eli5: What is a hypertrophy workout different from a normal workout?
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Hypertrophy means that you’re building mass, as in sheer size of muscles, as opposed to strength or athletic prowess. This is typically done, to the extreme, by bodybuilders.
The specificity is that you train in a certain way that favors mass gains (for example, higher weights with fewer repetitions is the predominant approach), and you also calibrate your nutrition to the same effect (large quantities of protein to favor bulking, for example).
Hypertrophy just means muscle growth, it’s working out with the intention of overworking or muscle group. Coupled with sleep and nutrition this will cause muscle hypertrophy.
Regular working out can be simply for cardiovascular health or weight loss. That being said weight training can help with both of those but is technically different
Your muscles are made up of very long cells, inside these cells there are lots of strings of proteins called myofibrils, these are often called “muscle fibers.” The muscle fibers expand and contract to moves your limbs around. These muscle fibers are surrounded by a fluid called sarcoplasm. Sarcoplasm is full of all the things your body uses for energy, glycogen, ATP, creatine, etc. You can think of it like the fuel that the muscle fibers use to move your limbs around. More muscle fibers means you can create more force with your muscles and thus lift heavier things. More sarcoplasm means you can lift for longer before collapsing.
Hypertrophy is just the fancy word meaning muscles getting bigger, and there are two ways this can happen:
1) You increase the number of muscles fibers in the cell.
2) you increase the amount of sarcoplasm in the cell.
Any resistance training is going to increase both those things, which is good because it means for 90% of the population who aren’t gym-rats, it means any lifting you do will increase both your muscle strength and muscle size. However, if you’re ALREADY a weightlifter/athlete and all you’re looking for is large muscles, it’s much easier to increase the amount of sarcoplasmic fluid in your muscles than it is to grow a bunch of new muscle fibers.
A “hypertrophy” workout is one that is designed to increase the amount of sarcoplasm in your muscle cells. So a hypertrophy specific workout will involve lifting a lighter weight a BUNCH of times. The goal is to burn up all the fuel in the tank, not exert the maximum power. That way, when your body is recovering and trying to figure out how to adapt it will say “I need to make the gas tank bigger” (more sarcoplasm) rather than making the engine more powerful. The opposite type of training would be “strength” specific, which would involve lifting something very heavy a small number of times so that the body adapts by making the engine more powerful (more muscle fibers).
So when you look at a body builder, their giant muscles are mostly fluid. Because they’re focusing on muscle size above all else. Arnold Schwarzenegger, commenting on the state of bodybuilding at one point said he was unsatisfied with the goal of muscle size above all else because “A guy that looks like he could lift 500 pounds, should actually be able to lift 500 pounds.”
They’re not different, all workout is hypertrophy workout. Its just that some workouts are more so than others.
“Normal” workout seems quite vague, but as others have said, if you are relatively untrained basically any workout will make your muscles bigger. However as you start to hit the gym more, it helps to start thinking about what you’re trying to accomplish.
As a generalization, improvement derived from physical activity happens because your body is trying to adapt to become more efficient at the activity you are doing. If you run long distances, your body wants to be more efficient at that. If you lift heavy weights, your body wants to be more efficient at that.
What we’ve found through lots of experimentation is that there is a certain type of stimulus where the a significant part of the body’s adaptation is to make the muscle bigger. This tends to be lifting weights to the point that you can only do 1-2 more repetitions, after doing 5-30 repetitions. You *can* get bigger muscles doing 3 reps of a huge weight or 50 reps of a very light weight, but it is a lot less effective. So the above is what is generally called a hypertrophy workout.
If you want bigger muscles but workout outside of this range a lot, then your body is incentivized to make adaptations more suited for that rather than put on muscle. For example if you only run marathons, having big muscles isn’t just not helpful, it’s a detriment, because you just have more weight to carry around, so you will tend to lose muscle over time.
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