The Types of Hypertrophy Ex-plained
Let’s start at the beginning, with the different types of hypertrophy and how each of them can be employed to get different results.
Actually, let’s rewind and start even further at the beginning. Specifically,let’s take a look at why you need to know why you’re training before you even begin.
You see, the way you’re going to train is always going to be dictated by the results that you’re looking for. This might sound obvious but actually it’s
something that a lot of people never consider before they start working out. They just say they want to be ‘fitter’.
But what is ‘fitter’ do you? Is it strong with lots of bulky muscle? Is it strong without muscle? In a much leaner sense?
Why is it you train? Is it because you want to be a kind of super hero? In that case, you’ll be well suited to a GPP system like CrossFit.
This stands for ‘General Physical Preparedness’ and basically means that you’re strong and fit across the board and thereby able to defend yourself during a zom-bie apocalypse.
Maybe you’re an amateur athlete and you want to be particularly impres-sive in a specific domain as a runner, in long jump, or in some other con-text.
Or maybe you just want to be a little fitter and healthier so you can be a good influence for your children and be a more active and engaged parent.
And maybe you’d just like to wake up full of energy for a change and try to avoid getting colds quite so frequently.
Whatever the case – in all these scenarios, the type of training you’re going to do is going to be completely different. And that’s before we’ve even ac-knowledged the significant difference between different body types.
Be-cause what helps one person to quickly build a huge amount of muscle just won’t work for the next guy.
How can you know what the best way to train is unless you know these things?
How can you expect to be met with anything other than frustration if you don’t know what it is you’re hoping to achieve?
Ultimately, having a goal is a little bit like knowing what your destination is. Knowing your body type, is like knowing what kind of gas to fill your car up on. Without these crucial bits of information, you really can’t expect to reach your destination very quickly (if at all)!
How Hypertrophy Works
So with all that in mind, you should be going into this chapter with a good idea of what it is you want to accomplish. Only that way, will you be able to take the relevant information from this and ignore all the rest.
So hypertrophy. What is it?
When your muscles grow, what actually causes them to grow?
What is actually happening?
As you probably had already guessed, there’s actually multiple things going on, which is where all the confusion comes in.
Generally though, we can split hypertrophy down into two main processes. These are ‘sarcoplasmic’ and ‘myofibrillar’ hypertrophy. Actually though,even this is contested somewhat – some experts actually believe that these terms are merely pseudoscience and that they aren’t actually based on any concrete evidence.
But whether or not the precise principles of myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic hypertrophy are accurate, the reality is that these two types of training do result in two different types of muscle.
This is how strength athletes have been training for decades, with a lot of success, so it’s safe for us to take this understanding and apply it. These terms and the description will simply serve as a somewhat useful ‘crutch’ for understanding what’s going on here…
Myofibrillar Hypertrophy
So on the one hand, we have myofibrillar hypertrophy, which is the pre-dominant form of hypertrophy used for building strength. This is also some-times referred to more simply as ‘muscle damage’. And that’s an apt name because it really does describe what is going on here – you are damaging the muscle.
Or more specifically, you’re actually tearing the muscle. By lifting heavy enough weights, you’re actually causing tiny rips in the fibers that make up the muscle, known as muscle fibers (the tears themselves are called ‘mi-crotears’).
Muscle fibers work just like any other cell in the human body, except that they can have multiple mitochondria and mitochondria can also increase as you train more frequently and in higher volumes. Right now though, we’re interested in tearing the muscle fiber, which then causes it to be marked for
repair.
Once we’re sleeping or resting, these tears are then repaired by the body using protein and amino acids to restore the muscle and build the muscle fibers to be thicker and stronger.
It’s generally agreed that it’s impossible to increase the number of muscle fibers (a process that is known as ‘hyperplasia’) through conventional train-ing. However, you can increase the thickness of the fibers through this process which makes them stronger and increases your ability to throw heavy weights around.
What’s the best way to cause these microtears? That would be to train with heavier weights, which in turn will allow you to cause more damage more quickly, triggering more growth.
That’s why powerlifters – who are pre-dominantly interested in pure power – will train using weights close to their one rep maxes and lift only a few times.
Sarcoplasmic Hypertrophy
Then you have sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, which is also sometimes known as ‘metabolic stress’. Here, the objective is not to create microtears but rather to swell the muscles with metabolites, metabolites being hormones and other compounds that stimulate more growth and hypertrophy.
The ob-vious examples of these are testosterone and growth hormone, both of which are ‘anabolic’ in nature.
So how do you trigger this kind of change in your body? This time, the aim is to occlude the muscle and allow blood to build up there – right up until the point where you have too much lactic acid in your muscles to continue and you start to feel a lot of discomfort.
You do this by using higher repeti-tions, as this allows you to increase that all-important ‘time under tension’ – the amount of time that your muscle spends contracting during any given workout.
While the precise mechanism of action isn’t fully understood, this appears to increase the amount of sarcoplasm in the muscle cells – their ability to retain fluid and to store glycogen. This in turn then allows the lifter to con-tinue lifting for longer and to see more growth.
While myofibrillar hypertrophy does lead to some increase in size as well as strength, sarcoplasmic hypertrophy appears to be the fastest way to in-crease size. A bodybuilder trains with significantly lighter weights but uses higher rep ranges, often reaching into the 10s, 12s and 15s before they reach failure.
This is why a considerably smaller powerlifter will often be able to lift more than a much larger bodybuilder. But that is not to say that a bodybuilder’s muscle isn’t as ‘strong’ or that one type of lifting is better than the other.
We’re going to get into all that in MUCH more detail over the subsequent post.
Understanding the Types of Hypertroph
For now though, a quick takeaway…
To build more SIZE and less strength, you need to lift lighter weights for longer.
To build more STRENGTH and less size, you need to lift very heavy weights for fewer repetitions.
You can also tell which type of muscle you’re building based on the way your body feels at the time – and this is something you might get better at differentiating between as you progress.
Myofibrillar hypertrophy feels like tearing at the time (not a serious tear however) and leads to DOMS (de-layed onset muscle soreness) the next day or the day after.
Conversely,sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is what leads to the feeling of the ‘pump’ as you train and your muscles become massively swelled with muscle.
It’s also what eventually leads to ‘the burn’ as the muscle floods with lactic acid, re-sulting in a lot of discomfort. This is where expressions like ‘no pain, nogain’ come from!