Weight Training Basics – What is Hypertrophy Training?
Hypertrophy training is the typical training style of the average bodybuilder. You aren’t really working for maximal strength or muscular endurance. What you are working on is the size of your muscles! Through myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, the size of your muscles increase. Myofibrillar hypertrophy is when the actual muscle fibers are grown. This is also known as functional hypertrophy, since the muscle growth results in more muscle fiber to activate on any given strenuous occasion – like weight training. Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is the growth of other parts of the muscle. This type of growth isn’t with the actual muscle fibers itself and doesn’t amount to much functional strength or endurance improvement.
While there is a huge debate on whether you can exclusively train for one type of hypertrophy, it is not a secret that there are two types of hypertrophy. Your muscle fibers make up a small portion of the actual size of the muscle that you see. If only the muscle fibers grew, you wouldn’t be able to put on as much mass. With sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, your muscle can hold more fluid, leading to a much greater size. So, to the point, you don’t need to worry about training for either of these specifically just yet. There isn’t definitive evidence that you can train for one without training for the other at the same time.