A closer and clearer explanation of my phrase in the title, what I will actually be about in today’s post, will be, in simple terms, our muscles. Or, to put it mildly, the muscular system. And what exactly? Let’s talk about how it works with the growth of our volume and strength. Again, a little more professionally, let’s talk about our muscle and strength potential. In a synonymous dictionary, we would find an equivalent for the word “potential” in the word “achievable”. So what about what we can achieve with our bodies? Let’s go in order…

In order to be able to produce a certain strength, we should have a certain muscle base, capacity. Muscle capacity depends on several factors – genetics, the structure of our skeleton, hormonal response, the length of individual muscles and our initial weight at the start of exercise.

The term genetics should be understood as heredity. It is something we are born with and that affects our entire life and therefore the very trainability of our muscular system. It is something that should not be overlooked. But whatever our genetic predisposition is, we should always be able to realize that we can influence it to a certain extent in the long term with the right training.

Another important indicator of muscle potential is the structure of our skeleton. In very layman’s terms, a person with a more subtle skeleton cannot stack and develop muscle mass to the same extent as a person with a robust skeletal structure. Thus, in the first case, the muscle potential will be less than in the second case. What is the main idea behind the muscle-to-bone ratio? Here I will rely on an expert and scientist in the field of kinanthropometry, Francis Holway, who, based on measurements of elite athletes from various sports sectors, found that 1 kilogram of bones supports a maximum of 5 kilograms of muscle in men and in women it is a maximum of 4 kilograms of muscle with 1 kilogram of bones. This finding confirms that muscles and bones are anatomically and functionally closely connected. Starting from the same stem cell line, they grow and strengthen in response to very similar hormonal signals. The traditional concept that skeletal muscle is used to load the bone and transform skeletal segments into a system of levers is evidence that striated muscle is essential for the maintenance and development of our bones – bone density. In addition to biomechanical function, skeletal muscles and bones are also endocrine organs capable of secreting factors capable of modulating biological function within their microenvironment, in surrounding tissues or in distant organs. These properties of muscles and bones can be used to sense and transmit biomechanical signals, such as different exertion, exercise, and others. These mechanisms can become extremely important during bone and muscle healing after musculoskeletal injuries. We can influence all this with the correct and appropriate load based on strength training. A small impulse to think about what we can influence by simply “pounding” in the gym…

The muscle-to-bone ratio is a much better indicator of someone’s ability to gain muscle mass, as it not only takes into account height, but also points out how broad and robust someone is. The one who will look more robust even at the same height, even if he has a little more fat mass on him, but will naturally really look “gigantic”. Thus, his potential to gain muscle mass will be greater than that of someone who is the same height but is actually thin.

What kind of idea we could have about muscles, now let’s briefly focus on strength. Strength is the result of how many muscles we have and how we know how to use them – activate them in relation to overcoming a certain resistance from the external environment. This is also how it could sound somehow. Strength is a function of nerve and muscle factors. More sophisticated wordingJ The more muscles we have, the greater our strength potential will be. However, all this is a long-term process, because through training we improve our nervous system, which is necessary for muscle activation (addressing motor units, helping them to activate faster, produce more work, relax faster, increase overall performance). The second, essential thing is the constant improvement of motor control in anything. Better mastery of any movement, motor pattern, together with better neural activation, leads to greater force production.

In conclusion, I would like to point out – whatever your goals are in gaining mass or gaining strength, try to take into account these facts, which have been briefly stated here and tried to look at the matter soberly. Although it is true that all the limits are actually only in our heads and with hard and honest work we can get really nice results…