How Muscles Grow
In order to achieve muscle growth, you need to do three things:
One: Stimulate the growth – intense weight training exercise is required to make your muscles work harder, use up energy and to cause microscopic damage to the fibers.
Two: Feed the Growth – nutrition is need after your intense workouts, your muscles need carbohydrates to replenish the stores of fuel and protein to grow bigger and stronger.
Three: Allow Time For Growth to Occur: You need to get enough rest between workouts because it is during the rest and recovery phase that the muscles repair the microscopic damage and growth occurs.
Muscle size increases are due to "hypertrophy adaptation", which is an increase in the cross section area of your muscle fibers. Intensive weight training causes more stress on your fast twitch type II fibers, therefore you will get both an increase in muscle size and well increased strength.
Hard workouts deplete your muscle's energy reserves and also cause microscopic damage to your muscle fibers. During the recovery time, the reserves of glycogen and phosphocreatine will build back up from the carbohydrates in your diet and the creatine supplements your take. Amino acids either from diet or supplements will assist with "protein synthesis" which is the repair and building up thicker and more powerful of the previously damaged muscle.
To achieve continuous muscle growth you will need to keep using weight training techniques that the body is not used to, this causes higher levels of intensity which forces the muscles to adapt by growing bigger and stronger.
For more muscle building information go to Muscle Shock Training.
