As a young man, I was always stronger than my peers, though I have never been inclined toward athletic contests. Even at that young stage of development, I perceived a distinct difference between the kind of strength I possessed through purposeful exercise and the kind that appeared to exude from hard people. I could tell immediately for example, that firefighters, policemen, veterans, and manual laborers were almost all as strong as I was, but obviously exercised far less to maintain their strength. Many of my friends who returned from the war in the Middle East took terrible care of themselves by exercising very little, drinking heavily, and otherwise struggling to focus on their well being. However, to a man, these survivors remained hardy, well muscled and physically formidable, even as their health has deteriorated. As my life grew more difficult, I too found myself working jobs in manual labor, grappling with some severe personal losses and hardships in my family, and training at a no-nonsense school of martial arts where the stress of training was severe. I used to joke about doping with cortisol instead of testosterone. This chronic stress manifested in numerous physical symptoms, but the most interesting one was a default state of muscularity that persisted no matter how I did or didn't train.
To this very day, despite my vegan diet of solely plant foods and no oil, despite a reduced stress lifestyle, despite a workout routine consisting solely of running, pushups, situps, squats, kicks, and punches, I remain physically formidable. Yet if I had attempted to build muscle through these means before my hard years, I would have stayed very weak. I have a theory for why this effect has persisted: I call it the dye theory.
Conventional wisdom about bodybuilding posits that muscle growth is a function of resistance plus nutrition, but this approach is myopic. How shall the body prioritize muscle building? Why do certain exercises cause gains for some and plateaus for others? How do extraordinary individuals like Herschel Walker sustain their incredible strength on suboptimal routines composed entirely of calisthenics? One hidden variable contributing to these exceptions may be hormonal stress. Testosterone and human growth hormone may cause building, but they cannot on their own encourage the body to begin the process. Therefore, the building metaphor of muscle growth does not seem complete. Otherwise, there would be one single way to workout and eat that would guarantee optimal muscle growth across all people, and that perfect way has never been found.
A better metaphor for muscle growth may be color fastness and dying the body. Muscle grows more like a cloth being dyed than a structure being built. That cloth can vary from color fast, or difficult-to-dye, to easy-to-dye. Stress makes the body easier to dye and causes the muscle that IS built to be preferentially maintained. This may explain morphological differences among people engaged in the same physical activities. It also explains exceptional individuals who engage in suboptimal routines yet manifest above average muscularity.
In my case, I've found that the muscle I built during my hard years has been largely dyed into me through the high levels of stress I carried during that time. Even as my levels of stress decline, those morphological changes have proven resilient in spite of a diet and exercise routine that are intrinsically suboptimal for muscle maintenance. However long this effect persists remains to be seen, but to those seeking to gain muscle, consider the following revised formula for muscle growth: Growth is a function of resistance, diet, and stress. To increase stress, you'll need to live with purpose and self sacrifice. To my knowledge, there are very few gyms where this kind of austerity can be found.
Another outcome of this dying is that the body, given a choice between maintaining the health of tissues or thickening and maintaining muscle and tendon, will tend toward the latter, even at the cost of negative health effects, such as calcified and hardened arteries. As a result, if you want to reverse damage from hard living, you need equally severe opposite stimuli of diet, exercise, and stress: you'll need to eat, exercise, and calm yourself like a monk for as many years as it takes to readjust your physical constitution. I can only hope I have enough time left to fix the damage done.
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