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MORE THAN MUSCLES
Have you ever heard your favourite fitness influencer say:
“Build muscle, build strength—your bones will be stronger, joints more stable, blood glucose better managed.”
Sounds great, right? But… how does building muscle actually make all this happen?
Let’s break it down.
Understanding muscle fibres
Firstly there are 2 types of muscle fibre type 1 and type 2
- Type 1 (slow-twitch): Great for endurance, stamina, and long efforts.
- Type 2 (fast-twitch): Power and strength
— further divided into Type 2a (more fatigue-resistant) and Type 2x (super explosive, but tire quickly.
Molecular mechanism of hypertrophy helps : imagine your muscles as a wall when you build it you need bricks(the muscle cells myocytes
Concept of hypertrophy
Imagine your muscles as a brick wall.
To build a bigger wall, you need more bricks—in this case, muscle cells called myocytes.
But how does it happen?
When you work out intensely, tiny tears occur in your muscle fibers. Your body repairs these tears by:
- Sleeping well (recovery time)
- Eating enough (especially protein)
That repair process? That’s muscle growth.
what is the name of the crucial signaling pathway that regulates protein synthesis? Any idea..
Muscle making switch
mTOR mammalian target of rapamycin
More precisely mTORC1.
mTORC1 promotes the translation of mRNA into protein, essentially upregulating the production of new muscle proteins.
Imagine mTOR as a master switch that turns on muscle growth.
When you lift weights and eat protein, you're flipping it on.
Think of it like this: imagine your muscle to be a construction site and mTOR is a foreman at a construction site.
When the foreman sees enough building materials (amino acids from protein) he tells the workers (ribosomes) to start building more muscle.
If there aren't enough materials the foreman tells everyone to stop. So no building muscle.
Why this really matters?
Muscle changes your metabolism
Muscle tissue has a higher resting metabolic rate than fat tissue.
This means MUSCLE burns more calories at a resting state
You burn more calories just by existing.
Muscle and NEAT.
Ever heard of NEAT?
It’s all the energy you burn doing things like walking, fidgeting, standing, cleaning.(I HAVE SPEACIAL MEMORY OF HOW I LEARNT THE NEAT CONCEPT 😊 )
More muscle = stronger body = daily activities feel easier.
MUSCLE AS AN ENDOCRINE ORGAN
Muscles don’t just move you—they also secrete chemicals called myokines.
Myokines help with:
Reducing inflammation
Improving insulin sensitivity
Lowering blood sugar levels
Let’s imagine your muscles are like little houses
Glucose = the food they need
GLUT4 transporters = the doors
Insulin = the key that opens those doors
When insulin shows up with the key, it unlocks the GLUT4 doors so glucose can enter the “house” and fuel the muscle.
Cool, right?
Got questions about training for muscle? Drop them in the comments—I’d love to dive in deeper!
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