What Drives Muscle Growth & What Doesn't | Dr. Mike Roberts

[laughs] So people love to use your stuff as, as fodder for whether it's a training recommendation or something else.

And so I would, I would really love for you to maybe set the table clearly on, on what some of your work does, what it suggests, what it doesn't suggest-

Sure

... and otherwise.

So that's the playbook-

Okay

...

in large part, and I think it would be best for us to actually just start with a broad understanding of how does muscle grow.

When we say that, and we say this word hypertrophy, one of our muscles, presumably our biceps, 'cause that's what everyone cares about, right? When it got bigger, how? Why? And then that, of course, will lead us into, if you wouldn't mind giving us an overview of what we'll call the molecular mechanisms of how that muscle grew, why it grew, and then that'll give us the table to get into all the nuances of how do we optimize that, how do we alter it, and change.

So I'll set, set you up that way, and I'll let you lead from there.

Okay.

Sounds good.

So how does muscle grow? Uh, the simple answer is mechanical overload.

You will see that in the literature time and time again, which is to say that weight training for humans, um, or very, very intricate models in rodents will allow the muscle to grow.

So, uh, when we say mechanical overload, if, if any of your viewers, uh, read that, we're, we're referring to resistance training in, in the human.

Consistent resistance training, uh, and we'll get into programming, not my forte.

Like, we talked about our buddy Brad Schoenfeld, who is very well-versed in that, but I have some ideas in terms of how to maximize hypertrophy, sets per week, that sort of thing.

Um, if you consistently resistance train, we've seen this time and time again with 10-week studies, 12-week studies, 16-week studies.

Uh, we'll call it two to three days per week, uh, full body.

Uh, what you're seeing in terms of hypertrophy is mainly radial hypertrophy, which is saying the, the cross-sectional area of the tissue is increasing in size.

Uh, how do you measure that, right? So, uh, you can do muscle imaging.

Uh, we do ultrasound in the laboratory.

We have a panoramic, so we can actually look at the rectus femoris, the, the vastus lateralis, and we can see something to the tune of, we'll call it 15% increases in the cross-sectional area of that, of that muscle tissue.

Uh, and then from there, we can take muscle biopsies.

That's mainly from the vastus lateralis our lab, uh, uh, does a vastus, and we'll see probably, uh, I would call it 20 to 25% type 2 fiber cross-sectional area increases.