The first law of strength training is simple. Lift weights, and you’ll build larger muscles. This is the basic bargain that brings people to the gym. It’s also true, but only up until a certain point.
The rise of artificial intelligence-powered analytical tools has enabled physiologists to ask nuanced and complex questions about how our bodies react to exercise. Wim Derave is a professor at Ghent University, Belgium. He says we already know the muscles get stronger and bigger when exercising. What about the other muscle?
In a recent study, Derave and colleagues attempt to solve this riddle. The article was published in Science & Medicine in Sports & Exercise. The AI-driven study shows that muscles targeted in weightlifting can grow while the other muscles may shrink. This new finding sheds light on the factors that trigger muscle growth. It also explains why fuel is important and how you can exercise without sacrificing your triceps.
Derave recruited 21 volunteers—11 men and 10 women—to participate in a 10-week strength training program that targeted specific leg and arm muscles. The volunteers were asked to complete two or three sessions per week.
The scans were done in three dimensions, before and after training. This process took a lot of computing power and time to complete. Recent breakthroughs made by the University of Virginia Biomedical Engineer Silvia Blemker and others using AI have dramatically accelerated the process. This makes it possible to measure more muscles at once.
Derave measured the size of thirty different muscles using Blemker’s technique. Of these, only 17 were targeted in the program, and the other 13 weren’t. The targeted muscles did grow more than the non-targeted muscle groups. Eight of the eight non-targeted muscle groups shrank in size following 10 weeks of exercise, and two (those of the calves and hips) showed statistically significant shrinkage.
Subjects filled in dietary questionnaires to monitor their intake. The subjects whose intake of calories was higher than the group average were able to maintain their muscle mass, and their volume increased by an average of 0.3 percent. The lower the calorie intake, the greater the loss of non-targeted muscles.
Derave and his team were surprised by the results. Strength training is thought to increase the levels of muscle-building hormones such as testosterone in circulation throughout the body. This would suggest that non-targeted tissues should also grow. However, Derave has since abandoned this theory, and these new findings prove that hormones do not drive strength training’s benefits.
You might still hope that nothing will happen with the muscles that are not targeted. Derave explains that muscles never remain static. Derave points out that muscles are never static.
The subjects that consumed less food had a shortage of amino acids; some were reallocated to the targeted muscles.
The study has two main takeaways. The first is to fuel your exercise properly. Otherwise, gains will be made in certain body parts at the cost of others. The results are not conclusive as to whether getting enough calories is the most important factor or if getting enough protein. Derave believes the first is that as long as you consume a minimum of 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight, it is close to what Canadian adults average.
Multi-joint movements are better than single-muscle isolation exercises. There’s also no such thing as a free lunch. The muscles you exercise are the only ones that will get stronger.
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