Key Highlights
- But recent studies show there’s another wayUntil pretty recently, the conventional wisdom about building muscle was that it worked via a system you might think of as “tear and repair” – the idea being that working out causes microtears in the muscle fibres, which trigger the body’s repair processes, encouraging the muscles to come back bigger and stronger. That’s why many old-school trainers will tell you that there’s no gain without pain, and why a lot of bodybuilding advice includes increasingly byzantine ways of pushing your biceps and triceps to the point where you can’t do another repetition: the more trauma you can cause, the thinking goes, the more “swole” you can become. To be clear, this has worked for plenty of lifters – especially ones aided by under-the-counter performance enhancers, which can help recovery from even the most arduous workouts.
- But the current science suggests that there’s a better way to think about things.“The best evidence now suggests that the primary driver of muscle hypertrophy – the technical term for an increase in size of the muscle cells – is mechanical tension,” says Dr Anne Brady, a kinesiology professor who specialises in muscle quality, physical function and body composition.
- “Muscle damage certainly contributes, but it’s not the main factor.
- Typically, it’s more of a side-effect.”Burn those biceps?
- eopleImages/Getty ImagesTo explain this a bit more: when you lift a weight that’s heavy enough (or you perform enough repetitions of a movement to reach near-failure, which you’ll recognise from the fact that your reps slow down and feel more “grindy”), the resulting physical tension stretches the membrane that encases your muscle cells.
