Why You Show Love Muscle Fatigue
Love and Appreciate Muscle Fatigue!
Fatigue is the necessary ingredient for muscle growth and a rapid increase in strength. A typical workout will require you to rest and take off a day or two between workouts so your muscles can recover.
For example, once you’ve begun training the biceps and arms, you won’t see a noticeable change in size right away, yet your body is working continuously to increase the thickness of the muscle fiber. A muscle fiber is thinner than a human hair but can support up to 1,000 times its own weight, so increasing volume in the muscle fiber causes hypertrophy (increase in mass), which then allows for more force production.
But what happens during an exercise? In a fascinating bit of physiology, your body focuses all attention on a working muscle. When a muscle is asked to contract, your brain sends a message to the rest of the body to constrict blood vessels and blood flow is diverted from nonessential organs (your digestive system, for example).
Meanwhile, the working muscle dilates its blood vessels (vasodilation) and receives an increased blood supply. That’s why bodybuilders like to do bicep curls before a competition—because the exercise increases oxygenated blood flow to the muscle, which causes it to look bigger.
That immediate response is available because biceps are fast-twitch muscles. There are also slow-twitch muscles, and those are the large stabilizing muscle groups in the abdomen and back. The muscles of the arms and legs are fast-twitching, meaning they can contract and respond well to strength training. Since they are easy to over load and fatigue, it’s relatively easy and quick to produce bulging biceps and calves, while it may take months to develop cut abs. To put it another way, abs are difficult to overload and fatigue; therefore, difficult to tone and define.