Muscle Worship

You can see muscle worship in the way our heroes look in movies today. The massive muscles that you see in bodybuilding have become the normal and accepted look that we see in Hollywood movies, giving us an unrealistic idea of what we should look like.

That being said, we can all look alot more like that than we do now, if we use a good training and diet program.

Especially now, in the twenty-first century, we live in a world where people are infatuated by celebrities, TV, the movies, and what has become known as "Hollywood" in general. This has driven body-image standards through the roof with serious muscle worship. Everybody wants a six-pack, bulging biceps, and a nice toned chest.

If you are a woman, you want those sexy curves, and not "too much bulk". So how can I assist you in achieving these kind of results?

It's called lifting weights. For men, lifting weights will allow their hormonal make up (high levels of testosterone, human growth hormone, etc) to build pounds upon pounds of muscle mass on their frame while building strength. For women, weight lifting holds many of the same benefits. Female sex hormones estrogen and estradiol prevent females from getting "bulky". That's right. The excuse a lot of females make when asked to consider lifting weights is that they do not want to be too "muscly" or "bulky". This SiMPLY WiLL NOT HAPPEN without the introduction of male sex hormones into the body... i.e. IF YOU ARE A WOMAN YOU WiLL NOT GET BULKY UNLESS YOU TAKE STEROiDS, it is physically impossible. You can get some great results from some supplements without negative side effects. If you are a woman, however, you will gain functional strength, and tone your muscles enough to get those sexy "curves" you've always wanted and to satisfy your muscle worship goals.

If muscle worship is your thing, check out these muscle girls.

In my opinion, weight lifting routines can be divided into two major categories: size and strength. in the first category, size, the trainee does specific exercises for a certain amount of sets and reps that will contribute to the gain of the size of the muscle. The act of gaining muscle size is called "hypertrophy".

There are two main types of hypertrophy: sarcoplasmic and myofibrillar. Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is when the amount of fluid inside of the muscle cell increases, causing the muscle to get bigger. Myofibrillar hypertrophy is when the amount of nuclei as well as the amount of contractile proteins (myosin and actin) increase. Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy will not contribute to strength gain, but myofibrillar hypertrophy ellicits a gain in size as well as strength.

When training purely for strength, the nervous system is what is trained more so than the muscle. When you lift something, your body talks to your brain. Say you're doing a curl. Your body says "OK brain, I need you to tighten... ahh.. lets say 50% of the muscle fibers in both of the biceps, because this load isn't too heavy" Your brain gets the message, and complies, and you curl the barbell. But what happens if the message is like this: "Brain, this weight is pretty heavy, we've already done 2 reps with 95% of the fibers.. I need 100% to get this third rep up". Your brain complies, and you get the rep up. But based on the fundamental instinct of survival, your body says "OK well next time I need to be more efficient with the fibers of the bicep with that curling motion"... and thus you gain strength.

At the end of the day, we can all improve our bodies and look really good, but the massive muscles that we desire in our muscle worship culture may be just out of reach for most of us.