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Lecture Notes

Before we move into the last section of this lecture where we talk about how to improve both muscular strength and muscular endurance, there are two terms that it's important to be familiar with. The first is hypertrophy, and here we're talking about the increase in muscle size as a result of training, so your muscles getting bigger, and this is really a result of increased size of the muscle fibers themselves. The second definition, or word, that you should be familiar with is atrophy, and here we're talking about shrinking of the muscles. Usually it comes from a lack of use of the muscle, and one of the most common times you see this is if someone breaks their arm or their leg and it has to be put in a cast; when you take that cast off, the leg is much smaller, or the arm, the casted body part is much smaller because of atrophy, because of the shrinking of those muscles. So this gives us just a good foundation to start talking about developing muscular strength and muscular endurance.