Best tips to Gain Muscle In The Blink Of An Eye

 There are three ways that muscles can be stimulated to change. So, let's review those three ways and discuss what happens inside the muscle.

It's very clear that moving weights, or using bands or using bodyweight, for instance, in the 30 to 80% of one rep maximum, will be the most beneficial range in muscle hypertrophy and strength, so muscle growth and strength. And there will be a bias if you're moving weights in the 75% to 80% range or even going above 85 and 90%; you're going to bias your improvements towards strength gains. 

And suppose you use weights in the 30% of your one repetition, maximum, or 40%, or 50%, and do many more repetitions, of course. In that case, you are biasing towards hypertrophy and what some people call muscle endurance. But that's a complicated term. Because of endurance, we almost always think of it as relating to running, swimming, or some long bouts of activity. So, 30 to 80% of one repetition maximum, it doesn't matter, for the sake of hypertrophy, except at the far end, when you're trying to buy us for strength. It is clear, however, that one needs to perform those sets to failure where you can't perform another repetition in good form or near failure. 

All sorts of interesting nomenclature are popping up all over the internet, some of which are scientific, some of which are not scientific about how you are supposed to perceive how close you were to failure, etc. But some very interesting principles relate to how the nerves connect to the muscles that strongly predict whether or not this exercise you're performing will benefit you. 

So here's how it goes. Untrained individuals, meaning they have been doing resistance exercise for anywhere from zero, probably out to about two years. However, for some people, it might be zero to one year, but those are the so-called beginners; they're untrained. For those people, the key parameter is to perform enough sets of a given exercise per muscle per week.

 Okay, the same is true for people who have been training for one or two years or more; how many sets to perform differs. Depending on whether or not you're trained or untrained. So you're somebody who's been doing some resistance exercise on and off over the years, and you decide you want to get serious about that for the sake of sport or offsetting age-related declines in strength. The range of sets to improve strength to activate these cascades in the muscle ranges from two, believe it or not, to 20 per week. Again, these are sets per week and don't necessarily all have to be performed. I will discuss the number of sessions in the same weight training session. 

So it appears that five sets per week in this 30% to 80% of the one repetition, maximum range, getting close to failure, or occasionally actually going to full muscular failure, which isn't really for muscular failure, but the inability to generate a contraction of the muscle or move the weight in good form. I'll go deeper into that briefly, but about five weekly sets are required to maintain your muscles. So think about that. If you're opposed to resistance training, you will lose muscle size and strength, your metabolism will drop, and your posture will get worse. Everything in the context of Nerf to muscle connectivity will worsen over time. 

Unless you generate five sets or more of this, 30% to 80% of your one repetition maximum weekly, okay, so for the typical person who hasn't done a lot of weight training, you need to do at least five sets per muscle group. There are three major stimuli for changing the way that muscle works and making muscles stronger, larger or better in some way. Those are stress, tension, and damage. Those three things don't necessarily all have to be present. But stress has to exist; something has to be different in how the nerve communicates with the muscle and how the muscle contracts or performs, which makes the muscle need to change. 

So, this is reminiscent of neuroplasticity in the brain; something must happen. Certain chemicals must be present, and certain processes must happen, or a tissue won't change itself. But if those processes and events do happen, then the tissue has no option except to change. So, muscles move, as I mentioned, because nerves dump chemicals onto the muscles, but they move because they have these things called myosin and actin filaments. And if you want to read up on this, you can look online. You can use the sliding filament theory of muscle contraction if you want to go deep down that rabbit hole. Interesting, you can learn about this in a muscle physiology class. Along the length of the muscle, you have what's called myosin. And think of myosin. 

As it's like a wire, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a bunch of beads and wires that extend across the muscle, that's the simplest way to describe it. And the myosin is surrounded by these little beads called actin. The way muscles get bigger is that the myosin gets thicker. It's a protein, right, and it gets thicker. So that put this in your mind if you're listening to this, or even if you're watching it on YouTube, the way to think about this whole actin-myosin thing and muscles getting bigger is imagine that you're holding a bouquet of balloons a bunch of balloons by their strings, except you're not holding the strings all at their bottom. 

So, the bouquet needs to be nicely arranged. It's not like some balloons all up at the top, and you're holding the strings down at the bottom. Imagine that one of the balloons is very close to your hand, and the other is slightly higher. And so this bouquet could be more organized. In other words, the strings extending out of your hand, the strings rather extending out of your hand, are all different lengths. And so the balloons are all over the place. That's what myosin looks like in the muscle.

 And those strings are what we call the filaments. Then, the myosin head is the balloon when you properly stress a muscle, give it sufficient tension, or damage it just enough. An adaptive response occurs when a very specific protein is synthesized. It's myosin. The myosin gets thicker. In other words, the balloons get bigger.

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