What happens during weight training?
Weight training and muscle building routines are not necessarily all about ending up looking like a prime Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In fact, there are hundred of athletes competing in next year’s 2012 Olympics who are quite the opposite build to that. They need just a few core muscle strengths in order to compete at the highest sporting levels in the world against other fit and strong competitors.
This includes those competing in kayaking, athletics, bobsleigh, cycling and of course gymnastics – an often overlooked but highly demanding sport. Really, there are very few sports in the Olympic games that don’t require the need for some kind of muscle building.
Yet the actually process of muscle building occurs in the same way no matter what your sport or personal achievement may be.
When a muscle contracts against a large amount of resistance (e.g. dumb bell) then it begins to adapt to become much stronger than before. This happens because tiny tears begin to form in the muscle fibres prompting something known as the muscle-protein synthesis to repair the strained and damaged muscle.
When amino acids try to rebuild the muscle and reinforce the fibres, then they become stronger and eventually physically bigger; able to withstand more stress. Performance enhancing supplements and repair compounds can speed up this process further.
Of course the opposite is true too. The less we use our muscles, the more likely they are to wither and weaken and our frames look smaller.
Additionally, research shows that after a work-out, muscles continue to repair and grow for up to two-days. Therefore the best way to work on the whole body is not by targetting individual muscles each or every other day but by doing full body work-outs every two days. Then the muscles are in a constant process of building.
You couldn’t possibly intensively work out everyday because your body would never accept the nutrients it needs to build new muscles. It would just concentrate on getting you through the workout instead, which is detrimental to the body and repair of the muscles.
Despite the muscle building process being scientifically the same between all people, it’s worth noting that the rate of progress totally depends on the individual trying to build muscle. Metabolisms vary between all people which will ultimately be one of the deciding factors when trying to build new and stronger muscles.