The Science Of Building Muscle

The science of building muscle: this groundbreaking article will help you get the most out of your workout by breaking down the critical components of each rep

Sets are competitions with yourself. They’re finite journeys taken again and again. Broken down into reps and stacked together to form workouts, they’re training’s fundamental unit of measurement. They’re like miniature lives, beginning with vigor, but debilitating with time and repetition, and always, eventually, ending. They’re regimented periods of joy and pain, and, at their best, they deliver an aching sense of accomplishment we’ll call “joyous pain.” They’re all that and more, and they’re the very essence of bodybuilding, so it’s remarkable that they’re seldom considered in depth.

What happens to your body during a set? Why do your muscles fail? What physiological factors dictate the very essence of bodybuilding? And, most important, what steps can you take to enhance your sets and eke out invaluable extra reps?

Prepare For Liftoff

It doesn’t matter what the exercise is. You slide plates on a bar, set a pin in a machine’s weight stack or pick the right dumbbells, and before you even begin the first set, your body is preparing itself for the onslaught that awaits. Your sympathetic nervous system releases norepinephrine, a.k.a. noradrenaline, from specialized nerve fibers that innervate your heart, thus boosting your heart rate. Your adrenal glands secrete epinephrine, a.k.a. adrenaline, along with some NE, which travels via your blood to your heart to ramp up the rate and force of its contractions. NE and EPI also increase the force of muscle contractions, resulting in greater strength. Your testosterone starts to rise. Secreted from your testicles into your bloodstream, it travels throughout your body to different tissues. It causes nerve signals to rush more rapidly to muscles, thus, like NE and EPI, increasing the force of muscle contractions.
Boost Tactic

The more you focus on the set before you even begin, the more NE, EPI and testosterone you will produce, allowing you to lift heavier weight and complete more reps. In addition, targeting the muscles you’ll work in the set by performing an isometric hold can increase strength. This is called postactivation potentiation, and it’s believed to work by ramping up the nervous system so it fires more rapidly during the set.

As an example of how to perform this hold before barbell curls, position a Smith machine bar at a height that replicates the curl’s halfway point (arms at 90 degrees). So it won’t move, load the bar with more weight than you can curl once. Then, as if doing a curl, pull up against the stationary bar (without unhooking it) as hard as you can for 20 seconds. Rest for two to three minutes, then do your set of barbell curls.