Muscle Growth
by: Kyle Kirshenbaum
There three types of muscles. These muscle types include smooth muscle, cardiac muscle, and skeletal muscles. To build the smooth and cardiac muscles there is a technique called progressive overload, which consists of constant stress being applied to these muscles until they reach their limit. Through rest these muscles go through a repairing process where the muscle tissue mends back together, and the muscle cells grow in size (contrary to popular belief one cannot gain muscle cells, they can only grow in size).
This process can be continuously repeated; however the human body adjusts these specific exercises after constant repetition that hinders the outcome of the single exercise. To avoid this, new exercises can be introduced that require different uses of the same muscle. Due to the introduction of these new exercises the human body doesn’t have to time to adjust to these exercises allowing more stress to be applied to the muscles. This is called muscle confusion.
Another way to build muscle quickly is to super set one’s exercises. To do this, two exercises that use the same general muscle are put back to back, allowing very short breaks to be taken by the one exercising. There is a controversy in the fitness community whether supersetting gets one bigger faster or just toned, however, it is agreed that it helps cardiovascular endurance as well as push the body to reach new limits faster.