lazy, and it will only develop muscles to counter the load that it has been placed under. With this in mind, if you want to develop more muscles, then prepare to do some hard work and stick with it. In other words, the more weight you lift, the more your body tissue will develop, and the longer you participate in a regularly scheduled weight lifting regime, the more success you are likely to see.
Research has proven that in order to increase muscle mass, stress has to be applied to the body. The increase in stress causes an increase in hormone release, which increases the flow of nutrients to the muscles. As a person rests, the muscles will repair and hence grow in size and strength. While this might all sound very scientific, what it comes down to is this – gaining muscle requires time at the gym, lifting weights and increasing how much you attempt to lift over time. Doing this is the very best way to gain those six pack abs, bulky biceps and toned legs too.
Author Bio: Dan Carver is the creator of workoutsupplementreviews.com, a site devoted to providing up to date, unbiased reviews of everything you need to enhance your workout routines and reach your fitness goals fast.