How the Body Builds Incredible Strength Without Getting Bigger

humans have an incredible capacity to improve their strength with certain types of exercise most often through resistance training but what actually happens inside the body when you get stronger and what's the best training protocol to accomplish this often you hear that if you want to get stronger you have to get bigger and yes it is true that often a bigger muscle is a stronger muscle however you can actually get significant strength improvements without much or any increases in muscular size or muscular hypertrophy so today we're going to explain the different strength adaptations that occur with

getting stronger by getting bigger versus getting stronger without putting on much size and we're going to do this by showing you some awesome relevant Anatomy by taking you from the brain through the nerves and into the muscles and of course talk about some of the training protocols to improve your strength so let's do this so let me first start by asking why in the world would anyone not not want to get bigger and stronger at the same time well there are plenty of athletes where they may want to be as strong as possible without putting

on much weight or in other words their strength to body weight ratio is important this is also known as relative strength which is a measure of how strong an individual is in say like a particular lift or movement compared to their body weight like having a high relative strength would be very beneficial for say something like a vertical jump also there are sports where people have to be in certain weight classes so they may want to maximize their strength at that weight but what is muscular strength muscular strength is about how much force your muscles

can produce and we most often represent this by someone's one rep max the greatest amount of weight you could lift one time and obviously today we're going to talk about how you can improve that now earlier I mentioned that we were going to take you from the brain through the nerves and into the muscles and what we will see is that we can get adaptations in multiple places along this chain and what when I say into the muscles we're going to go deep inside of the muscles to show you how the muscle contracts as well

as certain intracellular adaptations that improve without increasing the size of the muscle fiber it's ridiculously awesome so let's get into the brain when you decide to contract a muscle this starts all the way up in the brain in the motor cortex which is this fold or what we refer to as a gyrus on the posterior aspect of the frontal lobe the signal will move from the motor cortex through a neuron called an upper motor neuron which travels down the spinal cord and this upper motor neuron will eventually synapse with a lower motor neuron at a

specific segment of the spinal cord depending on the muscle we're sending the signal to for example if this signal is going to the biceps brachi this synapse between the upper and lower motor neuron would occur at C5 or C6 spinal cord levels if the signal were going to a lower muscle like the quads the synapse would occur at the L2 L3 or L4 spinal levels but after the synapse occurs the axon of the lower motor neuron and therefore the continuation of the signal will travel through a spinal nerve until it reaches its Target muscle where

it will then synapse with specific muscle fibers that make up that Target muscle and this causes those muscle fibers to contract now let's pause right here for a second and connect some more dots that lower motor neuron that connected to a certain amount of muscle fibers within the whole muscle is called a motor unit or the textbook definition that I will often give my students is a motor unit is the motor neuron and the muscle fibers it controls but with our example we only activated one lower motor neuron and therefore one motor unit which means

we only activated a small amount of the total number of muscle fibers within that whole muscle and so this is only going to generate a minimal amount of force and so this is how motor unit recruitment works if I lift something light I need fewer muscle fibers to do that so I only need to recruit a few motor units but if I want to lift something heavy I need more muscle fibers to be activated within the muscle and so then I would start by activating more upper motor neurons in that motor cortex which would then

in turn activate more lower motor neurons that form the motor units with those muscle fibers and I would generate more force or lift something heavier so hopefully you are seeing that the force exerted by a muscle during a contraction depends on the number of motor units recruited not only does it depend on the number of motor units recruited but it also depends on the rate or how fast those signals can be sent to the muscle a faster signal generally means more force and this is where we see one of our first improvements in strength without

the muscles undergoing hypertrophy because with specific types of training which we'll get into later your nervous system this pathway that we just discussed gets more efficient at recruiting motor units it does this by getting better with recruiting more motor units simultaneously on demand as well as by increased synchronization of those motor units when you first start strength training your muscle fibers might not fire in perfect sequence or in a perfectly coordinated manner but as you continue to train your nervous system gets better at synchronizing those motor units working together more efficiently and all this results

in more Force gener ated by the muscle without getting any bigger and real quick I want to take a moment to say thank you to the sponsor of today's video ag1 as someone who tries to prioritize high performance in most every aspect of my life it's important to have a supplement that supports whole body health and that's where ag1 comes in ag1 is a daily foundational nutrition supplement that's backed by research studies it's packed with 75 ingredients that support focus and energy nutrient replenishment gut health immune health and more now I'm actually quite the minimalist

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definitely nice to see that ag1 is constantly putting their formula to the test to ensure continuous Improvement so if you're interested go to drink a1.com humananatura today's video and now back to strength so now let's move on to the next physiological adaptation that can result in improved strength and in order to do this we're going to zoom into the synaptic connection between the end of that lower motor neuron and the cell membrane of a muscle fiber and the synaptic connection is referred to as the neuromuscular Junction and as you can see they're not technically connected

there's actually a space between the end of that lower motor neuron and the cell membrane of the muscle fiber and that space is referred to as the synaptic Clift and as an FYI the cell membrane of a muscle fiber is referred to as the sarcolemma but if we look at the inside of the end of that lower motor neuron we can see these bag-like structures called synaptic vesicles and Within These synaptic vesicles there's a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine and when that signal gets sent down that lower motor neuron those synaptic vesicles release the acetylcholine into that

synaptic Clift and then those acetylcholine molecules will bind to the acetylcholine receptors embedded in the membrane of that muscle fiber and this will then cause ion channels to open up and so sodium will rush into the muscle fiber and this creates an action potential and eventually leads to the muscle fiber Contracting now we'll get into a little bit more of that in just a second but right here at the neuromuscular Junction we can get physiological adaptations that can result in improved strength that lower motor neuron can get more efficient at releasing the acetylcholine and within

that synaptic Clift we have certain enzymes that are in charge of breaking down the acetylcholine so that it can be recycled and put back into that lower motor neuron this process of reuptake and this whole process can also get more efficient so just having changes at the neuromuscular Junction can also result in improved strength so now let's go inside the muscle fiber to learn how a muscle fiber contracts and of course this will help us to understand some other physiological adaptations that result in strength and if we go to the inside of a muscle fiber

we'll see that it's made up of multiple multiple contractile protein subunits called sarir and sarir are stacked end to end to end to end in sequence kind of creating this string of sarir and a string of sarir is referred to as a myof fibral now if we just focus in on one sarir we can get a great understanding of how a muscle fiber actually contracts and we're going to focus on three proteins that make up the sarir there's more than three but these three are the most important for our story the first one is Mein

and if you look at this picture you can see one mein molecule or one iin protein and to me it looks like two golf clubs Twisted together if you can kind of see that analogy or stretch this analogy with me you can see the masin heads would be where you'd actually hit the golf ball where the mein Tails would be the actual shafts of the golf club and they're kind of Twisted together now all the mein molecules bundled together create a thick filament within the sarom so multiple mein molecules bundled together equals thick filament in

SAR but then the other protein we want to take a look at is act one actin molecule or actin protein is one like circular ball that you're seeing in this picture and you can see that there's multiple actin molecules strung together it almost looks like two strings twisted and all those actin molecules Twisted together on that string creates the thin filament so mein bundled together makes a thick filament all the actin molecules strung together equals the thin filament now you'll notice that thin filament also has another protein associated with it this protein wrapping around the

thin filament is called TTC or troponin tropomyosin complex and what's really interesting about this whole interaction between these three proteins is I often will tell my students masin is in love with actin mein wants nothing more than to bind to actin and cuddle or what we'll refer to as ratcheting a little bit later on but TTC you could kind of think of them as the protective parents of actin they don't want mein cuddling and ratcheting with actin they're trying to protect it so when you see TTC covering up The Binding sides of actin that's when

a sarcomere is in a resting state but for us to understand how a muscle fiber contracts we need to go back to the neuromuscular Junction where we learned that that lower motor neuron released acetylcholine and the acetylcholine would bind to the acetylcholine receptors in the membrane of the muscle fiber and when this occurred it caused ion channels within the membrane of the muscle fiber to open up and sodium would rush into the muscle fiber creating an action potential now if you don't feel like we've gone into the weeds enough we could go further into the

weeds when we talk about the action potential that occurs with muscle fibers but we're going to save that for another video today what we need to know is that when this action potential occurs it affects a specific structure within the muscle fiber called the sarcoplasmic reticulum and this sarcoplasmic reticulum is in close proximity and wraps around these C cir and it contains Calcium so when the action potential occurs it causes the sarop plasma creticum to release the calcium and then calcium binds to TTC and when calcium binds to TTC it causes the TTC to change

its shape just enough to slightly move out of the way and expose those binding sites on actin and what will myosin do as soon as those binding sites are Exposed on actin mein's going to bind and Ratchet or what we kind of referred to as cuddling earlier but you can see that ratcheting or some book books will refer to it as the power stroke that's going to pull and start to shorten the circle miror and what's interesting about this bond between masas and an actin is that it requires a high energy molecule ATP to actually

break that Bond so we burn an ATP the myosin will release and actually reset the head but then bind to a further down acting molecule and Ratchet again use another at P reset bind further down and Ratchet again and you can see that would shorten by ratcheting and ratcheting and ratcheting the overall sarir and therefore shorten the overall muscle fiber and what's crazy to think about is there are multiple mein heads multiple actin molecules doing this within each individual sarcomere and it's just happening ridiculously fast like every time I'm moving a muscle these sarir are

shortening and I just can't keep up with it but this whole idea of what's happening with the muscle contraction and now that that we understand it a little bit more fully this can help us to learn some more physiological adaptations that occur with improvements and strength now one way to get stronger with this whole process that we just learned is that you could increase the number of contractile proteins within the muscle fiber increase the amount of meas and an actin and you're going to be able to generate more Force however if you make more meas

in an actin this is going to take up space and therefore increase the overall size of the muscle and again this often happens with people who are doing certain types of resistance training they get muscular hypertrophy going hand inand with increases in muscular strength however it has been shown with certain types of strength training that you can have improved contractility of the sarir and therefore generate more Force independent of increases in muscular size or in other words the sarir and the contractile proteins that you do have start to contract more forcefully without making more of

them and there are a few reasons for this one is the speed and efficiency at which the calcium is released and recycled with the sarop plasmic reticulum increases also there's evidence that suggests the bond between mein and actin also gets stronger which of course I just think is great with my love story analogy because the more time these two spend together connecting and pulling on each other the stronger that bond gets and they cuddle and Ratchet even harder producing more force and strength for the muscle now we do also need to address that some strength

improvements can come from some of the slow twitch muscle fibers converting to more of a fast twitch fiber in general we say that slow twitch fibers are great at resisting fatigue so they are great for endurance activities however they don't generate as much force whereas the fast twitch fibers not great at resisting fatigue but they contract with more velocity and force so some conversion of the slow twitch to fast twitch fibers can also explain improvements in one's overall strength so what are some of the important training protocols that are more specific cific to improving some

of these strength adaptations first you typically want to pick compound movements these are movements that involve multiple joints such as the squat deadlift bench press shoulder press rows pull-ups Etc and to stimulate these strength adaptations the rep and set scheme is also going to need to be of a higher quality and higher intensity so this will usually consist of 3 to five sets per exercise with a load or a weight that you could only perform about two to five repetitions with it is also helpful to try to move the load as quickly as possible without

of course sacrificing form control or safety now the reality is that with these heavy loads you aren't going to move the weight that fast but it has been shown that if you consciously try to move the weight as fast as possible even though it isn't going to look like it's moving much faster this has been shown to recruit more motor units and stimulate these nervous system strength adaptations that we've been discussing so far so imagine imagine a controlled lowering of the squat and you attempting to stand up or press the weight up as quickly as

possible again with maintaining form control and safety and because we are going for higher intensity and higher quality rest is usually at least 2 to 3 minutes between sets and you could even push that to 3 to 5 minutes if you have the extra time as this would just enhance the quality of each high-intensity set but you aren't going to sacrifice that much as far as long-term adaptations are concerned if you have limited time and you can only rest for that 2 to 3 minutes one other thing to keep in mind is that due to

this type of training being of a higher intensity and neurologically demanding you usually need a few days to recover before doing another session that uses the same muscle groups and movement patterns that will vary a little bit from person to person based on recovery capabilities so some may only need 48 hours to recover While others may need 72 hours or more now as far as progression A good rule of thumb would be to increase the intensity by about 3 to 5% per week which usually comes in the form of adding more weight as well as

a 3 to 5% increase in the volume that volume could come in the form of additional sets or maybe even squeezing one or two extra workouts in per month you would also want to consider a D Lo week every 5 to six weeks or so where you decrease the intensity for that week that could come with fewer sets Andor slightly lighter loads now as cool as it is to be able to increase strength without changing muscular size much it is important to note that eventually you'll get to a point where you maximize the strength with

the muscular size that you have which means you will get to the point where you will need to get some increases in muscular size in order to continue to get stronger and this is when people at the end of their strength-based workouts could throw in some sets and exercises that are more dedicated to stimulating hypertrophy generally this includes higher reps and more volume which we'll definitely get more into with part two to this video and as always thanks for watching everyone hopefully you'll learn some new and interesting information about strength adaptations if you want to

learn more about other adaptations that can occur from exercise we'll link some pretty cool videos here and like And subscribe if you feel the need and I'll see some of you down in the comments