Dr. Luc (Luke) van Loon

And then you're looking in the mirror and you're thinking like, hmm, nothing much has been changing.

I still look the same.

And then you don't get back to the gym anymore.

You just quit.

90% of the people listening, including myself, that happens.

So the gain in strength is the first step.

The body tries to generate more strength with the stuff that it has.

And most of that is neuromuscular.

And then when the body constantly is being driven to do more than it wants, then it starts thinking like, okay, now it maybe becomes more efficient to build some extra muscle.

I mean, it would be strange if the muscle starts building extra muscle simply because you overexerted yourself once.

It's a very energy costly process to build more muscle.

So it takes a while.

So first you gain strength and then you actually follow up with more muscle.

So there's also a time relationship between the two.

Also the other way around.

I mean, when we become older, we lose more strength than can be explained by the amount of muscle that we have lost.

So there's also a neuromuscular component.

And of course, if you then start training these people, the first few weeks, even months, you don't see that much, but their strength goes way up.

So those two things are not one-on-one.

It's not a proportional linear relationship.