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is microtrauma THE causality of hypertrophy?

Wed, 01/21/2009 - 5:29am — quazimodo

AFAIk TUT is a correlation, lots of people claiming microtrauma to be the causality... whats the general concensus?

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Wed, 01/21/2009 - 11:15am — JeffS Timex Inspired

Isn't the other way around?

Isn't the other way around? Microtrauma* causes hypertrophy (increased sarcoplasm and all those other chemical changes). The way you stated it sounded like because of hypertrophy you will ceed to microtrauma.
*by microtrauma I mean the type you get as a result from weighted resistance training (doing it on purpose!).

Sat, 01/24/2009 - 7:05pm — BBpowerlifter
BBpowerlifter's picture

I don't think so

If that was the case then "hit with a hammer" would be the way to go
I believe the answer lies in a carefully designed program obeying Doc's seven laws of weight training.

Tue, 01/27/2009 - 12:58am — Mark Riso

Too much of a good thing

Microtrauma = small injury. For our purposes we are looking to cause microtrauma to our muscles. The body overcompensates for these injuries and makes us bigger/stronger than before(hypertrophy.) This is the basic idea behind progressive training: to injure, recover, injure, recover, wash, rinse, repeat. The problem comes in the timing. If you train too soon, the body hasn't overcompensated yet. If you train too late, the body has started to fall back to its original state.

Now, as to HIT, there are many problems. First, while a five second negative might hurt, do we know that it is causing microtrauma? And the microtrauma we want to get bigger/stronger? Are sets to failure causing more/less? I don't known about you but I don't take a scalpel and microscope when I'm in the gym. Results are really all you have to go on. Bottom line, proper periodization training has it, HIT does not.

Second, do we know that more microtrauma = more hypertrophy? Sure, it'll take you longer to recover...but will you supercompensate more as well? Or will there be diminishing returns? Again, results are really all we have to go on. But, let's try to analogize this:

Let's say you know that cutting your hair makes it grow. If that's the case, and you want long hair, are you going to trim the ends or buzz it all off?