From what I learned, building muscle is essentially working them until there’s microtears, and said microtears repair themselves and become bigger/stronger than before. Since this is the case, why can’t we give ourselves microtears using some tiny sharp object and build our muscle that way?
In: Biology
THE SAME REASON WE CAN’T CURE DEATH
Technology is not there yet, and you talk about nanorobots that can do complex surgery
[https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10uv7d1/eli5_if_muscle_growth_is_caused_by_microtears/](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10uv7d1/eli5_if_muscle_growth_is_caused_by_microtears/)
Last year, u/math2ndperiod offered a great answer to this by answering a similar question in this sub. I recommend you go check out that top comment of theirs.
Muscle hypertrophy is a complicated subject in which we do not have clear answers. There are many different theories, of which muscle damage is only one.
There is no proof that artificially microtearing muscles would grow them. Also it would be unpractical and possibly dangerous. If it had to be done in a clinical setting, it would also be costly.
Weight training is the safest, cheapest and most fool-proof method we currently have.
Perhaps in theory, you could, but it’s not like there would be a surgery in which you go from skinny to yoked in one go, it would require many many visits which would be very expensive because it would be very invasive and require removing skin to get to the muscles. It just isn’t practical. So, to answer your question, lifting weights technically is manually tearing our muscles, since you can target certain muscle groups with specific lifts. If you’d like a combination of good info and good laughs, and have a good sense of humor via vulgarity, I recommend Renaissance Periodization on YouTube. Dr. Mike is very knowledgeable and very funny and slowly becoming a voice for exercise science, and he’s got the body to prove it.
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