Raging Hormones!

Many people don't realize that the hormones in our body play a huge part in our resistance training progress, and I do mean HUGGGEEEEEE!! Some assume that a little protein here, a dash of carbs there, mixed with some treadmills and low intensity training, and voila....beach body with abs to kill!

If you believed that was the case, you're wasting your time in the gym and you should just cancel your gym membership immediately. Here's the thing, do you think the human body just builds muscles at a whim? Do you honestly think that performing light unstimulating weights with minimal rest would cause you body to undergo major changes to become stronger? BAH!

Hormones are absolutely critical in ensuring that our bodies build more muscles and grows stronger, and these hormones would only be secreted if a strong enough stimulus would trigger the body to do so. In this case, sufficient muscular force production is required to trigger the release of anabolic or muscle building hormones e.g. testosterone, which would then bind to receptors in the muscle cells, subsequently signalling the body to increase protein synthesis and therefore increase the overall size of the muscle cell.

So what is considered to be a sufficient trigger to cause our body to secrete these wonderful hormones responsible for muscle synthesis? According to the Strength Training book by the National Strength & Conditioning Association, the hormonal response to an exercise has a general correlation with the amount of metabolic stress experienced by a person. Therefore a high intensity and high volume training session with minimal rest and exercises that recruit more muscles would optimize your body's capacity to trigger a hormonal response to build more muscles.