Dr. Andy Galpin

Going higher on that spectrum, say five sets of five of five exercises.

five days a week, would get closer to the hypertrophy or muscle growth end of the spectrum, would give you a little bit more muscular endurance, and would be a lot more volume for those individuals who are higher training status.

For muscular endurance, you can add any number of things, more repetitions per set, more sets, less recovery in between sets, or anything else like that.

Training to a little bit of fatigue is a pretty easy way to think about muscular endurance.

Of course, exercise science is an entire scientific field.

It gets far more complicated than that, but that is a rough idea of how to intervene to change the quality of contraction in which your muscles can go through.

So to wrap everything up, today we talked a lot about skeletal muscle.

We went over how it actually works, what it's made of, why, in my opinion, it is the most important organ in the entire body and deserves more credit and attention.

We talked about why you want to make sure that it is functioning at the highest level possible.

This means both a quality of muscle functionality, contractile properties, how much force it can produce, how fast it is, and other things like that, as well as the quantity of it, how much muscle you have in general.

We went into a little bit of the microanatomy, so the difference between fast-twitch fibers and slow-twitch fibers, and why it's important that you pay particular attention to high-force activities in order to preserve those fast-twitch fibers, regardless of whether or not you're an athlete or a person interested just in longevity and overall wellness.

So from there, we talked about the three I's, the first being investigate, so identifying whether or not you have enough muscle and how it's functioning in terms of power and speed and so on.

The next I, of course, was interpretation.

So letting you know whether the amount of muscle and the strength and power you have is good, great, close to some of our world records, whether you're male or female, or maybe not quite as high as you think.

And then lastly, to intervene.

So what do you do about it?

What are some protocols and things you need to do from a lifestyle perspective to improve the both muscle quality and quantity?

I hope you found this initial discussion of skeletal muscle interesting and useful.

Now, when I say initial, that's for a reason.

I have a lot more to tell you about skeletal muscle, but we're gonna have to save that for future episodes.