How Muscles Operate

ByJonathan Yeo

What do your muscles go through during workout and resting periods? Here are the principal phases during muscle fiber breakdown and repair.

1. Warming up
As heart rate increases, blood is pumped to your muscles, which warms them up and allows them to completely stretch out. This brings oxygen into the muscle fibers.

2. Booting the muscle
Upon beginning the rep, the muscles are stressed and stretched, which leads to your heart pumping extra blood into the protective sheaths around the muscle fibers, delivering adequate nutrients and oxygen to them.

3. Jump-Starting the nervous system
As you lift the weight, your central nervous system transmits signals to the nerves covered by the sheaths that envelope the muscle fibers. The muscle fibers respond by contracting, which allows you to lift the weight. Performing the exercises properly activates your muscles in a certain series of processes while your central nervous system adjusts accordingly. By performing the exercise again and again, your nerves become more efficient, allowing you to complete additional reps or increase the weight of your lifts.

4. Chemical reactions
Muscle contraction relies on adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as its immediate source of energy. ATP breaks down inside the cells of the body to release energy. Creatine, glycogen, and phosphate reserves of the cells are transformed into ATP. Lactic acid is then formed in the process as a byproduct.

5. Getting maxed out
After the cell's glycogen reserves are maxed out and lactic acid has accumulated, the result is the muscle working less efficiently, which means you have to rest. As you rest, oxygen-based or aerobic muscle respiration takes place, resulting in the conversion of lactic acid into glycogen, providing you with sufficient energy for another set.

6. Reaching failure
As you come closer to failure on your final set, your fast-twitch muscle fibers experienced fatigue, and microscopic tears or 'microtears' are formed within the myofilaments, which are the tiniest muscle fiber bundles.

7. Repair and development
The post-workout repair process is the first stage in which your muscles start growing. The amino acids myosin and actin are added by your body to the myofilaments to fix the microtears, and this process also initiates muscle growth. However, your body is not capable of growing more muscle cells, which means muscle growth depends on how many muscle cells your body has. Intense workouts may also lead to increased glycogen storage capacity of your muscles, so there is a greater energy source for subsequent sessions. A nice side effect of this process is that you could observe a slight increase in your muscles' size.

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Health and Fitness: Build-Muscle
Jonathan Yeo

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MLA Style Citation:
Yeo, Jonathan".".16 Jan. 2012EzineArticles.com.26 Jan. 2012 .APA Style Citation:
Yeo, J. (2012, January 16). . Retrieved January 26, 2012, from http://ezinearticles.com/?How-­Muscles-­Operate&id=6819129Chicago Style Citation:
Yeo, Jonathan "." EzineArticles.com. http://ezinearticles.com/?How-­Muscles-­Operate&id=6819129EzineArticles.com© 2012 EzineArticles.com
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