grass is so cute

Let me show you something adorable.

I haven’t met many people who’ve seen this.

Nothing beats the beauty in our world. Nothing fascinates me more than the microscopic.

This is going to be all about fixing your micro…

Micro gains!

I’m kidding it’s nothing so serious.

I partially wanted to show you what grass looks like, and something a little more nerdy.

That’s your muscle under a microscope.

Let me teach you a little bit about your muscle cells, it’ll also give you a better understanding on what’s happening with muscle growth.

First off, bone, who cares. They just calcium deposits.

Secondly, tendons, who cares. They just connect muscle to calcium deposits.

Now listen up, here’s what everyone cares about.

Muscle fibres.

• These are what makeup your skeletal muscle

• They attach at two points and facilitate movement by contracting

• They are basically rubber bands that can contract (you’ll see where the rubber band comes in later)

Let’s go deeper into what makes up this muscle fibre.

You have two parts, one is relevant, one is irrelevant.

1. The sarcoplasmic reticulum, sarcolemma, transverse tubule, and mitochondrion 🥱 

2. The myofibrils 😄 

Number 1 is boring and is just supporting structures for your muscles. These are pretty lame and aren’t something you can really focus on too much.

Let your sarcoplasmic reticulum, sarcolemma, and mitochondrion be themselves.

They’ll appear as and when the myofibrils require them.

Now I can tell you about the myofibrils…

Myofibrils

These are what you actually care about in the gym.

When you’re trying to get bigger you’re trying to get myofibril, or sarcomere growth.

The sarcomeres are inside the myofibrils and I’ll touch upon that in a second.

• Myofibrils can increase in number, this is muscle growth.

• Muscle fibres cannot increase in number, this is inhuman.

• When your muscle fibres experience active mechanical tension myofibrils are added

That’s pretty cool.

Now inside these myofibrils you have many many sarcomeres in series.

When sarcomeres are stretched to a certain degree and experience passive mechanical tension more sarcomeres will be added and will lengthen a muscle fibre.

That’s pretty cool.

Alright the last thing you need to know about the muscle on a cellular level is how contractions work.

Inside a sarcomere you have two myofilaments, actin, and myosin.

These do something called actin-myosin crossbridging, it’s how your muscle contracts.

Actin and Myosin run parallel to each other.

1. When they’re resting myosin is ready to bind to actin but cannot do so because of a protein called tropomyosin.

2. When your brain sends an electrical signal (action potential) through your nerves to command a contraction, the sarcoplasmic reticulum will release a calcium ion into the muscle cell.

3. This calcium ion binds to what governs tropomyosin (from step 1) and exposes actin for myosin to attach to.

4. Now that myosin can bind to actin it does so, and pulls actin forwards.

5. This happens again and again on a cellular level over and over for you to fully shorten a muscle (where anatomically possible)

That’s pretty much it.

Some fun stuff for anyone who’s a complete 🤓 not me.

I promise your next email will actually help your gains.

Your Hypertrophy Hero,
Fletcher

P.S. Other animals have demonstrated something called hyperplasia, this is when a muscle fibre divides into two (each with the same muscular potential). Although no one has found this in humans, some have suggested this is what stretch-mediated hypertrophy is… 1) it’s just not. i covered that here. 2) hyperplasia doesn’t occur due to stretching, it’s an adaptation for animals who will easily max out their muscle fibre potential in order to facilitate the additional needs. this is something we don’t even get close to doing.