Without muscles we would just be a sack of bones within our skin. The muscles we are most familiar with are the ones that grow around our bones which pull and contract in order for our bones to move in a particular direction.
3 Types of Muscle
There are 3 ‘types’ or categories of muscle that our body needs to operate.
1. Cardiac Muscle
Your cardiac muscle is your heart and it is the only muscle that constantly expands and contracts in order to pump blood around the body.
2. Smooth Muscles
Like the heart muscle, smooth muscles also perform without us having to consciously think about it, such as moving food through our system and around the digestive tract.
3. Skeletal Muscles
The skeletal muscles are the ones that really concern us and are the muscles that cover the entire skeleton. Without them we could not move and they make up around 50% of our body weight.
When we workout with resistance training such as weight lifting, quite often we will put weight on, despite losing body fat. This is because muscle weighs more than fat.
The actual operation of a muscle is a complicated connection involving the brain, electrical signals and nerve endings. Despite my thorough research and new found knowledge on this subject, you’ll be pleased to know that we won’t be touching on this!
What is interesting to know however is that each muscle can only be contracted, and so can only move in one direction. Every muscle has an opposing muscle which runs either side of the bone, and works in unison. When one muscle contracts, the other relaxes.
The diagram below shows how muscles work:
How Muscles Grow
Muscle growth has been a long debated science with a few theories to explain how and why muscles grow bigger. What we do know for sure is that muscles do grow as a result of resistance training.
The common belief is that when muscles are subjected to intense activity, such as a weight lifting workout, the internal fibers of the muscle are damaged with hundreds of micro-tears. The body’s amazing regeneration ability naturally repairs these tears and your muscle is returned to its former size.
As your workout routine progresses, the brain anticipates this internal abuse and overcompensates the repair process by increasing the muscle’s size and strength.
This is the science in its simplest form because the corresponding muscle growth also depends upon other factors such as what foods you eat to feed the muscles and how much rest you get for your muscles to recover.