Causes of Muscle Growth

For muscles to grow, three things are needed:

1. Stimulus - exercise is needed to make the muscles work, energy and cause microscopic damage to the fibers.

2nd Nutrition - after intense exercise the muscles need to replenish their stocks of fuel.

3. Remains - it is during the recovery phase or resting muscles repair the microscopic damage and grow.

Muscle size increases due to hypertrophic adaptation and an increase in cross sectional area of ​​muscle fibers. Intensive exercise impacts more on the strength influencing fast contraction of type II fibers, therefore increasing muscle size, with a greater force.

This exhausts the muscle energy stores and cause microscopic damage to muscle tissue. During recovery, glycogen and phosphocreatine recovery from carbohydrates and creatine ingested as food or supplements. The amino acids in the diet will always result in the synthesis of proteins that repair damaged muscles and lead to the creation of larger muscle fibers.

In order to continually improve is necessary to achieve higher levels of training intensity otherwise the improvement process stops. Fortunately, this is fairly easy to plan, though some basic principles and rules are clearly followed. The following articles in this series will examine these principles in more detail.