When one is seriously considering taking up body building training, it is important to research about exercises, about intensity, about dieting, about rest and recovery, about hypertrophy and such important facets of body building. As is the practice, there is one element off body building that most people usually overlook at the time of researching body building. This is about types of muscles that make up the body. Muscle physiology is a pertinent part of strength training program, for rarely will you ever succeed in building something you don’t know.

It is therefore advisable that from the very outset to find out about the different types of muscle tissues. This will help you determine and emphasize in the best type of training suited to each one of them. If you simply can’t locate or differentiate between the muscle fibers in your body from their outside appearance and form their internal configuration , it will be very hard to undertake isolation exercises effectively, especially in intermediate and advanced body building training levels.

We have muscle fibers categorized into two broad groups that is, fast twitch muscle fibers and sow twitch muscle fibers. The fast twitch muscle fibers have two different types namely the type A and type B fast twitch muscle fibers. These there types differ in the ability to engage in fast contractions and he period of time they can sustain the contractions. Type A fast twitch muscle fiber for instance have the largest neurons and can therefore be engaged very fast into maximally exerting contractions like when you are performing an all out set of two reps at maximal intensity. A sprinter too, for 100 meters will also employ the type A fast twitch muscle fibers.

The motor neurons decrease as you go to slow twitch muscle fibers, reducing the speed of their engagement in contractions. It takes a while before the slow twitch fibers are engaged due to their decreased size of motor neurons, while medium exertions will eventually recruit the type B fibers with their medium size motor neurons.

Again the reason why these fibers differ is the size of their mitochondrial density. Type A has minimal mitochondrial density since they can not synthesis energy for themselves. Their speed of engagement and duration can only use the stored up glucose in the blood, while slow twitch fibers have all the time to synthesis nutrients and burn the calories for energy. As such, mitochondrial density increases as the speed of engagement decreases. Again, as already seen, the faster the contractual ability of the fibers the lesser the duration of engagement.

This later characteristic is determined by the oxidation ability of the muscle fiber. The fibers can only sustain contractions for as long a duration as their oxidation ability, meaning that the fast twitch muscles have lower oxidation ability while the sow twitch fibers have a higher oxidation ability. In oxidation ability we are referring to their ability to utilize oxygen for syntheses purposes.

If you like this article, click here to share: