NO ONE CAN NATURALLY...
grow muscle or add muscle to their body. This is a myth. One’s natural gene pool remains constant as one enters and exits this world. Muscles can grow by taking protein supplements, huge dozes of food, or large quantities of lifting repetitions. Muscles can be chemically enhanced. However, these un-natural gains come with price tags that can damage the body or take years to repay. Natural Strength comes from the simple process of recruiting.
Human beings generally use only 20% of their muscle to perform activities. The other 80% of their muscle fibers remain to be utilized as stimulation activates their potential. When an individual learns how to recruit muscle from the 80% of unused resources the individual begins to “GET STRONGER” because the body has stimulate more working muscles to run, jump, lift, push, and throw. Building strength is the art of stimulating the muscles within the body to work more effectively and efficiently.
When an individual throw, lifts, or moves an object he is propelling a mass (load) from one point to another. There is a percentage of muscle needed to successfully propel the load. As the load is increased the percentage of muscle needed must also increase. The brain recognizes this need and recruits the muscles needed to succeed.
Example: If a man is to move a 50-pound bag of potatoes from the floor to the table, he usually requires 20% of his muscles to pick it off the ground. Increase the poundage and the percentage of muscle needed to lift increases. If the bag is now a 100 pounds of potatoes he will require 35%, if the bag becomes a 150 pounds of potatoes he will require 45%, and so on.
Recruiting muscles to work efficiently and effectively creates the strength of an individual. The size of the man is not the measure of his strength. The effective use of a high percentage of the muscle mass within the individual is the key to power.
The Motor Unit
The motor unit is the fundamental unit of the neuromuscular system. It is composed of a single motor neuron and all the muscle fibers with which it synapses (A synapse is a junction between two nerve cells, where the club-shaped tip of a nerve fiber almost touches another cell in order to transmit signals). The number of muscle fibers innervated by a single motor neuron may be smaller than 20 or larger than 1000. This number represents the number of branches at the end of an axon, and the larger motor neurons usually will have larger threshold potentials. The ratio of muscle fibers to motor neurons in a whole muscle indicates the degree of control one has over a muscle contraction; the smaller the number of muscle fibers per motor unit, the more precise the control of the muscle, the larger the number of muscle fibers per motor neuron, the coarser the control of the muscle.(McGinnis, 1999, pp. 282-283)
The size of the force produced by the muscle is directly related to the number of active recruited motor units. If a small force is desired only a small number of muscle fibers contract to produce the tension. If a larger force is desired more motor units are recruited and a larger number of muscle fibers contract to produce more tension.
(McGinnis, 1999, p. 282)Biomechanics of Sport and Exercise, Peter McGinnis, Copywrite, 1999, ISBN 0-87322-955-x
Size VS Power (Notes from Jonathan Sherbourne, Platinum Sports Academy)
How Much Protein?
Evidence for the protein needs of athletes has been accumulating since 1978. Dr. Gontzea and colleagues at the Institute of Medicine in Bucharest were the first to show that exercise causes the body to use protein at a much faster rate. Like the RDA studies, they also measured nitrogen balance, but added the essential variable of exercise. A positive nitrogen balance means that the body is obtaining sufficient protein from the diet. A negative nitrogen balance means that the body has insufficient input of protein, and is therefore, cannibalizing muscle and other protein structures to provide its daily needs.
First, the athletes were instructed to stop exercising and remain sedentary for two weeks. They were given a daily portion of 1.o grams of protein per kilogram (2.2 pounds to the kilogram) of body weight (33% above the RDA). As long as they remained sedentary, this level of protein intake maintained a positive nitrogen balance. Then they were given workouts of two hours a day. Nitrogen balance dropped to negative within two days. Protein intake one-third above the RDA was insufficient to offset the increase protein needs caused by the exercise.
Growing Muscle
What about strength and short event athletes, who are especially concerned not only to maintain protein status, but also to increase muscle growth? There is no doubt that very high protein intake, 3.0 g/kg a day, maintains a highly positive nitrogen balance. (But the use of nitrogen for building muscle is not controlled by the protein you eat.) It is controlled by processes in the liver that hold the available store at precisely the level required to meet bodily demand. All excess protein is simply broken down into carbohydrate and area waist.
(Despite what the supplement ads imply, it is not protein intake that controls muscle growth, but rather the demand for growth caused by the trauma of intense exercise.) No one ever grew an ounce of muscle from simply gulping protein. Muscle grows from pushing poundage-Period. I
f, and only if, you are doing intense strength or speed workouts (over 3 hours per day) then there is evidence that very high protein intake does yield greater muscle growth) (Dr. Frank Consolaz and colleagues at the Letterman Army Institute of Research in San Francisco, gave healthy men either 1.4/kg/day or 2.8g/kg/day of protein in a 3600 caloric diet. Then they trained the heck out of them to near exhaustion for 40 days. Subjects on the lower protein intake, which we have seen is sufficient for most endurance athletes, gained 1.21 kg of lean mass. Subjects on the higher protein intake gained a massive 3.28 kg (7.2pounds ) of lean mass.)
Mo Protein, Mo Protein
I have watched big lads scarf down 24 eggs whites at a sitting. Others tell me they have eaten protein to the point of vomiting, under the illusion that it will turn into muscle. Plain dumb!!! If you eat enough excess of protein to grow a hippopotamus, then that’s what you’ll become, a roly-poly lump with a burgeoning rump.
So, even if you train your brains out, don’t fall for the muscle mania myth that you need to stuff protein. Despite magazine ads claiming “25 pounds of solid muscle in 12 weeks, (Most athletes furiously pumping the iron, and on the best nutrition, gain less than 10 pounds a year. The best we have measured in drug-free athletes at the Colgan Institute is 18 ¼ pounds.)
Physiological Dynamics
Improved nutrition must wait on nature to renew whole bodily systems before its effects can show. You have to wait on nature to grow muscles. Muscle proteins are replaced about every six months. The limiting rate of turnover of muscle cells indicates that it is impossible, evening the biggest men, to grow more than about one ounce of new muscle per day. That’s 23 pounds a year. (Oh you ___________ of tricks to make muscles, hold more water, and look bigger, but growth of new muscle tissue is absolutely controlled by physiology.)
Weight Lifting for Size VS Weightlifting for Strength
The following is a standard workout prescribed around the athletic communities. We will provide an example of workout for a 13-year old average male athlete who does the basic workout for a one day period. He is a baseball player, has six years of athletic participation, and has a weight of 145 pounds
