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 to 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

...