You must have heard the term “muscle hypertrophy” but do you really know what muscle hypertrophy actually is?
This article will explain to you everything about muscle hypertrophy and how can you use it to grow your muscles. So let’s go for it.
What Is Muscle Hypertrophy?
Well, hypertrophy basically means an increase or growth in your cells. So muscle hypertrophy simply means an increase in the size of your muscle cells. The best way to achieve muscle hypertrophy is by lifting weights.
It increases the size of muscle fibers that are already present in your body. It is not related to the increase in the number of muscle fibers, that’s a totally different process called hyperplasia.
There are two types of muscle hypertrophy:
- Myofibrillar: It refers to growth in the contraction parts of the muscle.
- Sarcoplasmic: It refers to an increase in glycogen storage of muscle.
Both these types have their own effects on your muscle building goals. Myofibrillar hypertrophy helps in increasing your strength and speed while Sacroplasmic hypertrophy does more focus on building endurance capability of your muscles.
SUMMARY: An increase in the size of your muscle fibers is called muscle hypertrophy.
How Actual Muscle Growth Happens
Most people think that muscle grows during the workout. Whereas, the truth is exactly the opposite. You grow your muscles in the resting period, during the workout you just damage them. Let’s understand it thoroughly.
To increase your muscle size, basically, two factors are important – stimulation and repair.
When you lift weights or do resistance training, you put a lot of mechanical pressure on your muscles. In order to generate power for lifting weights, you need to contract your muscle fibers. This contraction occurs during exercising, stimulates your muscles. Due to which, your body activates a repair response to the muscles.
Every time you workout, you contract your muscles and damage the muscle fibers. The repair of these damaged muscle fibers occurs during the resting period or after the workout. This is the time when growth happens.
SUMMARY: Lifting weights leads to wear and tear in your muscle fibers. Now during the replacement and repair of these damaged muscle fibers, actual muscle growth takes place.
How To Maximize Muscle Hypertrophy
Everybody wants to build maximum muscle mass possible and for that, you need to maximize your muscle hypertrophy. A study done in 2010 shows that various factors are responsible for the hypertrophic response. Genetic structure, age, gender, training experience, training protocol, and nutrition are the major factors.
However, you can maximize your muscle hypertrophy by optimizing your nutrition and workout. Here are the things that can give you maximum gains:
Train For Both Types Of Muscle Hypertrophy
Myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic – both types of muscle hypertrophy are important to grow your muscle size. So train with both light and heavy weights as different weights give you different hypertrophic results.
Don’t Stick To A Particular Rep Range
Most people keep doing their sets in a rep range of 8-12 which is not a very good strategy. It can give you muscle-building benefits as a beginner but in the long run, you have to optimize your workouts with different rep range.
Your body has two types of muscle fibers – slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscle fibers. When you train with heavy weight in a lift moderate to heavy weight within a rep range of 4-10, you train for fast-twitch muscle fibers (strength-based). On the other hand, lifting light weight for a rep range of 10-20 trains your slow-twitch muscle fibers (endurance-based).
Try to design your workout such that you get the benefits of all rep range. The best strategy is to keep 60% of your lifts in a rep range of 8-12, 20% less than 8, and 20% more than 12.
Progressive Overloading
You may have heard the term progressive overloading. It simply means to gradually increase the mechanical pressure on your muscles or the volume of your workout. It is the best way to maximizing your muscle hypertrophy.
Your workout volume is basically the product of your sets, reps, and weights.
Volume = Sets * Reps * Weights
How to achieve progressive overloading
You can do progressive overloading by increasing your total workout volume. You can lift slightly heavier than before, or with the same weight for more reps, or by adding one more set in your exercise.
Take Enough Protein And Caloric Surplus Diet
No matter how intense your training is, if your nutrition is not up to the mark then you can never achieve the best results. Take about 300 – 700 calories more than your maintenance with a lot of complex carbs and healthy fats. Carbohydrates are the primary source of energy and you need surplus carbs to fuel your workouts.
Apart from that, enough amount of protein is highly important. Protein is the building block of muscles and made up of amino acids. Protein is a macronutrient that your body requires to build muscles and to repair the damaged muscle tissues.
Muscular hypertrophy takes place when muscle protein synthesis exceeds muscle protein breakdown. Hence, taking high protein (at least 2 times your lean body mass in kg) is essential to maximize your muscle hypertrophy.
You must have read:
13 High-Protein Foods For Lean Muscle Gain
Rest And Recovery
After workout and nutrition, recovery is the third factor that determines your muscle hypertrophy. In order to gain more muscles, some people start doing more training which sometimes leads to overtraining. Instead of increasing muscle hypertrophy, this will hamper your gains.
It is very important to give proper time to recover your muscles. Different muscle groups need different time to recover. Shorter muscles like biceps and triceps need about 48 hours to recover while longer muscle like legs requires 72 hours. So don’t train any muscle for more than two times a week.
In addition to recovery, take a good night’s sleep of about 7-9 hours daily. It is the resting time when growth takes place so it’s important to take proper rest to maximize your muscle hypertrophy.
What Is Muscle Hypertrophy – The Takeaway
So this was the science-based article explaining what is muscle hypertrophy and how to maximize it.
The growth in the size of your muscle fibers is called muscle hypertrophy. You can maximize it by the following factors:
- Optimize your workout with different rep range.
- Lift heavy weights.
- Focus on progressive overloading.
- Take a high protein diet.
- Give proper time to recover your muscles.
- Take adequate sleep of 7 – 9 hours.
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