Strength vs Hypertrophy: The Science of Building Muscle

most of us at some point have probably wondered what it would be like to have bigger muscles and some have worked to turn that Wonder into a reality as there are people that have developed incredible increases in the size of their muscles but what is actually going on when you increase the size of a muscle and what are some important training principles to stimulate muscle growth well today we're going to discuss these training principles and for even more fun we're going to dive into the physiology of muscle and talk about some of the characteristics of

muscle tissue that allows for these amazing size and strength increases plus we'll discuss if there's an actual difference between increasing strength versus increasing the size of a muscle it's going to be a hypertrophic one so let's do this as we get into this discussion about increasing muscular size did you know there are actually three different types of muscle tissue in the human body and I'm not talking about fiber types here like fast twitch or slow twitch I'm talking about actual different types of muscle tissue and I think going over these different types of muscle tissue

will give us an even greater understanding on not only how we increase muscular size but also what's going on at the cellular level plus it's just really cool to know the differences in muscle tissue now as we talk about the muscles I do want to say that often you hear the phrase muscle fibers and these are actually the muscle cells that make up the whole muscle like the biceps is made up of thousands and thousands of muscle cells but just know know that if I ever say muscle cells or muscle fibers I'm talking about the

same thing but on to the different types of muscle tissue and these are non- stried or smooth muscle stried cardiac muscle and stried skeletal muscle striad refers to this strip likee pattern these dark and light alternating bands that can be seen under the microscope but from here on out we'll just simply refer to them as smooth cardiac and skeletal muscle tissue now all three of these different types of muscle tissue have this amazing ability to contract but they also have some major differences like where you find it in the body how it's hooked up to

the nervous system differences in architecture and structure and of course differences in how muscle tissue grows and gets bigger and stronger with smooth muscle tissue the muscle cells are smaller and have this spindle likee appearance and you find smooth muscle lining the walls of your organs I often will tell students if it's a tube or a hollow structure it's likely going to have smooth muscle built into the wall now that may sound a little bit funny at first but we have a lot of tubes inside of us our digestive tract is a tube we have

respiratory tubes blood vessels urinary tubes and many genital structures are tubes and all these have smooth muscle built into the wall that will contract to move along and or influence the flow of what's ever inside the tube now smooth muscle is under involuntary control it can work reflexively and is controlled by your autonomic nervous system so luckily you don't have to think about it but could you imagine if you did have to think about Contracting all the smooth muscle in your body like if you ate a cookie you might have to pause stop what you're

doing and think about Contracting the muscles of the digestive tract and maybe even include some Shimmy Shake maneuver to move that nutritious cookie around one of the bends of your dunum and your intestines are over 20 ft long so that would be quite the distraction during your already busy day but luckily you don't have to do that because your autonomic nervous system does this for you automatically but I do think that we should be grateful or at least have a moment of silence or moment of gratitude that the very very beginning and the very very

end of your digestive tract is skeletal muscle which is under voluntary control I mean could you imagine if your external anal sphincter was smooth muscle and it just opened and closed whenever it wanted to that would be a disaster literally and here's a little quiz question for you do you know what the largest smooth muscle mass is in the human body here's a little hint I don't have it it's actually the uterus now I grew up with three sisters and they definitely had some very interesting ways to describe how the smooth muscle making up the

uterus was not under voluntary control during menstrual cramping this thing just contracts however and whenever it wants to right and I shouldn't laugh because I can't really experience that but even during labor it's involuntary Contracting so as another FYI when everybody in the delivery room is saying okay give me a push it's not like mom has the ability to contract the uterus during labor more forcefully mom is actually Contracting the abdominal muscles which will increase the intraabdominal pressure which will assist the uterus in pushing a baby out but one last point I want to make

about smooth muscle and we can also relate this to skeletal muscle growth and this is that smooth muscle can also grow and get larger and it does this through a process called hyperplasia which is an increase in the number of cells and keep that in mind when we talk about cardiac and skeletal muscle there's going to be an important difference there and so think about the uterus again when pregnancy occurs the uterus goes through dramatic changes and gets huge and part of the reason for this is that the smooth muscle cells will divide and therefore

increase the overall number of smooth muscle cells making the uterus bigger plus those smooth muscle cells can also just get larger which when a cell gets larger we call that hypertrophy so two processes can contribute to the overall increase in size of the smooth muscle hyperplasia and hypertrophy but let's see how this works with the heart and skeletal muscle tissue cardiac muscle tissue as the name implies is only going to be found in the heart and under the microscope these cells are longer and larger than smooth muscle cells and the cardiac muscle cells branch which

we'll see is different than the skeletal muscle cells now obviously these cardiac muscle cells will contract and make the heartbeat pumping the blood throughout the body and as you may have guessed cardiac muscle tissue is under involuntary control it has its own built-in Pacemaker and it is is also hooked up to the autonomic nervous system now I have had some students occasionally argue the point that their cardiac muscle tissue is voluntary for some reason and then I usually look them in the eye and I say something like make your heart beat it 52 beats per

minute now go we don't have that kind of direct control over our heart we obviously know that our heart rate will increase if we go running down the street or if we relax and do deep breathing generally our heart rate will go down but again this is not a direct precise control over our heart rate now something that I hinted to earlier that is important for us to consider with cardiac muscle is that cardiac muscle cells cannot divide and that's different than what we learned with smooth muscle and let's think about this from two different

perspectives from a clinical perspective and an exercise perspective from a clinical perspective if you kill any of those cardiac muscle cells you can't really replace them and that's why something like a heart attack also known as a myocardial infarction can be so detrimental if you have heart attack that kills a lot of these cardiac muscle cells they get replaced with scar tissue and then the heart will not be able to contract as efficiently as it did before but from an exercise perspective if the cardiac muscle cells can't divide how does the heart get stronger well

let's answer that question and keep it in the back of our minds after we get into a little bit more detail with skeletal muscle tissue now if you've spent much time thinking about muscle you may have also thought about testosterone and its contribution to building muscle but sometimes test testosterone contributes to other things like in some of us testosterone can get converted to dihydrotestosterone or DHT in the hair follicles of the scalp and this is one of the factors that can result in hair loss luckily if you're one of those that is concerned about hair

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if you aren't 100% satisfied with your results they have a 12-month moneyb guarantee so if you're interested visit the link on screen and use our coupon code ioha to get $625 off the IR restore Elite device we'll also include that information in the description below skeletal muscle tissue as its name implies attaches to and moves the skeleton there are a few exceptions to this like the muscles a facial expression actually attached to and move your facial skin so you can show emotions and make all sorts of funny faces and expressions of people the skeletal muscle

is what we typically think about when we are working out and increasing the size of our muscles mostly through resistance training skeletal muscles are under voluntary control and for the most part we can contract them whenever we want to but again here's something that's very important similar to cardiac muscle cells skeletal muscle cells cannot divide now for all the physiology nerds out there I do need to mention satellite cells satellite cells are these small stem cells embedded between the larger mature non-dividing skeletal muscle cells but these satellite cells retain the capacity to fuse with one

another or with damaged skeletal muscle cells that can help regenerate these damaged muscle cells however the number of new skeletal muscle cells that can be formed by satellite cells is not enough to compensate for significant skeletal muscle damage or degeneration and so skeletal muscle tissue that has been damaged significantly will still be replaced by Scar Tissue and therefore any regeneration of skeletal muscle tissue is greatly limited so again with mature skeletal muscle cells not being able to divide and the limitations we just discussed with these satellite cells how do do our skeletal muscles get bigger

and stronger well you've probably seen this coming and hopefully you learned some cool stuff along the way but the skeletal muscle cells that you already have just get bigger and when cells get bigger as we've already mentioned we call this hypertrophy and even though we're going to focus the remainder of our discussion on skeletal muscles and talk about what's actually going on during hypertrophy I do want to just mention that this is also how cardiac muscle gets bigger and stronger the cardiac muscle cells that you do have just get bigger and they undergo hypertrophy as

well but what exactly happens when our skeletal muscle fibers or skeletal muscle cells undergo hypertrophy hypertrophy is due to an increased production of the contractile protein units within a skeletal muscle cell maybe you've heard of these contractile units before like myof fial and sarir and we have a video coming soon going into the amazing details of the myof fibral and sarir but for today know that these myof fibral and the sarir within them generate the force inside the skeletal muscle cell and the increased production of these units is one of the major contributors to the

muscle cell getting bigger but other changes also contribute to hypertrophy such as the development of more mitochondria and other organel within the muscle cell for example the sarcoplasmic reticulum which is a modified smooth endoplasmic reticulum that stores calcium within the muscle cell and as an FYI calcium is extremely important for muscle cell contractions increased fluid content within the muscle cell can also contribute to high hypertrophy and we're going to discuss that in a little bit more detail in just a minute but hypertrophy results or is stimulated I should say from forceful repetitive muscular activity which

is often done through resistance training and because hypertrophied muscles often contain more myofibrils and therefore sarer in general a larger muscle with a greater cross-sectional area is capable of producing more force or in other words is stronger but obviously an important part of this video is what exactly is meant by forceful repetitive muscular contractions what does this mean for the specifics of an exercise routine well this does depend a little bit on the person because for example almost anyone that is just starting with resistance training and lifts relatively heavy weights will increase strength and muscular

size with a variety of different rep and set schemes but as people get more advanced you start to diverge more into is your main goal strength or is your main goal hypertrophy because as you get more advanced you will start to train a bit differently for those two goals and you start to get more into powerlifting routines versus bodybuilding routine in general those that have strength as a main goal follow more of a powerlifting routine and the lifts tend to be higher in intensity so a higher percentage of a person's one rep max these would

be loads or weights that someone may only be able to lift one to five times and because of the higher intensity the rest period is typically longer with people resting about 3 minutes sometimes even up to 5 minutes in between sets they also tend to make compound exercises the staple of their routines and often don't include a lot of isolation exercises and just to be clear a compound exercise would would involve multiple joints and multiple muscle groups like a squat or a bench press whereas an isolation exercise would typically involve one muscle group and one

joint like a biceps curl now for those that are more concerned with hypertrophy you start to follow more of a bodybuilding routine compound exercises are often a part of this routine but they tend to do a greater amount of isolation movements than those that are more concerned purely with strength and if hypertrophy is the main goal then there obviously is some interest in how the muscles look aesthetically and so these isolation movements can allow for more specific targeting of certain muscles to really get that balanced look in physique and in general the loads are a

lower percentage of a one rep max compared to that which powerlifters use this doesn't mean the routines are easy the weights are still somewhat heavy but with higher reps common rep numbers would be something they could lift 8 to 15 times there are routines that work for hypertrophy and bodybuilding that can have higher reps and even sometimes lower but in general that 8 to 15 is a good place to start and due to the weight of each lift generally being lower than in powerlifting the rest periods are often shorter from about 60 to 90 seconds

and the overall lifting volume per session and even throughout the week is typically higher and this training strategy tends to be a greater stimulus for hypertrophy more so so than strength but you might be thinking wait a minute Jonathan you told us earlier that a big part of what causes hypertrophy is an increase in the production of the contractile protein subunits within a skeletal muscle so isn't a bigger muscle a stronger muscle well in general yes but again as you get more and more advanced you start to see more of a Divergence between strength-based routines

versus hypertrophy based routines and therefore this results in differences in the main physiological adaptations that occur now clearly these two adaptations strength versus hypertrophy don't exist completely in their own little bubbles because if you look at powerlifters whose main goal is strength they obviously have large muscles and if you look at bodybuilders whose main goal is muscular size and hypertrophy they obviously are still quite strong so in a way all we are seeing is a greater manifestation of one of these two adaptations if you're mostly concerned with strength and you are following more of a

powerlifting routine you're going to get a greater manifestation or development of more of those contractile protein units the myof fibral and the sarir which as we already learned are what produces the force within the muscle cell plus there's a major contribution from the nervous system the nervous system will get better at coordination and recruitment of more motor units with strength-based training and therefore this nervous system adaptation is going to be something else that contributes to the greater strength that you can see in powerlifters if you're more concerned with hypertrophy and following more of a bodybuilding

routine yes you are going to get increases in the contractile protein units but part of that increase in size is theorized to come from an increase in the fluid content within the muscle cells and this is referred to as sarcoplasmic hypertrophy which is kind of this disproportionate increase of the sarcoplasmic fluid compared to the increase in the number of myof fibral giving us a theory as to why people may not see a proportional increase in strength with their increases in muscular size as they get more advanced in their bodybuilding routines now just to be clear

the sarcoplasm is just the cytoplasm or the inside fluid containing area of a muscle cell and again increasing the fluid within the sarcoplasm will give an overall increase in the size of the muscle cell now as I've hinted we don't exactly know all the reasons why this cop plasmic adaptation occurs but we do see the differences between bodybuilders and the powerlifters so hopefully more answers to come with further research in the future but hopefully this did give you some useful information about the basics of different training methodologies of strength versus hypertrophy and hopefully you enjoyed

learning more about the different types of muscle tissue found in your body and if you're interested in learning more about muscles as we age we'll link some videos on screen here and thanks for supporting the channel let me know what muscle tissue you think is the coolest in the comments and we'll see you soon