It is often heard that muscle is built while resting, not in the gym, but what does this really mean? In brief, this statement extrapolates from the fact that the anabolic response to exercise is largely postponed until after exercise has already taken place and requires some time to take full effect.
Damage Control - Allow Enough Time to Rebuild
Intense exercise causes some muscle damage. These areas of micro-damage are an obligatory prerequisite for muscle growth. That is, muscle repair and growth depends on preexisting muscle damage caused by exercise. Given sufficient recovery time and appropriate nutrition the amount of new muscle tissue produced may then exceed the previous level and your muscles will increase in overall size. In essence, this is the biochemical basis for bodybuilding - that is, if all goes well. If, on the other hand, sufficient time is not allowed for muscles to fully recover, or if nutrition does not supply the needed amounts of substrates to support new muscle synthesis, then the growth phase will be blunted. Excessive exercise furthermore, will destroy already damaged muscle before it has a chance to rebuild; we then enter a state of negative muscle growth (net muscle loss), a condition known as Overtraining Syndrome. In essence, building muscle is a tradeoff between resting too little, which destroys overexerted muscle, and resting too much rest, which does not stimulate muscles sufficiently to provoke functional adaptation.
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Posted in Muscle Growth | Tagged anabolism, atrogene, catabolic, cortisol, creatine, growth hormone, IGF-1, insulin, insulin-like growth factor 1, muscle groups, overtraining syndrome, recovery, stress, testosterone |
Three conditions must be met in order to establish the best metabolic conditions for muscle anabolism: 1) an exercise stimulus is required to incite muscle’s biosynthetic machinery into action; 2) proper nutrition is needed to provide the proper substrates for growth and; 3) adequate rest is required so that muscle’s biosynthetic machinery can work at optimal efficiency.
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Several key growth factors and hormones control muscle development. Of these, testosterone and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) are extremely important.
Testosterone & IGF-1 Stimulate Muscle Growth
Testosterone is a steroid hormone that triggers the reading of genes coding for proteins essential for muscle development. By mechanistic contrast, IGF-1 promotes the physical elaboration of these proteins once their genes have been read. Hence, the participation of both these myogenic (muscle generating) agents is needed for optimal muscle development. Read More »
Posted in Muscle Growth | Tagged anterior pituitary, creatine, creatine facts, creatine side effects, Disuse atrophy, GH, growth hormone, IGF-1, insulin-like growth factor 1, LH, Luteinizing hormone, muscular dystrophy, testosterone |
It has been known for quite some time that cell swelling provokes a biosynthetic response. That is, giving cells an agent that makes them take up water from their surroundings (to the point where they actually inflate with water) also causes them to increase their production of new proteins as well as to retard the degradation of existing proteins - an overall anabolic response.
Most importantly for the purposes of this blog, creatine monohydrate is one of the most effective swelling agents that stimulates cell anabolism. In fact, the most widely accepted side effect attributed to creatine supplementation is a process known as muscle volumizing; muscles increasing in volume (size) because of creatine ingestion.
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Anabolism: The set of metabolic pathways that construct molecules from smaller units (Wikipedia).
Let me expand this rather abstract definition of anabolism to better suit our purposes.
With reference to muscle development, anabolism is the combined set of cellular and hormonal circumstances that cause muscle growth to out weigh muscle breakdown following exercise.
With reference to creatine supplementation, recent scientific studies have been revealing some very exciting ways that creatine supplementation helps boost cellular anabolism.
First, the mere physical presence of creatine within a muscle cell serves as an anabolic stimulus. Creatine monohydrate causes muscles to swell with water, which turns out to be an anabolic stimulus for cells.
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