My entire adult life has been dedicated to finding the holy grail of muscle growth. I've read thousands of research papers and countless books on the topic, and I've spent over a decade slaving in the lab trying to scope out new techniques—and classic ones—that bodybuilders can add to their toolbox. So I can think of a few candidates off the top of my head.
But here's a surprise: Out of all the papers I've read, the most extreme growth response was from a study I saw all the way back in high school. The author of that paper was Dr. Jose Antonio, a man who played a large part in inspiring me to pursue a career researching hypertrophy.
Through a unique approach to stretching, Dr. Antonio induced jaw-dropping levels of growth in animals, and my lab at the University of Tampa has recently striven to—you guessed it!—optimize this technique for bodybuilders.
Get ready to stretch both your mind and your muscles!
THE SWOLLEST QUAIL IN THE NEST
When muscles grow, they do so through one of two mechanisms: either by making existing muscle fibers bigger, or through the addition of new muscle fibers.2 Dr. Antonio's research was primarily centered on the second method, which is known as hyperplasia.1
While the first method of growth is more or less uniformly known and accepted by scientists, the second method has been more controversial. There are two proposed mechanisms through which individuals achieve hyperplasia, or add new muscle fibers. The first mechanism is when existing muscle fibers split. The second is when your body activates specialized cells known as satellite cells.2 The satellite cells then divide and combine to form new muscle fibers. Both of these methods require extreme mechanical stress and damage to induce hyperplasia.
In Dr. Antonio's study, he subjected quail to an extreme, chronic stretching-overload protocol which involved hanging weights on their wings for 28 days. During the month-long study, he progressively added more weight. Incredibly, Dr. Antonio reported 318-percent increases in mass for the stretched muscles! This is far larger than anything else I've seen in the scientific literature. He then counted their individual muscle fibers and discovered that the technique had indeed drastically increased the number of muscle fibers in stretched muscles.
After reading this experiment, I immediately asked myself two questions:
- Can hyperplasia occur in humans?
- Can we modify Dr. Antonio's protocol for bodybuilders?
STRETCHED TO THE LIMIT
Unfortunately, our ability to detect changes in muscle fibers in humans is quite difficult because we can't count the number of fibers from pre- to post-training in an entire muscle group. Unlike an animal model where it is possible to count every single muscle fiber, you have to make assumptions from a small muscle sample in humans. However, indirect methods in humans still point toward hyperplasia.
One of the best studies on this topic to date was performed by Dr. Tesch and Dr. Larsson back in 1982.3 These scientists found that many of the muscle fibers in highly trained bodybuilders were the exact same size as recreationally trained physical-education students. The fact that the bodybuilders had much larger muscle mass indicated that many of their muscle fibers had been newly created.
So should you duct-tape some weight plates to your arms for the next month? I wouldn't—although perhaps hanging some weights on your pet turkey might make for a bigger Thanksgiving meal. It is important to emphasize that the conditions in Dr. Antonio's study were extreme, to say the least. Luckily, when looking at studies, there are other stretching models to follow.
One is known as an intermittent stretch overload. This technique uses weights to stretch the muscle intensely, followed by two days of rest. Animal research has demonstrated that this type of approach can still results in up to 50-percent increases in muscle size when the weight is not progressed, and up to 225 percent when weight is progressively increased.4
IMPLEMENTING THIS TECHNIQUE IN HUMANS
Until recently, no human studies had been performed to investigate muscle growth with intermittent stretching protocols. However, two new studies have shown that intense stretching—even without lifting weights—increased strength by greater than 20 percent in only 3-8 weeks.5,6 Because individuals weren't actually lifting weights, an increase in strength strongly suggests—and other research supports—that the muscle must be enlarging, either by increasing fiber size or quantity.
Our lab recently tried to tie together all the existing research into a training protocol that bodybuilders could use right away. Our study, led by Jacob Rauch and Jeremy Silva, focused on individuals performing seated calf presses on the leg press.
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