Assume I exercise regularly, let’s say I work out on a Friday and then don’t work out the rest of the weekend.
Is the muscle built Friday night while I sleep? All through Saturday? During the weekend?
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After undergoing trauma from resistance exercise and assuming the trauma was sufficient enough to cause the body to react by deciding to release growth hormone from the pituitary gland and build muscle it can day 1 -7 days for the muscle to actually grow. Depends on a ton of factors but the process will begin as early as a few hours.
Common myth is muscles only grow while sleeping, this isn’t true. While sleeping your body does do the heavy lifting on muscle repair and growth, your body is also constantly breaking down and rebuilding muscle at all times , even in people who don’t train at all.
To answer your question, yes, all of the above
Once you hit a threshold of strain on your muscles, your body will start releasing hormones which tell it to build more muscle (or reform them, to be more precise)
This isn’t just a sleep thing, it will happen even while you’re working out still, but it’s definitely slower than while you’re sleeping or even just resting/sitting.
When you sleep your body releases more “rest and digest” hormones to use the nutrients you got during the day on your body’s down time to repair damaged tissue.
Those hormones from the workout earlier let your body know it should divert some of those resources to muscles specifically. Again though, those chemicals are always being produced, it just happens more when you’re sleeping.
It creates a bit of a feedback loop, your cells repair and those workout hormones get used up, then less are produced because of the muscle gain, so less of that muscle building takes place until you meet that new, higher threshold.
Your body is always going for equilibrium. Working out disrupts that, so your body creates the hormones to restore it by building muscle mass.
Know how when you’re growing you’re never not growing?
Same thing.
You’re in a constant state of rebuild and repair.
None of these answers seems to answer “like your 5”
When you exercise, that stress of hard work is actually tearing the muscle apart in a bunch of tiny places all over.
Just like when you get a paper cut and you can see the blood start to pool there really fast, this starts to happen in the muscle tears the same way, basically. But the blood flow brings fresh proteins which fill in the tears just made in the muscle, this is how the muscle grows because now the tears are filled in adding more to your muscle.
It’s kind of happening all the time in a great circle of life way. Each time you eat and drink your refilling the stores of all the really complex but amazing stuff your body needs to rebuild itself.
But keep in mind too- your entire body is made up of cells, all cells have a lifespan and will end up dying. Some cells live hours, some days, some months, some like your brain stay your life time and die with you- but these cells are being replaced and rebuilt all the time as they die.
Exercise helps build muscle by causing those tears- but also helps your heart and blood carry and push oxygen around the entire body by beating faster because of the stress which is helping your cells rebuild everything else too, not just the muscle.
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