"Until pretty recently, the conventional wisdom about building muscle was that it worked via a system you might think of as tear and repair the idea being that working out causes microtears in the muscle fibres, which trigger the body's repair processes, encouraging the muscles to come back bigger and stronger. That's why many old-school trainers will tell you that there's no gain without pain,"
"when you lift a weight that's heavy enough (or you perform enough repetitions of a movement to reach near-failure, which you'll recognise from the fact that your reps slow down and feel more grindy), the resulting physical tension stretches the membrane that encases your muscle cells. From there, specialised sensors called mechanoreceptors detect that stretch and turn on what's known as the mTOR pathway, a sort of master regulator that listens to various signals and decides whether your body should be building new tissue"
Conventional belief held that muscle growth resulted from microtears and subsequent repair, encouraging extreme training to induce more damage. Current science indicates mechanical tension is the primary driver of hypertrophy, with muscle damage more of a side-effect. Heavy loads or high-repetition near-failure create physical tension that stretches muscle-cell membranes. Mechanoreceptors detect that stretch and activate the mTOR pathway, which regulates whether cells build new tissue. The mTOR signals initiate intracellular processes that increase muscle cell size. Performance-enhancing drugs can aid recovery and amplify gains, but natural hypertrophy depends mainly on sufficient mechanical tension and controlled training.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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