Fibrous vs.

Fluid-Filled Muscle
In addition to the nervous signal sent by the CNS there are your muscles. If you don't already,
you should know there is more than one type of muscle growth.
First, you have what I call “puffy muscles”. The scientific name for this type of muscle growth is
Sarcoplasmic Hypertrophy. This is increased fluid, or sarcoplasm, levels in the muscle.
When you train like most bodybuilders, with high volume and low or moderate weight and short
rest intervals – you get sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.
This type of training will make you grow larger muscles, but it will NOT make you stronger. The
reason why you look bigger but remain relatively weak is because you have caused the muscle

to retain fluid. Since water can't be flexed, like muscle fibers can, the extra size won't help you
produce more force.
If we use the light bulb example again, it is like increasing the size of the glass bulb, as opposed
to delivering more electricity to the bulb, or more accurately, increasing the size of the filament
(the part that glows) inside the bulb so that it can handle more electricity.
In order for your muscles to produce more force your body must add tiny little “filaments,” called
myofibrils, to each myocyte. or muscle cell.
We call the type of hypertrophy that we're looking to gain, myofibrillar, because we want to
grow more of these myofibrils. Myofibrils are a part of the muscle cell, so when they become
stimulated by the electricity from your nervous system they contract. This is very different from
the fluid that gathers within the cells in sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.