What’s up with muscle fibre? So what's so useful about strength training.

1. There are a host of health benefits associated with strength training. But there's a stereotype when it comes to strength building exercises. We associate them with enormous people usually men who build strength with enormous amounts of weights. Weights so big that us mere mortals would find it a little scary and perhaps intimidating. 
2. Muscle fibers differ in three ways : One, by the amount of force the fibers are able to generate. Two, by the speed that they're able to contract, and three, the number of times that the fibers are able to contract without fatiguing, or what we call endurance. Each of these qualities are actually related. 
3. The more force the fibers are able to generate in general, the fewer number of times they're able to contract without fatiguing and the opposite is also true. 
4. The more times a muscle fiber can contract without fatiguing, the less force it's able to generate. 
5. For convenience sake, physiologists tend to group fibers into two major categories. Some people call them slow and fast twitch fibers. Others call them type one or type two fibers. 
6. Type one muscle fibers are those fibers that are part of the slow twitch motor unit. These muscle fibers are the ones that are able to contract many times. They are the fibers we use when we walk, jog, run, swim, or cycle for long distances. 
7. When untrained people start to work out, they develop a lot of strength quickly. A lot of that initial increase in strength comes from the interplay between the brain, the nervous system, and the muscle. It turns out that untrained people aren't all that great at marshaling all of their muscle fibers to cooperate at the same time.
8. A lot of the strength gains that happen initially come from the various muscle fibers getting better at working in a more coordinated fashion. So at first, developing strength means that the nervous system improves the ability of muscles to contract at just the right moment. Then later, as one sticks with resistance training, more of the strength gains come from an increase in muscle mass from the muscle tissue actually getting bigger. That's a process that sees the body adding contract out protein to the individual muscle fibers. The fibers increase in cross sectional area. The muscle gets bigger a process called hypertrophy.