Why Do Muscles Get Bigger When Exercised?

You maybe are one of those people who wonders why muscles get bigger when you engage in regular exercise. Muscle gets bigger because of hypertrophic adaptation, otherwise known as general adaptation syndrome. This term explains how the body muscles act in response to the stress suffered by the body. Once a cross-section of the muscle fiber augments or swells due to regular exercise, the muscle energy supply shrinks and this diminution causes dents to the muscle tissue. Naturally after swelling muscle fibre will undergo recuperation. Throughout the resurgence process, the glycogen and phosphocreatine will be reloaded while eating carbs and carotene rich foods. This is the reason why after workouts, people who go to the gym eat protein rich foods to refill the lost energy and patch up the dented muscle which helps the formation of much larger muscle fibres.

According to Dr. Hans Style, a Canadian endocrinologist, there are three stages involved in the process of getting a bigger muscle. These stages are:

Stage 1 - Alarm stage or the fight and flight phase. This is the immediate reaction of the muscle fiber to the stressor. That stressors is the exercises that a person does every day. Exercise is basically want stimulates the muscle fibre to augment. However, a person should be careful at this stage because this may also drop off the value of the immune system which may direct the person to become more vulnerable to infirmity during the initial stage.

Stage 2 - The resistance stage or the phase of adaptation. If the stress persists the body get used to it. You can view it this way. Your first day doing exercise is stage one but while you do the exercise regularly you are moving on to stage two. The stress mentioned here is referring to the regular exercise you do every day. As you do regular exercise and increase the number of weights you grab every day, the level of adaptation to stress increases too as well as its effect to the muscle fiber. Again, as long as your muscle is stressed out due to exercise it will naturally undergo resurgence process which pilot a formation of a bigger muscle.

Stage 3 - The exhaustion stage. Persisting stress may progressively trim down which eventually leads to collapse. Since your body has adapted the stress from doing exercise that means, your muscle will continue to undergo revival process after the first two stages. The more often muscles undergo rebirth the more formation of muscle fiber. The more muscle fiber is formed the bigger your muscle can be.