Does Muscle Fever Mean Muscle Growth ?

Many bodybuilders think that they have to have muscle fever to know that they had a successful training. Muscle fever is an inflammatory response to exercise. To grow, satellite cells (precursor muscle cells, in a latent state, which repair damaged muscle tissue) mediate the hypertrophic process. Inflammation is believed to play a role in muscle growth.

One study compared two groups of people - one trained, the other untrained - during an 8-week weight training program. The researchers measured markers of muscle fever and inflammation and took biopsy samples from the subjects' legs. At the beginning, the untrained group showed symptoms of muscle fever, while the trained group did not.

Both groups had the same increases in IGF-1 in muscle and had similar increases in muscle mass. It was also found that IGF-1, muscle strength and hypertrophy occur regardless of the level of markers that show muscle damage (such as creatine kinase) and muscle fever.

So, don't feel guilty that you didn't work hard enough, just because you didn't get muscle fever. Muscle fever is a bad indicator of muscle damage. Trained athletes develop a protective mechanism in the muscles, called the "effect of repeated matches". So, the more you train, the less muscle fever you get. This does not mean that you are no longer progressing !