• View
• Edit
• History
• Print

Building Muscle

Let's look to Byron to discover which of the following statements are true:

1) To get bigger you must get stronger

or

2) Strength and size are totally unrelated.

In this forum thread on building muscle size and strength, Byron writes:

Hatfield had it right all those years ago when he broke down hypertrophy into it's individual components. He explained how you could increase the size of the fibers, the fluid around the fibers, and the capillaries that supply the fibers.

Capillarization is really something more prone to happen in the extreme endurance athlete. Since that training is generally incompatible with training for size and strength, I think it's safe to say it's not that useful.

Increasing the fluid (sacroplasmic hypertrophy) happens faster than the others, but it seems to top off plateau pretty early on. The training for this doesn't do all that much to increase fiber size.

Thickening the fibers is most effectively done by getting stronger. "Stronger" is tricky though. In the strictest sense, this is just an increase in the amount of force with which the muscle can contract.

A muscle can get stronger via growth (more contractile protein) or by an increase in recruitment (the ability of the nervous system to fire the fibers).

You can get stronger at a lift by making the involved muscles stronger, or by improving your skill. (This is not the same as recruitment.)

When you first start training for strength, the neurological gains typically occur rapidly then plateau.

Over time, the thing with the most potential for growth is the thickening of the fibers.

If you always train for hypertrophy, that is, growth of a comibination of all factors, you'll probably never gain all the strength you could - unless you're a mutant or on steroids or both.

If you train for strength for a short while, you are going to make some neurological changes while some of the size-without-strength factors drop off. This is what I think happened to you.

If you continue to train for strength, your neurological gains are going to top off before long and your gains are going to come from thickening the fibers, size. (If your neurological gains don't top off soon, you're going to have to settle for a gold medal in weightlifting or a poewerlifting world record. Boo Hoo.)

If you ever want to bring your hypertrophy to a peak for some event, say for a bodybuilding comp, in the short term (3-4 months) you'd naturally change your training to maximize those factors. But long term, you'd have to go back to gaining strength to ultimately beat that peak.

Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. It's all based in science. You see a lot of people that have no taste for the laws of men or science. But, you don't see nearly as many breakingbreaking the laws of science.