To build muscle you are tearing the muscles and letting it heal. Does this not increase risk of mutations that might turn into cancer like how repeated damage to skin or lung cells can cause cancer?
I don’t think it is a cancer risk but I would like an explanation as to why.
In: Biology
Your muscles are essentially a rope that’s made out of millions of protein fibers that are all wrapped together. Its those fibers that are the functional unit of a muscle, not the muscle cells, and each fiber will pass through thousands of cells from start to finish.
Muscle cells are sort of wrapped around those fibers. The cells themselves don’t provide any structural support to the muscle – its all the fibers doing that. What those cells are doing is maintaining the fibers and providing the proper chemical environment to allow the fibers to expand and contract.
What this means is that when you put force on a muscle 100% of that force goes into the fibers, none actually goes into the cells. So when you “damage” a muscle during exercise you aren’t actually damaging the cells, you’re damaging the fibers. What causes your muscle to grow is the cells repairing the damaged fibers and building new ones.
Muscle cells, like most other cells in your body, cannot replicate once you’ve hit adulthood and have an extremely limited ability to repair themselves.
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