if building muscle is caused by microtears then how come we don’t get bruises from doing it?
In: Biology
Because muscle growth isn’t caused by muscle damage. It’s a myth that’s spread everywhere because it’s so compelling; it’s one of those explanations that just clicks and makes sense. But it’s not supported by the science. The real drivers of muscle growth are mechanical tension and metabolic stress. Mechanical tension is basically your muscles freaking out over how heavy a weight feels, and deciding to get stronger so that it feels less heavy. Metabolic stress is your body trying to feed energy into your muscles and not being able to keep up with the demand, and deciding to level up the muscles so they need less metabolic support.
Edit: in response to people taking issue with “myth” – the popular meme “why does muscle grow from weight lifting? Cause they get damaged and grow back stronger/bigger” is ABSOLUTELY a myth. The best opposing case that could be made is that muscle damage is one of the three primary drivers of muscle growth, but every expert I’ve read has implied that research over the past decade or so has been building a case that muscle damage is merely correlated with muscle growth under many circumstances. It’s difficult to establish concretely that muscle damage has absolutely nothing to do with growth when pretty much all weight training causes some damage. Here’s a review of some research that includes a study that showed similar hypertrophy rates between two training modalities that caused different amounts of muscle damage – [study ](https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/ijerph/ijerph-16-04897/article_deploy/ijerph-16-04897-v2.pdf)
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