Welcome to the Get Fit Guys' quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up. My name is Ben

Greenfield. I'm the Get Fit Guy. And in today's show, you're going to learn why bigger muscles

aren't necessarily better. All right, let's jump in. You probably know that the way you train

shapes your muscle size and also shapes

your muscle function. For example, if you lift heavy weights, you can build strong, dense muscle,

and if you lift very light weights, especially if you don't lift too muscular fatigue, you just

build muscle endurance and smaller, less dense musculature. If you choose exercises that involve,

say, multiple joints working all at the same time, like a deadlift or a squat, you tend to

build coordination and natural movement patterns, while if you choose single joint exercises,

like a bicep curl or a leg extension, you tend to fatigue muscle and build lots of lactic acid

in a muscle group, but from a functional standpoint, you may not build quite as much coordination

or athleticism. Now, if any of this is confusing to you, you might want to check out my

episode, How to Build Muscle. And I'll link to that in the show notes for this episode,

which you can find over at episode number 256 at quick and dirty tips.com. Now, when it comes

to overall health, though, what kind of muscle training is best? Well, you're about to discover the

answer, along with why you may actually not want to be training your muscles

to simply get bigger. So a recent study entitled Single Muscle Fiber Contractile Properties Differ

Between Bodybuilders, Power Athletes, and Controls, looked into the muscle fiber contractile

properties of muscle biopsies taken from the quadriceps muscle

of bodybuilders who'd been engaging in low to moderate intensity, high volume, resistance training,

and compared these muscle fibers to power athletes who had been engaging in high intensity,

low volume training. So what's the training difference between bodybuilders and

...