Muscles: Doing More to Keep Up

     Your body is very energy efficient.  Any tissue that burns a lot of energy that you are not using, your body will break down and use it elsewhere.  Muscles use a lot of energy just sitting there.  Consequently your body is always keeping track of just how much you use and need your muscle mass and getting rid of any excess.  (Too bad it doesn’t do that for fat.)  How does your body know how much muscle you need?  It measures just how much microtrauma takes place in your muscles.  When you push a muscle to its limit and ask it to do more than it can, little micro tears occur in the muscle.  When this happens, the body says, “we need more muscle” and proceeds to build more.  When the chemical messengers that are released with this trauma stop being released your body figures it has plenty of muscle and starts tearing it down.  This teeter-tooter balance between ‘no enough’ and ‘too much’ is what physiologists call homeostasis.  Homeostasis (balance) means health to the body.

     One extra piece is needed in this puzzle.  The stress hormone cortisol suppresses muscle building.  That means that too much muscle stress from too much microtrauma actually stops muscle building.  So…

How to build muscle strength:

     To build muscle mass and strength you have to push your muscles to do more than they are capable of just long enough to produce a little bit of microtrauma but not too much.

     For average people that looks like this.  Contract or extend the muscle you want to build against resistance.  The amount of resistance should be just enough to push the muscle to failure somewhere between the 7th and 12th push.  When I say “push to failure” what I mean is that as you are pushing your muscle just can’t push any longer or further.  It will start to tremble and then begin to fail.  For average people pushing to failure just once with each muscle group twice a week is all that is needed.  The muscle needs a couple of days to rebuild after the microtrauma and it needs proper nutrition to rebuild with.  Muscles are made of amino acids and need them to repair themselves.  It has been found that the optimal time to flood the system with good amino acids from protein is about 15 minutes after the workout…so have a nice protein shake after your workout.

     Your whole muscle building workout might only take 20 minutes twice a week.  Alternate muscle building with another 20 minutes twice a week doing interval training for lung capacity and cardiovascular tone and you have the some of the best health insurance you can get.