-: So, when we look at this in terms of
desired adaptations, what we have to do
is what that metabolic cost is.
So, if you were to compare the three stimuli,
metabolic, hypertrophy, or neurological,
like, those three phases of training.
And you had to think of
which ones is the body more willing to do adaptations for?
Metabolic and neurological are both gonna be more favorable
because essentially, they immediately make life easier.
And when we say life easier,
we're always talking about from an energy perspective.
Our body really,
the currency of every bit of feedback we get,
as much as we would like to think
that our body can think like we think,
that's not how our biology works.
Our biology is taking everything down to biochemistry,
and all the decisions that are making
is whether or not this became biochemically easier
to exist or not.
And so when we make adaptations for metabolic efficiency,
okay, that's a win.
We are managing energy better,
you know, its gonna be easier to live biochemically.
Alright, neurological, if I become
more efficient and less wasteful
in terms of the amount of energy I'm expending,
I'm more able to stabilize my joints and cause less trauma
and inflammation, all these things that would zap energy.
Well guess what?
Immediately, life is better biochemically.
When we look at adding muscle tissue,
life is not immediately better biochemically,
because, I now have this extra tissue that I have to fuel.
It's gonna consume a bunch of resources just to build,
right, not only just the building blocks, but actually,
to actually pay the workers within the cell
to build it, okay.
So, it's expensive.
So, when you think of hypertrophy, you have to think of,
this is a long term investment.
So I'm having to get my body invested in the long term.
If you think of why we would gain muscle mass,
because my biology does not know that I want bigger biceps,
or bigger pecs, or lats, or glutes, whatever.
And it doesn't know that I need them
for any particular purpose.
It's not a predictor of what's gonna go on.
It doesn't know that I'm gonna step onstage, doesn't care.
So, why would my body ever decide that putting
on more muscle mass is a good idea?
And the reason that it would do that,
is it's a long term investment of protection
and sustainability in terms of tissue health.
So, if I have mechanical damage happening
within a muscle cell, a long term investment
to limit mechanical damage happening later
is to be able to resist that force that was damaging me.
So, if I can have more tissue to absorb that force,
less of it is going to be damaged, and that's actually
gonna save me energy in the long run, because I'm not
gonna need all the resources and the fuel,
and spend all the time repairing that.
I'm not gonna need to run as much inflammation,
not gonna be able to need as many amino acids,
not gonna need to waste as much ATP
on all that repair process if I can simply prevent
that damage from happening.
And the logic, in terms of our physiology is,
if we have more tissue, we can spread the load out,
so that it gets damaged less.
So, that's the decision, or the investment that we're trying
to get our body to make with this type of training.
But it's, you don't get any short term benefits from that.
If I have more muscle today, life is not easier,
it's actually, it's just having a safety blanket.
It's kind of like having insurance, if you will.
If you don't ever get in an accident, well, your insurance
is kind of a waste of money, but, you have insurance anyway,
because you want to protect yourself if something really bad
were to happen, and, if you ask anybody,
nobody likes paying for insurance, especially the people
that don't have to use it, that aren't getting
in car accidents, or aren't getting sick,
whatever you're talking about,
health, car insurance, whatever.
But, insurance can be a lot.
People are very thankful when they actually need it.
But we all begrudgingly hate having to pay it,
when we're like, well, I don't crash my car, or whatever.
Same thing for our body, okay.
It doesn't like, paying for insurance is not something
it particularly wants to do, but, if we approach it
with, hey, this is what could really happen,
and that's what happens when we start to actually damage
this muscle tissue, as the body starts to say,
wow, okay, something really bad could happen
that would really set us back biochemically.
Take a long time, and a lot of nutrients for us
to recover from, so, let's kind of put this safety blanket
in place of having a little bit more tissue
than we think we need, as like an insurance layer
to cover us for potential damage in the future.
So, think of it like that, okay.
When we look at sarcoplasmic, in that case,
we're just kind of storing resources, that's just kind
of putting money in the bank for later, but,
in terms of the myofibrillar,
that's really that long term investment,
so it's much cheaper to store extra glycogen,
that's really a metabolic adaptation.
We just kind of look at as hypertrophy,
because the muscles do increase in size
with that extra glycogen and water storage.
So, be finicky if you want, on what you define
as hypertrophy, and this is very important when you guys
are setting goals for what the training program is,
because, all right, accumulating glycogen
does make muscles bigger, but your potential is capped.
There's a pretty thick glass ceiling on what I can do
from a sarcoplasmic fade, not to mention that,
as you get to a certain point, like, okay,
you're not gonna get any other benefits,
functional-wise, strength-wise,
beyond just like, the cell volume that leverage
that that's providing, so.
When we get to protein synthesis, that's that long term
investment, that's where all those insurance metaphors
come into play.
We do get increased function with muscle size,
so people are like, oh yeah, that's stronger,
so that's better.
But remember our body doesn't know what stronger really is,
so, in terms of all this stuff,
energy demands, whatnot, like, being able to do more work,
like, having bigger muscles, being able to expend
more energy, is amazing if I'm a physique competitor.
Or just trying to lose body fat, because, cool,
I can burn through more energy.
It's actually, in terms of a survival mechanism
for your body, it's actually worse case, like, oh cool.
Now this guy basically can go out and spend more money,
is essentially how your physiology is looking at it.
So, it's a poor energy thing to be able to carry around
extra muscle, and muscle is not a very good energy reserve.
It takes a lot of work to get protein into usable fuel,
and to glucose, so, if we're looking at investment wise,
that's why having that extra protein accumulation
is the worst investment that we could make long term.
So we really have to be convincing.
And that, again, goes back to the original idea
of this video, which is, there are more ways to shut
hypertrophy off than turn it on, because, if you were gonna
invest a ton of money, you would want to
do your due diligence and check out all of the facts, right.
And really be sure that this was a good
long term investment, because once you put it in,
you may not get that payback for a long period of time.
So, that just kind of goes into this whole process.
All right, so let's get a little bit more deep down
into the mechanisms for how this stuff is happening.
So, for my sarcoplasmic hypertrophy,
we have basically an overlap with what we were doing
in the metabolic phase, it is gonna be that AMPK stimulus
that is going to drive that super compensation
of glycogen, and that's gonna be done mostly
from our lactic style training, we're accumulating
lactic acid, we're burning ATP at a high intense rate,
but we're not extending into that oxidative mechanism.
Growth factors and hormones come into play.
Growth hormone, just like we talked about
in the metabolic phase.
What we'll also look at in this case, is we can get
other hormones that are gonna partition nutrients.
Insulin-like growth factor and testosterone
also are going to play a role in both aspects of this.
So, when we look at the androgen testosterone
that is thought to, you know, be one of the most influential
in terms of muscle growth, a big part of its job
is not actually on the myofibrillar side,
it's actually on driving nutrients into the cell.
So, testosterone and IGF both have implications
for being able to push nutrients into the cell,
or at least open the doors for those nutrients
to come in, specifically glucose and amino acids.
When we get into the myofibrillar, now we have a lot
more ways to stimulate this that are gonna differentiate.
The first one on here, again, is kind of an overlap
with the metabolic phase and that we're looking
at oxidative stress, so that was a stimuli
in the metabolic phase, where we could get mitochondria
adaptations, but, we talked about when you overdo that,
you get excessive inflammation.
Now, when it comes to your muscle cells,
damage is damage to the outside world.
So, if you have something
and it's broken,
to the outside world, it's just broken, it's not
why is it broken, how did it get broken?
So when we look at signaling outside the cell for help
and we're gonna talk about this in the drawing,
but basically getting outside resources in,
especially from satellite cell pools,
damage is gonna be damage, whether it's from oxidative
stress, which leads to inflammation,
or it's mechanical damage,
which also can lead to inflammation.
So both of these things are going to lead to inflammation.
The difference is, when we have this oxidative stress,
pretty much everything that's getting damage from that,
is essentially broken,
and not really usable, not recyclable.
When we have that mechanical damage, remember we talked
about the lysosome being this thing that can kind
of recycle amino acids, so basically, when we start
breaking down tissue, our immune system's gonna come in,
it's gonna do its job, it's gonna break down
that broken down tissue, those amino acids are gonna
get pushed into the lysosome, and that's gonna be a signal
for like, hey, hypertrophy can start to kind of occur here.
We'll look at that a little bit more detail later.
But, just know that I can kind of recycle
the damaged materials here, I can't really recycle
the damage from the tissues here.
So, in terms of which one of these is gonna be better
for myofibrillar growth, a lot of times,
you're gonna be looking more at this.
This may be a good method for certain instances.
But of all the different ways of stimulating hypertrophy,
what I will say is this is probably the one
that you should use the most sparingly.
And we'll spend more time on that when we talk
about actually setting these things up,
nutritionally and whatnot.
Tension, and so with tension, an important thing
to understand it is a ratio between the amount
and the volume, so you need to have a certain threshold
of both, because, infinite volume with not enough tension
is not going to matter, but having a ton of tension,
but not having enough volume of it is also not going
to stimulate hypertrophy.
So there's going to be different mechanisms in which
our cells can actually sense tension, and respond to that,
we're basically predicting,
some of this mechanical damage may occur, and we can
start some of these nutrient based
and enzymatic based processes.
And at the bottom here we have the growth hormones,
or growth factors and hormones, again, coming into play.
There are gonna be local growth factors,
as well as systemic growth factors, so when we look
at this, a lot of that's going to be systemic.
So like when we have the growth hormone,
and then the IGF that's made by the liver,
when we get into where we're focusing on the myofibrillar,
we're actually able to make these local growth hormones.
They're similar to the growth hormone that we make
systemically, but not quite, so they have a little bit
different signaling that goes on locally, and then kind
of communicate with the surrounding tissues
to the satellite cell pools, to get them to donate
some of their contents to facilitate hypertrophy
and potentiate greater recovery in the future.