Quote:
Paul Watt wrote:
Robert,
Muscle development is either hyperplasia or hypertrophy. If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting hyperplasia, which increases the number of muscle cells with minimal size increase in the muscle. So, you are suggesting your exercises cause hyperplasia. Is that correct?
Paul
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PD Gollnick, who at the time was a prof. at U of Washington, Seattle, addressed our graduate dept in PE at U of British Columbia, in - I think it was - 1979, with respect to his research into the argument between hypertrophy and hyperplasia.
I don't know if the article I'm citing below discusses this particular research (my bad, don't have easy access to old journals) but - they trained several different species of mammal and bird, and counted individual muscle fibres.
They found that in trained and untrained muscle there were fibres that "bifurcated" and could have been interpreted to be splitting, but mainly that the diameter of individual muscle fibre was changed due to training, and that change was due to increased amount of contractile elements (myosin and actin) within the indivudual fibres, rather than the fibres splitting and turning into more fibres.
Trained muscle on one side, and untrained muscle on the other side of individual animals had the same number of fibres on average, and muscle in trained animals of the same species had the same number of fibres as muscle in untrained animals.
Gollnick reported this to us in 79 or 80 (I'm getting old and can't remember), and this article may not be the specific paper referring to the hypertrophy vs. hyperplasia argument, but if you're driven by this question, it may pay to search Science Citations Index for Gollnick, P. D., publications (either principal or co-author) from (say) 1980 to 1985 to find the work(s) in question.
Riedy, M., H. Matoba, N.K. Vollestad, C.R. Oakely, S. Blank, L. Hermansen, and P.D. Gollnick. Influence of
exercise on the fiber composition of skeletal muscle. Histochemistry 80:553-557, 1984.