Quaranturnt Day 50 - Treasure Chest

​Hola Quaranturntadores,

A handful of you have asked me about how to build muscle, or more scientifically, muscular hypertrophy. The first thing you are likely thinking about is Arnold and body building and scary veins and being huge. Aka, I just lost all the girls and ⅓ of the guys here. But you shouldn’t think about muscular hypertrophy like that. I’ve never talked to someone who didn’t want to build *some* muscle - guys are usually interested in pecs biceps and shoulders, while most girls are zooming in on instagram booties on the daily. So I am confident all of you want to understand this, just don’t limit your thoughts to people like Kali Muscle. 

There are 3 means of inducing muscular hypertrophy:

• Muscular Damage
  
• Mechanical Tension
  
• Metabolic Stress
  

Today I’ll describe muscular damage a bit. Muscular damage is pretty self-explanatory in that it is literally damage to the muscle fibers. Small tears in the muscle tissue lead to repair and regeneration for larger muscles. This is the primary source of that feeling of soreness. There are two ways you cause damage to the muscles, and they’re pretty intuitive if you think about it. 

The first is by doing new movements. Any sort of novel stimulus will cause your body to work in ways it hasn’t before. Muscle fibers will contract against forces coming from directions they aren’t used to. Muscle fibers will team up with new muscle fibers. And all of it will be work your body isn’t yet accustomed to, so the system will be unprepared and the muscle structure will fail (aka tear) in a handful of places. 

The second is by stretching the muscle while it is contracted. That means you are squeezing it tight, but still lengthening it. At first look this might seem like an unreasonable scenario, but that is actually what you are doing every time you go down in the squat, or lower yourself in the pushup, or extend in your pushups. This lowering portion of any movement is called the eccentric (as opposed to the flexing part which is called concentric). In eccentric movement, the muscle is holding tension, but being stretched out. This causes tears and thus soreness and muscular hypertrophy. To imagine what is going on more tangibly, think of someone taking steps up a snowy mountain, but still sliding down - the snow will get dragged around and torn up. The flexing of the muscle is the skiier trying to hike, the sliding down is the continued extension of the muscle, and the destruction of that fresh powpow is damage to your muscle. 

If you are impatient and want to read about the next couple of means of muscular hypertrophy, then check out Bret’s article here. If you are impatient and just want the workout, then see my IG post here.