#281 How to Build Muscle and Strength FULL Guide

Siim Land (0:00)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast, and today I'm going to play you a comprehensive presentation about how to build muscle. It tells you how to train, eat, and recover for muscle hypertrophy and strength. This information comes from my new book with Dr. James DiNicolantionio and Conor McGregor's nutritionist, Tristin Kennedy. You can now get our new book, Win on Amazon. It includes 12 chapters about optimizing athletic performance and fitness.

All right, welcome back. This is another video. We're going to talk about muscle growth and how do you build muscle, the mechanisms of how it happens, and what are the best ways of building muscle.

I'm just going to start off with my own transformation, mini transformation that I've gone through over the years. On the left, you can see just me in 2014 when I was in the military, and approximately the weight, 69 kilograms or something like that. I was lean. I was still relatively muscular. More muscular than the average person, but definitely smaller and a bit thinner. And on the right, that's me approximately now, 2021 And now I weigh around 85 kilograms. And that's a 16 kilogram difference. And now I have more muscle mass, my all the muscles are more defined, the shoulders, the delts, etc. I am actually even maybe a little bit, I wouldn't say I'm a lower body fat percentage, but I'm definitely around the same body fat percentage, but I just look more jacked and more muscular because of having more muscle mass. And the definition is more there, so to say. So just like a difference between the military training and the training I'm doing right now. So it goes to show that there are like your body adapts always to what you're doing. So in the military, you're doing a lot of cardio, not a lot of like heavy weights, and mostly like calisthenics, et cetera, which doesn't mean like you can't build muscle. For sure, you can. Like I did build muscle in the military, but you know, there's a different ways of achieving that, which we'll discuss in this video in more detail. So basically, the process of building muscle is called hypertrophy. And there's different methods or different types of hypertrophy. But the main idea is that when you are putting a body under some sort of a stress, physical mechanical stress, mechanical stimuli, then your body responds to by building this muscle mass. And hypertrophy describes like, you know, expansion of the already existing muscle. And there's a difference between hypertrophy and hyperplasia. So hypertrophy is actually the increasing of the muscle cells. The muscle cells just become more inflated and they get bigger. Whereas this is a normal muscle cell hypertrophy, a muscle cell experiencing hypertrophy is going to be bigger than the normal muscle cell. And hyperplasia is actually basically the replication of the muscle cells or the increase in the number size or the number of total muscle cells, which doesn't necessarily equate to having bigger muscle cells, so to say. So usually most of the process of building muscle, there's a bit of both that's happening. But most of the process of looking like a bodybuilder or looking bigger is related to hypertrophy.

Muscle cells or muscle fibers themselves are also different, or they respond differently to different kinds of training. And there's different types of hypertrophy, like I mentioned. So there's a sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, which is associated with the increase in the sarcoplasmic fluid of the muscle, like all the glycogen content, the creatine, other kinds of things that make the muscle cell look more bigger, essentially. And there's the myofibrillar hypertrophy, which relates to increasing in the number of these myofibrils, which are basically muscle fiber types. And the sarcoplasm is all this fluid, the water, the glycogen in between, and the muscles. Most of the training adaptations, let's say strength-based adaptations, are related to myofibrillar hypertrophy, like powerlifting, lifting heavier weights, weightlifting, those kinds of things that promote myofibrillar hypertrophy. And you get stronger and you experience this type of hypertrophy. Whereas if you're doing more like a bodybuilding type of approach, where you're using lighter loads, but you're doing more volume, then that's associated with sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. So like the pump and a ton of reps, a ton of sets. Whereas the myofibrillar is like lower reps, but heavier loads, heavier intensities, and thus more strength gains as well. So this is like a Olympic gymnast and powerlifter, and this is like a bodybuilder.

Muscle fibers are also different. So there's three types of main muscle fibers. Type one is called the slow twitch muscle fibers, and this is associated with endurance. They have basically a relatively low force output. They're not like explosive, they're not strong, but at the same time they have like high tolerance to fatigue. They're very hard to fatigue because they're like endurance fibers, and you can use them for like hours and hours, like walking, jogging, cycling, hiking. Those things are used primarily type one muscle fibers, and they have a lot of these mitochondria in them, which gives them like more of this red type of look, and they can basically utilize a lot of oxygen because of that, which is why they are called high mitochondria. The type 2A muscle fibers are called fast twitch, oxidative muscle fibers, and they're more explosive for sure than the salt twitch muscle fibers. They have a medium force output, medium fatigue, and medium amount of mitochondria, and they're mostly related to like this sarcoplasmic effect, like you're not fully reaching maximum intensity, but you do experience relatively higher loads, higher mechanical tension, compared to like endurance sports. So this is again like a bodybuilder type of muscle fiber. And the lastly is the type 2B fast twitch glycolytic muscle fibers. They're also sarcoplasmic, but they're also mostly like the myofibrillial type, that they're very high force, near maximum effort, and high fatigue as well. You can't use them for too long because you will get exhausted. Like sprinting, like if you were to put it on a spectrum, this is, you know, a long endurance marathon running. The type 2A is like a 400 meter dash or something, and the type 2B is the 60 meter sprint or the 100 meter sprint. You can't really do it any longer than 30 or 20 seconds. And they also have a lower amount of mitochondria because of that. The mitochondria are mostly related to a lot of oxygen consumption, a lot of energy production, and thus also endurance and aerobic sports. Whereas the fast-switch ones are like explosive and power-related, like clean and jerk snatch powerlifting, again, is type 2B.