As our bodies repair this normal damage, our muscles grow back bigger and stronger. “We create this stimulus to tell our body, ‘Hey, we’re going to keep moving all this weight—maybe we make a bigger, stronger muscle to do that,’” says Chad Kerksick, PhD, an associate professor...
Hypertrophy training involves lifting light to medium weights for high to moderate reps to create metabolic stress and muscle tension, which increases muscle protein synthesis. This forces the muscles to grow bigger. Strength training involves lifting heavy weights for low reps. This causes structural ...
When they’re working out their muscles, the more oxygen they have, the faster and stronger they get. This is due to the fact that nitric oxide helps oxygen transfer in the muscle cells. It also helps the muscles to recover from the stress of exercise by helping them repair themselves fas...
The stem cells from fat are sending signals that trigger simultaneous muscle degeneration and formation of new fat cells, scar tissue, and/or collagen deposition within the muscle. (2) This ultimately leads to adecrease in strengthand hampers your muscles' ability to recover properly from training...
Weak muscles or muscle spasms Bruises Swelling Trouble moving your hip or leg Inguinal hernia.This happens when fat or a loop of your intestine pushes through a weak spot in the muscles of your lower abdomen (belly). You may see a bulge in your groin or scrotum. A quarter of all men ...
If you ever have any gripping or burning in your neck muscles, I would recommend stepping back down until your body is ready for the increase in weight. Just because we can pick up the bigger weights doesn’t mean we should! The second thing you can do might seem counterintuitive. It’...
This is the same as phosphocreatine, the same compound stored in your body’s muscles. While you may find this available as a supplement — and perhaps think it’s better due to its likeness to what your body naturally produces — no scientific evidence supports the notion that it’s more...
Good massage therapists are the ones with more training and a bigger toolkit. They do what they can with the tools they judge to be the most useful, and they candidly discuss risks, benefits, evidence, and controversies. They don’t just pay lip service to humility as a general principle ...
I think we can all agree that for each individual there is a technical, mechanical ideal we’d like to see in specific movements.The same can be said for posture. Posture is basically your body’s neutral zone. It’s the position of alignment where the most skeletal muscles are at a re...
Don’t tell me I’m not going to get huge after I run a hypertrophy program. I’ve been training for strength because they told me a natural could only get bigger by getting stronger. But now I’ll be training special for hypertrophy and I’m gonna pack on mass just like my...