muscle growth - how does muscle growth really happen

MUSCLE GROWTH

Podcast hosts: Brad Howard and John Barban http://blog.adonislifestyle.com of 17 ______________________________________________________________________________

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MUSCLE GROWTH



Muscle Growth

And Determining Life After AI…

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MUSCLE GROWTH



From The Desk of Brad Howard

Dear Friend,

Welcome to the Adonis Lifestyle Podcast!

Inside this transcript, you’ll find a lot of actionable information that you’ll be able to put to use

TODAY to help develop your body for maximum visual impact. With that said, here are a few

things to remember as you’re reading through this document.

1. Our trainings and opinions are based solely on the end goal of creating a body based on

proportions and social influence. Just as baseball players, powerlifters, and MMA

fighters train for a specific purpose, the techniques, tactics, and strategies we talk about

revolve around “looks based” training and not “performance based” training. (although

your average performance across most all regimes will, in fact, increase as a whole with

our advice)

2. “Health” based training takes a backseat as the recommendations we give create bodies

that fall within all of the generally accepted “parameters” for good health (blood pressure,

heart health, etc) by default. And, although we do talk about health and aging from time

to time, realize that “health” comes with the package, without having to FOCUS on it.

3. Our opinions are strictly our own and sometimes are about as un-PC as you can get, but

we’ll never hide from the truth or try to sugar coat reality. Our job is to help you get in

the exact shape you want, with all the BS aside. So, if you think we’re a little harsh

sometimes… just know we’ve got your best interest at heart.

So, with all of that said, dive in and enjoy. If you’d like more information on our workout

systems, just click this link. We guarantee you’ll save a bunch of time and energy in the process.

Your friend,

Brad Howard

http://blog.adonislifestyle.com

http://www.adoniseffect.com/true-account.html?utm_source=scribd&utm_medium=pdf&utm_campaign=musclegrowth

MUSCLE GROWTH



Brad Howard: All right guys, welcome once again to your Adonis Lifestyle podcast.

I’m Brad Howard and I’ve got John Barban on the phone. And today, we’re going to go

into a little bit about the state of muscle because we’re getting a lot of questions in the

customer forums and even on his blog about the different states that a muscle can

actually be in based on what’s going on with your body and what kind of work you’re

doing and things like that. So John, why don’t you go ahead and start out with this

because I know you’ve got a lot of things you want to talk about along this topic.

John Barban: Sure. It seems that people aren’t understanding what muscle is or how

it’s built. And I think one of the problems is the word ‘build’. The term ‘building muscle’ I

think makes people think that muscles are like bricks, and I know we’ve used this

analogy before. So the word build makes people think you’re actually building

something like a building, and I know that’s kind of a redundant term. But with ‘brick’,

like stacking bricks on top of each other, or like hammering wood together like lumber.

And building is probably the worst word ever used for muscle because you don’t build

them. I suppose you could say you inflate them, or you expand them, but building is the

wrong word. You wouldn’t think to yourself ‘I inflate a house’ or ‘I expand a house’. But

what you do with a muscle is you inflate it or expand it.

So ‘build’ makes sense for solid fixed structures. You don’t build muscle. Muscles are

in a transient state all the time. So what I mean by transient state is you’ve got to view

the size of your muscle as falling on a spectrum. The smallest your muscle could be is

due to complete wasting away from total disuse and complete and total starvation.

Those are the two ways to waste a muscle away to the smallest it could possibly be. It

won’t completely disappear, but it will waste all the way to the point where you would

eventually die. I mean, I don’t think you could necessarily die from the loss of skeletal

muscle, but whatever state you’d be in that would cause the muscles to get that small

MUSCLE GROWTH



would also cause your heart and lungs to atrophy to the point where you actually

eventually would die.

So on the one end of the spectrum, it’s as small as a muscle would ever shrink up to

from not using it at all and from starving it of nutrients. Or you could even sever the

nerves that innervate that muscle so you could never actually contract it. That’s the

smallest it can be.

And then the biggest it can be would be with as many genetic and chemical stimulus

and mechanical stimulus from working out that you could introduce it to. So that would

be working out all the time and taking any kind of anabolic and androgenic steroids as

well as growth hormone, perhaps gene therapy. Like all the different things that would

cause it to just constantly grow, so that’s the other end of the spectrum. And then every

where, everybody else, every human is somewhere on that spectrum, somewhere in the

middle. So you’ve got guys who go to the gym, but they don’t take any drugs. The only

thing that is “inflating” their muscles is the workout and whatever they’re eating and

perhaps some supplements. And then to make them bigger than that, you would

actually have to add in some kind of drugs and combine that with a workout.

S that’s kind of the way to look at what’s the stimulus that’s causing a muscle to be any

given size at any given moment. So there’ no such thing as how big your muscle is. It’s

how big your muscle is given the stimulus at that moment. So for instance, when we’re

just sort of standing around, not working out, never worked out, just how you would be

without working out; You’re only that big because you still get up and move around in a

day. If you fell and broke your arm and you put it in a cast, you’d find out as soon as the

cast came off that all of the muscles in that arm shrunk, shrunk to even smaller than

their normal size. So that means those muscles are only that size when they can move.

They’re a different size when they can’t move. And then they’re an even bigger size

MUSCLE GROWTH



when they can move with heavy weights pushing against them. And then they are an

even bigger size when they are moving with heavy weights pushed against them, as

well as drugs. So that’s what I’m trying to say, muscles are in transient state. It’s

dependent on the stimulus.

Brad Howard: Yeah, it’s obvious that you’re getting a lot of the questions, but what

kind of questions are people is asking you that just made you want to think about it and

just kind of talking about this in general. Because it kind of seems like we covered it a

little bit before, but not really talked about the actual state of it. There must be some

questions that are just coming across that just really are triggering kind of your little

radar and saying, “Hold on, there’s kind of this fundamental understanding that people

just don’t have.”

John Barban: Yeah, guys are asking me things like, “Is muscle building different than

muscle hydration.” And I would say that they are very similar. It’s the word build. The

word build is a poor choice of words to explain what’s happening to a muscle when you

place it against mechanical stress, I guess, even chemical stress. Like if you take

steroids, you’re not necessarily building a muscle as much as you are inflating it. So I

guess what this really comes down to is a lack of understanding of what even the

structure of a muscle is.

So a muscle is somewhere in the area of 80-85% water.

Brad Howard: Right.

John Barban: So those cells, the actual wall of the cell have some protein in it and

some lipid and some carbohydrate but the bulk of it is water. So when muscle store

MUSCLE GROWTH



glycogen, which is a reaction to training. For every 1 gram of glycogen stored, you have

to store about two grams of water. Same with protein, the protein content of a muscle is

about a 1:2 ratio of protein to water. So no matter how much “matter,” actual protein or

glycogen matter you’re adding to the bulk of what we would call the muscle cell, you’re

adding twice as much water, so it’s a transient state.

The best way to describe it (and I know I have described this before) is water balloons.

Making a muscle bigger is like filling a water balloon larger. The material of the balloon

stretches a bit, just a little bit more material but the inside of the balloon is what really

expands. The difference between starving and malnutrition and at least getting enough

protein and carbs, and exercise and/or drugs, all of those things stimulate the muscle to

uptake glycogen and uptake more amino acids and turn over more amino acids and

more protein. So those processes stimulate the muscle to draw more water in it and to

lay down a little bit more protein tissue and to hold more glycogen.

But those are all transient states. If you take away the drugs, if you starve the person or

if you stop working out, the muscle doesn’t have the signal anymore to fix more water,

to hold more water and to store more glycogen and to cause more protein synthesis.

Do you see what’s I’m saying? The bulk size of the muscle is never really dependent

on like things like protein content per se. The way to think of it is you’re stimulating the

muscle to want to hold more water.

Brad Howard: Got you. So what kind of the response should people expect if they

have muscle memory? Where does that fit in?

John Barban: A friend of mine who has been training for fifteen years now ripped his

bicep tendon right off at the elbow and his arm was casted for a while, and it shrunk. He

looked like he had a little girl’s arm by the time the cast came off, (and he’s got well-

MUSCLE GROWTH



developed arms). He’s got type of musculature most guys would want. He has good-

sized arms, I don’t know how else to say it. But the one arm completely shrunk, the

other arm stayed its full size. And then within six months, the arm that he ripped up

came all the way back to full size. So it didn’t just go back to the size he would have

been without weight training. It came all the way back to the size it was after fifteen

years of training.

So there definitely is some lasting response from weight training over time, which may

be the true measure of growth. If you take somebody who’s been training for ten or

fifteen years, completely immobilize the limb like this guy, like cut the tendon,

immobilize it, reattach it, and the thing shrinks all the way up to what his arm looked like

when he must have been twelve years old, like it was tiny. And then it came all the way

back past his normal growth rate all the way back up to his full fifteen-year weight

training size. So there’s definitely some lasting reaction there or some lasting

remodeling of the muscle such that it only took him six months to come back to its full

size, and match how big it was after fifteen years of training. It’s not like you have to

train fifteen more years to get there.

So all of that chronic training does change something at the genetic level or at the

actual material level, but I don’t know exactly what those mechanisms are. I don’t think

anyone really understands what the mechanisms are to get it all the way to that degree.

Brad Howard: Interesting. So it’s really not necessarily known, but we know it exists

and now, all I’m saying is that it just seems it’s like it’s more of a potential that’s being

laid down than anything because I can go three months and not train and then be lifting

about the same amount of weight within thirty days of starting back relatively quickly

MUSCLE GROWTH



John Barban: Yeah, so there are some neuromuscular changes. It’s at the nervous

system as well as probably at the genetic or at the nuclear level in the muscle, for non-

scientific-sounding terms, where it’s very primed to get back to its full size or its biggest

state, I guess you could say. The interesting thing is you can get all the way back to as

big as you manage to build it but not much bigger. So there are limits. There are upper

limits to how big we can get. And the interesting thing with that is it proves to you that

nutrition has nothing to do with it because his other arm stayed the same size, and the

arm that got ripped up and put in the cast and came out of the cast, he was eating the

same food all along, and then all he could manage to do is come back to that size, but

not beyond it.

Brad Howard: How much is it neurological, just overall? Not necessarily the atrophy

coming back and the muscle memory, but just overall just getting stronger? How much

is that actually with people, they’re just become more efficient and the signaling systems

just work better, that type of thing?

John Barban: That’s part of it. I mean, that’s part of the ongoing adaptation to

strength training, the neuromuscular unit, meaning the nerve as well as the muscle put

together as a unit, becomes more efficient. So the muscle doesn’t necessarily need to

get that much bigger to get stronger. And so that’s why we see guys who can

constantly get stronger in a particular lift, but not necessarily expanding bigger and

bigger. You see, carrying around more muscles is not all that efficient, and the human

system doesn’t really want to be that inefficient. So it’s only going to lay down muscle if

it really has to. So it will find other ways to adapt without necessarily building more and

more muscle. There’s an upper limit. That’s why you need to turn to drugs to force the

body to get even bigger and even bigger because those are basically unsustainable

states. The body’s not meant to be that big and carry that much extra mass.

MUSCLE GROWTH



Brad Howard: Right, yeah, that’s interesting, the other day I was doing an exercise I

hadn’t done in a while, and it was funny because it didn’t feel like it normally did. And

then I came back and did it this week. I mean, this is probably last week to this week,

and just the movement itself felt a lot more fluid. And it was just weird because it felt so

foreign, even though I have done it before months and months ago. It felt so foreign but

this time, coming around it felt a lot more natural to do as far as just overall stabilization,

being able to actually lift it, pull it, all that type of jazz. It was interesting how just the

feel of it was different.

John Barban: Well, any movement you go through has a specific pattern, and a

specific activation pattern of muscles that all activate in a particular order. It doesn’t

take much to switch the activation pattern. Like for instance if you’re walking, you have

a very specific activation pattern of all the different muscles that get you to walk. If I just

tie a one or two-pound weight to one of your knees, now you’re entire activation pattern

changes. Like the order in which certain muscles fire will switch. That’s why when you

are in the gym and if you just switch where your hands are on the bar, or if you just

slightly change your stance, your activation pattern is different.

So that’s why we have basically limitless variations we can put into our workouts and to

continually force your body to adapt to some degree. If you just stay in the same

position constantly, you’re not forcing a whole lot more adaptation, but if you’re

constantly slightly altering your positions, the adaptation changes, same with the speed,

same with the weight. That’s why all of those things matter, the neuromuscular pattern,

the order in which the muscle’s fire is different.

And the other thing there to remember is there’s no such thing as working one muscle.

It’s impossible to flex one specific muscle. There is no such thing, there are always

muscle groups. To make a joint move, there are always groups of muscles, never one.

MUSCLE GROWTH



There are twenty muscles just in your forearm, and you can’t pick one out and make

one work without the others. So it’s a fallacy to think you can isolate any one muscle.

You can involve more or less muscles, but you can never pick one of them out.

Brad Howard: Interesting. Yeah, I never really thought about that. Okay, so what’s

the typical conditioning? What I would think is like a conditioning kind of threshold for

you being able to kind of acclimate yourself to a specific exercise or a specific

movement or something like that. Like for me it feels like that I can jump up pretty

quickly to where it feels comfortable doing, so maybe after the first time I do it in a

workout, it kind of feels different. The second time, it feels better. The third time, the

actual movement part of it feels pretty solid, and then after that there’s, I guess, a

different conditioning for me where as I can just start adding more weight and things like

that. I’m not sure if that makes sense butA

John Barban: Yeah, even from set to set in a given day, you get better at it. So if we

went in and did six sets in a row of a new exercise we’ve never done before. I

guarantee your sixth set will look six times better that your first set. And then if we did

that again later this week, all six of those sets would look better than the first six. And

then next week, you’d basically have it in a groove where you’re just knocking them out

unconscious. You don’t have to really think about your form anymore.

And the learning curve is fast. It’s set-to-set and rep-to-rep, you learn fast. When I was

working with some various sports teams with some of our coaches, we were talking

about why certain pro athletes are just way better than other athletes, and one of the

theories postulated was just the biomechanical set of coordination learning theory of

athletes when growing up. Humans in general have an average of how many reps it

takes to master a skill to the point where it’s unconscious, so you don’t think about it,

MUSCLE GROWTH



you just do it. It’s kind of like a lay-up in basketball or a jump shot. You take enough of

them, that you don’t think anymore. You just go in and you shoot. And you don’t have

to think, “Where is my foot? Where’s my elbow?” Like a lot of things and it just goes,

right, so it takes a certain number of reps for the average human to switch that from a

conscious thinking action to an unconscious ‘it just happens’ action. It’s kind of like

riding a bike. You think about it in the beginning and then after a while, you don’t think.

You just get on and go.

So the amount of moves in a sport that a pro athlete has, it’s just going through enough

reps to move the skill from a conscious action to an unconscious action where it just

happens. And what they were saying, the idea was perhaps the best athletes, the Hall

of Fame types, it takes them significantly less reps to move a skill from the conscious

realm to the unconscious realm. So for example, a guy like Michael Jordan, maybe

when he was growing up, it only took him fifty thousand reps to master a jump shot

where as all the kids around him, it took them a hundred thousand reps. So by the time

he’s got the jump shot mastered, he’s already moved on to a fade-away jump shot, or a

leaning one. Do you know what I mean? Like some other skill.

Or he’s got his crossover down, now he’s got his other hand down because it’s taking

him half the amount of time to master each skill. So as his list of unconscious skills that

he can just do whenever he wants without thinking about it grows, it’s growing twice as

fast as everybody else’s list. So by the time he’s got twenty skills mastered, every one

around him is still working on skill number ten. So he can pull out moves in a game that

other people can’t even try it yet. So it’s like, “Oh, my God, what was that?” They also

don’t have the skill to defend it because they’re still working on that, too.

That’s the theory of why guys like Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky in hockey were so

much better than everybody else because they are twenty skills ahead of everybody

MUSCLE GROWTH



else. And for a career, if your fifty thousand reps takes a couple of years to master,

(and most pro athletes are done their careers in their 30’s or 40’s), well you’re going to

be ahead of every one, every year, all the time. Because by the time you make it to pro,

you’re literally ten years ahead of everybody else on all of the skill that you’ve mastered

into your unconscious domain and don’t even have to think about. So that kind of

explains why guys like Jordan and Kobe are pulling out moves that others guys will say,

“I’ve never even seen that before. I wouldn’t even know how to try that. And I also

don’t know how to defend it.”

Brad Howard: Right, that actually makes sense. I mean, it’s all compounding. I’ve

read a couple of books on outliers where they talk about stuff like that. And people

being identified at an early age and as far as being bigger than the other kids, maybe

they’re just a tad bit older but they got identified faster so they get compounding levels

of coaching that the other kids don’t get.

John Barban: Yeah, you’re compounding the coaching, compounding the amount of

skills that they can master into the unconscious domain at a quicker rate to the point

where they’re always ahead. So the same thing with muscle memory, the number of

reps it takes to master a movement, everyone’s got their number. The average

people’s numbers are very similar and then as you move up to the genetic gifted

athletes, they probably master stuff way quicker.

Brad Howard: Yeah you never see somebody breaking into a sport like basketball as a

guard at an older age. Like you see that with like forwards and centers because it’s

mainly about height.

MUSCLE GROWTH



John Barban: Well, yeah, because the only thing you need out of them is just the

height.

Brad Howard: Right. So I guess the big thing on the topic of muscle building, we kind

of go around and around and people are skeptical every which way because we’re

basically saying the exact opposite of what is being talked about in the mainstream.

And we talk about this all the time. But I mean, you’ve seen it, you’ve been there. You

have seen what drugs actually do. You have a size right now which is pretty big. You

mentioned the other day how you actually met another blogger who kind of thought that

he was going to be on par with you and Pilon when you met and he was like, “Wow, I

got a ways to go.” So yeah, I’m not really sure how big people think they can actually

get overall. And why you’re saying that there is a limit here? Why it’s such a downer for

people?

John Barban: Yeah, well, I guess it cuts to the root of why guys want to be big in the

first place. It cuts through their insecurity and sort of looking at your self from being

awkward. What do you think bigger muscles are going to do for you anyways? It’s not

that simple. I mean, people are like, “Yeah, I want to build muscle.” And every other

guy is, “Yeah, of course you do.” But then when you actually stop and think, why? Why

do I? And then, what’s the limit? What would I actually think is going to happen if I

happen to have bigger muscles? And then, that’s actually a way trickier question to

answer. And then it usually ends with, “Oh, because I’m not confident.” There’s some

kind of insecurity underlying the need to be bigger. Otherwise there’s no other need.

What is it doing for you? What is having a 19-inch arm going to actually do besides just

force you to buy bigger t-shirts?

Brad Howard: I don’t know.

MUSCLE GROWTH



John Barban: Well, that’s what I’m saying.

Brad Howard: I guess people start really losing focus. I guess this is kind of the first

mistake that people make is just losing focus on what they actually want. I mean, it’s

okay to admit that you want your body to do something for you other than just be able to

lift stuff and push it around.

John Barban: Well, it better not be just that because that’s a pretty pathetic goal.

Brad Howard: Right, I mean, if it doesn’t mean anything, if it doesn’t help you do

something else. I feel like the only reason people work out is because they assume that

the body they’re going to get is going to translate with people building the body that they

want. Ultimately when they start out, they want to build a body or to kind of grow

muscles and things like that. They want that actual body to translate into something

else, whether it being some type of financial gain or some type of relationship

improvement, self-confidence, respect. Maybe they feel like it will help not get taken

advantage of as much. All these other things and realms of influence that this is what

people really want out of this, and very rarely is it really about health or any type of

strength or performance until it gets pushed on them by somebody else, pushing some

other agenda.

John Barban: Or they happen to actually be an athlete, in which case that’s their

career anyways.

Brad Howard: Right, yeah, exactly. Like I say, it’s kind of a strange phenomenon. I

really don’t know where else to go with this. You’ve got to say what you want to say

about this. I don’t know if there’s a reason to really drag it out. Do you have anything

else that you wanted to touch on?

MUSCLE GROWTH



John Barban: No, not really. I mean, I guess just to kind of bring it back around and

reinforce the point that you’ve got to view the size of your muscles as a state. It’s a

transient state and to maximize their size, you have to be training regularly and you

have to be doing a significant amount of work, and most of that work has to be heavy.

Heavy, meaning the difference between going for a walk or doing squats, and that has

to be consistent. Nutrition plays a minimal role, if at all, as long as you are getting some

kind of regular food intake, that won’t be limiting. There’s a size you can get to without

drugs and then that’s it. There’s just nothing you can do about it. And then if you are

not satisfied with that size, the only other thing you can do is add in drugs.

And it’s a transient state. It’s not like bricks, it’s like balloons. It’s transient because it’s

a matter of inflating the muscle and keeping it inflated by constantly training. And that’s

about the best way you can think of it. And if you stop training, you’ll just go back down

to the size you were before you ever started training. And for some reason, based on

what we are talking about with muscle memory, it seems as though over time, if you’ve

done a lot of training and then you stop for a while and then come back, you can build

yourself right back up to the biggest size you ever got to much quicker than it took you

to get there in the first place.

Brad Howard: Right, which is pretty encouraging, and because we all have different

things that come up in life with travels, bad moments and things like that, it’s kind of nice

to know that all of your previous work doesn’t just kind of get washed under the rug if

something happens in your life and you’re not able to train for a month or year whatever

it is. That you are able to bounce back and kind of recover a lot faster.

MUSCLE GROWTH



John Barban: Yeah, I’m sure that changes over time. I’m sure when you’re sixty or

seventy you can’t get back to how big you were when you were thirty or forty, but you

can still be bigger at sixty and seventy with weight training than if you didn’t weight train.

Brad Howard: Right, yeah, it makes total sense to me like I say. Anything you want to

close out with?

John Barban: No, that’s about it.

Brad Howard: Yeah, yeah it’s a good short one, kind of got to the point really quick on

this one.

John Barban: That’s new for us.

Brad Howard: Yeah, exactly. But normally we kind of go off on tangents that kind of

pop-up, but this one was a pretty specific topic that you wanted to talk about, so that’s

pretty cool.

If you guys have questions or stuff, make sure you put them in the forums and we’ll get

to them and we make sure we get them answered for you. But I can say for John

Barban, I am Brad Howard, and that’s your Adonis Lifestyle podcast.

Here are a few links for you to check out: 1. Adonis Lifestyle Podcast (iTunes subscription link)

2. Listen to the audio version of “Muscle Growth”

3. Get the body you deserve and invest in the Adonis Index Systems

today!

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muscle growth - how does muscle growth really happen

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