3 Myths About Muscle-Building
Learn three muscle-building myths and discover the shocking truth about building muscle and getting fit.
Ben Greenfield
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3 Myths About Muscle-Building
After being steeped in the fitness industry for more than a decade, I’ve seen many fitness fads come and go, and I’ve also seen many fitness myths dispelled. But there are still a few myths floating around among personal trainers, believed by exercise enthusiasts, and found in those fancy fitness magazines in gyms and health clubs. These myths could be holding you back when it comes to building muscle.
Myth #1: You Need to Lift Heavy Weights to Build Muscle
It’s certainly true that an excellent way to build muscle is by lifting heavy weights with big compound exercises, such as squats and dead lifts. But it’s not the only way to go. Contrary to popular belief, you can gain muscle using light weights (or body weight) and higher reps.
For example, opens in a new windowone study compared the effect of high reps and low reps on muscle growth, comparing sets performed with 80% to complete muscle fatigue with sets performed to 30% to complete muscle fatigue. It turns out that the load is not important, but simply whether or not a muscle is actually worked to fatigue, and in this study, high reps and light weights stimulated just as much muscle growth as low reps and heavy weights. So yes, this means you can, for example, build chest muscles by skipping three sets of eight reps on a bench press, and instead doing a few sets of high-rep push-ups to complete failure (which is good to know if you’re stuck working out in a hotel room or living room, have no access to a bunch of steel, metal, and weight plates, and still want to build muscle!).
There are plenty of other studies that back up the muscle-building capabilities of high-rep, low-resistance training. In opens in a new windowthis study, light super-slow lifting at 55-60% of the participants one rep max (1RM) increased both muscle thickness and maximal strength just as much as heavy normal-speed training performed at 80-90% of 1RM. In opens in a new windowthis study, both heavy training with 8-10 reps and light training with 18-20 reps activated the genes involved in muscle growth.
opens in a new windowAnother study found that training with higher reps and lighter weights (25-35 reps) led to the same gains in muscle size as heavier weights with 8-12 reps. opens in a new windowEven in seasoned weightlifters, researchers found the same muscle growth occurs when comparing 20-25 reps weight compared to 8-12 reps with a heavy weight.
Additionally, in opens in a new windowthis study, high reps and light weight (24 reps with 30%) increased post-workout protein synthesis, a sign of muscle building and hypertrophy, for 24 hours after exercise, and it did this to a far greater extent than low reps and heavy weights using 5 reps and 90%. In opens in a new windowyet another study, low weight training, even when not performed to complete muscular fatigue, stimulated protein synthesis (a sign that connective tissue is better capable of repairing) in connective tissue just as much as heavy weights.
Ultimately, if you want to add muscle mass as fast as possible, lifting heavy weights is the way to go. But you can still build muscle with light weight and high reps. Incidentally, as this study and this study shows, this approach seems to be most effective when training the legs vs. the upper body.
Myth #2: You Need Carbs to Build Muscle
Most folks trying to pack on muscle have been told that the muscles need storage glycogen and ample amounts of carbohydrates to grow. However, opens in a new windowa recent study (albeit on rats) shows that this may not be true. In the study, researchers compared a ketogenic diet comprised of 20% protein, 10% carbs and 70% fat with a typical Western diet of 15% protein, 45% carbohydrate, and 40% fat.
It turns out that after a six week ketogenic diet, rats were just as capable of producing all the biochemical parameters associated with anabolism and muscle growth. And yes, while these were rats being exposed to electrical muscle stimulation and not weight training humans, you can certainly delve into an “N=1” example with a human subject by reading my article, “ opens in a new windowCan You Build Muscle On A Low Carbohydrate Diet,” or by visiting a website such as opens in a new windowKetogains.com (which I am not in any way affiliated with!).
Myth #3: You Need to Lift Weights to Maintain Muscle
The prevailing thought among exercise enthusiasts is that if you lay off weight training for a certain period of time, you will lose muscle, and that the only way to maintain muscle is to load that muscle.
But there are other ways you can maintain muscle, even if you’re injured and can’t make it into the weigh room. One such method is electrical muscle stimulation (EMS), a topic which I cover in detail in opens in a new windowthis article.
Another lesser-known method of maintaining muscle is via heat stress, which you can implement by using a dry sauna, wet sauna, or infrared sauna.
However, another lesser-known method of maintaining muscle is via heat stress, which you can implement by using a dry sauna, wet sauna, or infrared sauna. One of the mechanisms by which heat stress prevents muscle loss and protein degradation is by opens in a new windowtriggering the release of proteins called heat shock proteins (also known as HSPs). HSPs can prevent muscle damage by opens in a new windowremoving free radicals and supporting cellular antioxidant production, but can also repair misfolded, damaged proteins in muscle tissue. opens in a new windowResearch has shown that when rats are exposed to heat stress, they expressed HSPs to an extent associated with 30% more muscle regrowth compared to a control group. As an added bonus, one particular HSP (the HSP70 gene) has also opens in a new windowbeen linked to increased longevity, which suggests there may be anti-aging benefits to regular heat stress, too.
Growth hormone is also crucial for repair and recovery of muscles, opens in a new windowand research has shown that two 20-minute sauna sessions separated by a 30-minute cooling period can elevate growth hormone levels two-fold over baseline. Two 15-minute sauna sessions at an even warmer temperature separated by a 30-minute cooling period resulted in a opens in a new windowfive-fold increase in growth hormone.
It is also important to note that when opens in a new windowhyperthermia and exercise are combined, they induce a synergistic increase in growth hormone, which is why I do yoga, push-ups, and squats in my infrared sauna, opens in a new windowa practice that I outline in detail here. For an additional recovery benefit, opens in a new windowsauna also increases blood flow to the skeletal muscles, which helps to keep them fueled with glucose, amino acids, fatty acids, and oxygen, while removing by-products of metabolic processes such as lactic acid and calcium ions, and can even opens in a new windowbuild new red blood cells at a rate similar to illegal performance enhancing drugs such as EPO.
Summary
Finally, I’ll readily admit that when it comes to building muscle fast and maintaining muscle, there really is no substitute for simply lifting heavy stuff and stuffing your face with sweet potatoes. However, if you have exercise equipment, dietary, or injury limitations, it’s nice to know that you can also build and maintain muscle with strategies such as a body weight or low weight training, a low-carb or ketogenic diet, and the use of electrostimulation or sauna.
If you have more questions or comments about these muscle-building myths, then head over to opens in a new windowFacebook.com/GetFitGuy and join the conversation there! I’d love to hear what you have to say.
opens in a new windowImage courtesy of Shutterstock.