How We Build Muscle
 
You may think that the act of lifting weights and doing resistance exercise is what makes your muscles bigger and stronger. When you are done with your bicep curls, you feel your muscle bulge a bit, so you think that the act of lifting the weight is somehow making it bigger. Well, in a sense you are right, but not really. How can this be so?
 
Weight training is a structured way of getting your muscles to adapt to increasing amounts of effort by building strength. You lift a weight that challenges your current level of strength a little bit. Once this weight becomes easy to lift, you increase the resistance again. As this new weight becomes easier to lift, this is the process of adaptation, meaning your muscles are becoming accustomed to this resistance by building the necessary strength to counteract it. This is called progressive resistance training because you continually increase the weight you are lifting in order to challenge your body and stimulate a strength adaptation. This strength comes from the combined force of neuromuscular efficiency (how well your brain interacts and commands your muscle fibers to contract synchronously), the size of your muscle fibers, and efficient movement patterns. How do these adaptations occur?
 
Well, what actually happens when you do resistance training is that you break your muscles down. Yup, that right—you are actually inflicting microtrauma by creating microtears in your muscle fibers. Muscles gain strength and size when they are pushed beyond their comfort zone. They are overloaded! This overload damages your muscle tissue, and it is the repairs that the body makes to these microtears that causes the subsequent increase in muscle size and strength. These muscle tears are why you feel sore the day or two after a tough resistance training workout. So, in reality, the actual act of lifting weights does not make your muscles bigger or stronger; rather, the resistance provides the initial stimulus to spark this adaptive process within the musculature. The key to building bigger and stronger muscles is allowing your muscles to rest and recover properly outside of the gym.