So all this weight or bodyweight training with progressive overload is kind of just a way to communicate to our body and tell it to grow more muscles and strength?
So all this weight or bodyweight training with progressive overload is kind of just a way to communicate to our body and tell it to grow more muscles and strength?
Muscles are incredibly inefficient.
That’s why people that work 12 hour days doing manual labor were “skinny strong”.instead of jacked.
To get huge muscles, we need to trick our bodies into thinking we randomly have to move heavy weights every once and a while.
Part of that is slowly increasing the weight so they muscle rebuilds even bigger otherwise it would just stay the same. If you stop, your body stops wasting the energy for those huge muscles and they get smaller.
inefficient
Shouldn’t that be “efficient”? They will adapt to the minimal required strength for whatever the standard is.
No, because it always uses more energy to move.
Tendon strength is more efficient, so that’s what your body wants
What? If a muscle was inefficient, it would use more resources than it needed to no matter what its task was. This would result in larger muscles than needed - simply because “why not?” Use the resources.
By being as small and effective as possible for their normal tasks, they are as efficient as possible. That’s why if you stop working out - their normal tasks reduce - they get smaller and weaker.
Muscles rise to the lowest amount of strength possible. I’d argue that all parts of a body are as efficient as possible, because that’s how life usually works.
So from what context are we using the word “efficiency”?
Because from a muscle’s view, it is as efficient as possible. It grows and atrophies based on what is required of it. This is my problem with the main post: muscles are inefficient.
They aren’t, full stop. A muscle will be as efficient as possible - be as small and use as little energy as possible - to handle the regular tasks given.
If you are speaking from a holistic view of a human who decides what goals to set, whether it is useful to simply have large muscles for aesthetic reasons, then sure. Yeah. Big muscles burn more energy and aren’t needed to survive. I’d still say that’s not what efficiency is, but I’d concede there.
No, muscles require the most energy to maintain. Literally at rest, muscle is burning more than any other.
That’s why the body sheds muscle readily if they aren’t used, and why building muscle is so effective for general weight loss.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2980962/
Heart & kidneys > brain > liver > skeletal muscle > adipose muscle
Background: The specific resting metabolic rates (K[i] ; in kcal · kg[−1] · d[−1] ) of major organs and tissues in adults were suggested by Elia (in Energy metabolism: tissue determinants and cellular corollaries. New ...
Due to not wanting to move the goalposts, I’ll cede regarding organs.
That said, I meant vs fat. I should have clarified. One does does does not build or shed more organs, so I thought that was clear, but I see I was not
Also said, I’ve seen the brain one contested quite a bit.
Again I cede to your source and acknowledge it, only clarifying I was comparing to non organ tissue.
Edit my meaning was a pound of fat, at rest, burns less and contributes less to TDEE than a point of muscle. Therefore muscle is less efficient, using more calories to continue existing per unit time.
Fair enough. And I’ll give you the vs fat part. It was unfair for me to say anyway - what was in my head when I said it was that a pound of fat is considered worth 3500 kcal, which is more energy than most things in a body. It was a shit argument that mixed points.
Overall, I think my issue is just with the simple statement that “muscles are inefficient”.
The way I interpreted that statement is that “muscles waste energy”, since that’s all the context I could get from those words. I see muscles as super efficient, just like anything else in the body in that they do as little as possible compared to what is demanded. I view that type of laziness as ultimate efficiency.
Through the rest of the thread I got little additional context, so I kept on keeping on.
I still think the op of this thread didn’t get his point across very well
Yeah it’s a funny thing.
Efficiency has multiple meanings for a living body, and a goal. (Is the goal to survive, is the goal to be strong, etc)
Here is a starting point to read on this topic:
www.mayoclinic.org/…/art-20046508
Edit and a slightly more editorial article
webmd.com/…/8-ways-to-burn-calories-and-fight-fat
Edit here is one that focuses on metrics of measurement, such as TDEE
Just muscles?
It tells your peripheral nervous system to grow and optimize wiring to increase recruitment and activation, attenuate signal noise, boost reflexes and responsiveness, and improve sensory feedback.
It tells your circulatory system to branch out with many small vessels and more limber large vessels, all with improved resource transmission and lots more oxygen.
It tells your connective tissues you need higher quality rigging with less friction.
It tells your bones they need to shape the fuck up and increase their density.
It tells your endocrine system to quit being cheap and give you the good stuff.
It tells your immune system to chill out and focus.
And much more. Ultimately the supply chain requirements for the additional work leaves no system untouched.