Jim: What exactly is going on when we’re building muscle?  When we’re working out, what’s happening physiologically to our bodies to build muscle?

Vince:    Sure.  We’ll let’s tone it down for everyone to understand what’s happening at a basic level.  I like to use this kind of analogy.  First off, you have to give your muscles a reason to grow. What I mean by that, your muscles are probably sleeping right now.  They’re stretched out on a lawn chair having a martini.  They have no interest whatsoever in building muscle because that’s hard work.

They prefer to sleep all day.  Building muscle is what you want to do, so you really need to give them a reason to wake up.  Essentially what you need to do is you have to get them to say, “Holy cow!  What the heck did you just do to me?  I don’t ever want to experience that stress again.  We better build some new muscle.”

When you don’t do that, visualize this scenario.  Your muscles are probably laughing at you and they’re saying, “Man, that’s your attempt at building muscle?  We did this work out a couple of weeks ago.  Actually never mind, we did this work out a couple of months ago as well.  Keep training like this and we’re going to get a great suntan here.”

So you really need to focus on progression and constantly outdoing your previous workouts.  Outperform your previous workouts simply by doing something that your body hasn’t done before.  I’m sure everybody’s heard that.  The whole thing is we’re breaking down muscle tissue and it’s growing back.

It’s more than just the function of breaking down your muscles, because if you’re not giving them enough calories, then they’re not going to have enough support.  It’s like building a house.  It’s like this, and I’ll show you how important nutrition is.  It’s like trying to buy a $50,000 car with only $25,000 in the bank.

So we first need to be in a caloric surplus.  But you probably also know there’s a lot of guys who eat a lot of food and they’re not building muscle.  What’s happening to those guys?  Well, building muscle is also a function of the amount of hormones in your body.  That’s why body builder guys inject steroids, take an extra testosterone, growth hormone – they’re creating the hormonal environment their body needs.

We also need to look at how are we training.  Are we creating the right hormones in our body so that our body can build muscle?  That’s kind of the science.  I just like to keep it revolved around creating the right hormones and getting the right energy surplus.  Those are the two big things.