As opposed to the human body controlling muscle growth from within?
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The human body is amazing at adapting to its surroundings. If you lift weights regularly, it tells your body “we need these muscles”. They grow larger because of that. Conversely, the same is true, if you don’t use your muscles they will shrink because your body doesn’t use them.
Muscle growth is very costly from an energy perspective. Ever notice how much huge bodybuilders eat? That all goes right into the muscle growth. Thus, there is an evolutionary advantage to having your body only focus on the muscles that it NEEDS. How does the body find out what muscles are getting used? Your muscle fibers get damaged through rigorous use. Then the body repairs it during rest and it comes back tougher and larger. This isn’t a one to one analogy, but if it helps think of a scar; it’s thicker tissue.
It’s not so much that you need to lift weights specifically, but it just so happens that’s a really good (read: efficient) way to do damage your muscle fiber to trigger the repair and growth process.
You need a stimulus to trigger the muscle to grow. Growing new tissue uses a lot of energy and the body wants to be as efficient as possible. It’s not going to just grow energy hungry muscles for no reason. So lifting weights puts lots of stress on the muscle cells, actually damages the muscles a bit, and this triggers the body to build it back strong to prevent it from happening.
It’s the way of telling your body which muscles need to grow (and by how much).
Lifting makes tiny tears in your muscles. When they heal, your muscles gain some mass.
Its your body’s way of adapting. Instead of having a ton of muscle mass by default (which would be heavy, resource intensive, and wasteful), your body figures out which muscles to prioritize.
It’s important to remember we didn’t evolve in the world of abundance we now have in rich countries. Our bodies evolved to be able to survive scarcity. When humans weren’t guaranteed food every day. So everything is use it or lose it.
You’re using it? Then that means we need it to survive. You’re not using it? Then why are you wasting resources maintaining it? Just get rid of it.
We’re adaptive creatures. It’s affecting the CNS to remember it faced something stressful and wants to be ready for if such an issue occurs to handle it better. That’s basically weightlifting, hacking evolutionary use of Adaption.
Maintaining muscle takes a lot of energy, more than you might expect, and our bodies evolved to save energy when possible. So our bodies only keep the muscle we need/use. Lighting weight tells your body to keep the muscle, and if it’s difficult enough, to build more.
Things are better when they have a specific purpose rather than a multipurpose.
Like your phone. It can take pictures, call, browse, watch stuff, etc. It’s all in one. And while the tech is great – there’s actually better ones out there:
1. DSLR or mirrorless cameras can only take photos, yet it can take better, higher quality with more color contrast image than a phone.
2. Calling – there’s landlines which would you give the best audio quality, or there’s satellite phones that can call from anywhere in the world
3. Watching stuff – there’s high quality TV, I think they’re at 8k now.
It’s the same with our body. Our muscles have a specific purpose, just like the rest of our body have their purpose (i.e. liver, kidney, lungs, etc.) which is why the human body cannot grow the muscles from within because they weren’t designed to build muscles. But the cool part is that they all work in teamwork. The muscles can only grow because of the heart, which can only function because of the lungs, etc.
There have been many body building plans with no weights. They do require lots and lots of flexing and posing. Stress + Rest = growth.
To answer the questions as asked:
They don’t. Muscle growth is observed from supplementary testosterone alone. Certain animals also preferentially build muscle tissue over fatty tissues with minimal stimulus.
But it’s not much and mechanical stimulus is needed to see significant growth in humans. Best guess anyone has is that the human body is extraordinarily good at doing the bare minimum to stay alive. Most of our functions are use it or lose it. Dexterity, cognition, recall, stimulus tolerance, strength and flexibility.
If you have not presented a convincing reason to build muscle mass your body is going to just chill.
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