The Science of Building Muscle

Yes, you read the post title correctly: building muscle is a science. It is something that must be done in an intelligent and orderly manner and must be measurable. Building muscle is like building a house. There are certain laws that apply when building a house and likewise there are laws that apply when building muscle. We'll cover these in this post.

Let's start by looking firstly at what muscle is. The body is made up of three main types of muscle: cardiac, which is the heart muscle, smooth muscle which is the soft tissue inside the body like the organs and then skeletal muscles which are the ones we're going to train.

Now the various muscle types serve different functions and it's just great to know what they do although they don't directly affect your training regimen in any way. The cardiac muscle pumps blood through the body at an amazing force. The smooth muscles assist with digestion and other bodily functions and the skeletal muscles keep us upright, enable us to walk and carry things etc.

Now before we get into the specifics of building muscle there is something about the body that we need to understand. Our bodies are always looking for equilibrium. They will always change in order to make sure that a balance throughout the body is maintained. This is called homeostasis. Now that we know that the body will do all it can to find a balance we can move on to why it is important to build muscle correctly.

So how does one go about building muscle? Do we just start lifting weights, heavy weights, or light weights for many reps? What do we do to build muscle? By the end of this article I'm trusting that you will have a good grasp of the science of building muscle.

Let's go back to that word homestasis. The body always wants to be in balance which means that it will only expend the minimal amount of energy needed to do a task. So what does this mean for building muscle? How are we going to  get the body to grow muscle when it's first instinct is to preserve the muscle mass that it has. Now comes the science.

In order to build larger muscles, we have to push our bodies past a point of comfort into a place of stress. Why do we do this? It's quite interesting really. The body wants to preserve what it has right? So when we push our bodies to a point of stress the body does not like it and is forced to adapt to ensure that it does not feel that stress again. By lifting weights, we put the body under stress which it does not like. What the body then does to keep homeostasis, or stay in balance is to grow larger muscles so that the next time we lift weights it will not be so stressful.

And there you have it in a nutshell ladies and gentleman. What we will do as we progress is to look at specific ways of ensuring that we are continually stressing the body so that it grows. We will also look at another important aspect of training and that is recuperation or recovery after training. While training is very important, recovery is equally imortant.

So now that we understand why building muscle is a science, let's look at some programmes that are out there and see if they fit the criteria.