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Help! My New Muscles Brought
Stretch Marks!
It happens to most bodybuilders sooner or later. When you build muscle
fast, sometimes your skin just can’t hold it all – and you end up with
stretch marks. Any serious bodybuilder you ask will tell you that some
stretch marks are inevitable. It’s almost as big a topic on bodybuilding
discussion forums as diet. If you’ve been working out for a while and
are starting to notice little tears and red lines in your skin, you’ve
probably got a few questions like:
What are those ugly red lines under my arms?
When you put on weight – fat OR muscle – rapidly, your skin has to grow
to accommodate the new size of your muscles. The problem is, your skin
can’t always keep up with all the growth going on inside it. When your
muscles grow faster than your skin, the skin can tear, and the result is
pink or deep red lines at the site of the tear.
So I got stretch marks from bulking up too fast?
All right. Here’s the more technical explanation. Scientists are
starting to believe that there’s a little more to stretch marks than
just growing too fast, though that’s a big part of it.
Your skin is made up of elastic fibers called ‘collagen’ and elastin. If
you were to look at a cross-section of your skin under a microscope, it
would look a lot like a chain link fence – those ‘links’ are made of
strands of collagen that knit together to make your skin. When you’re
eating a healthy diet and growing normally, your body makes plenty of
collagen and elastin. The more collagen and elastin in your skin, the
firmer it is and the more it can stretch before it starts to tear and
stretch marks show up.
Under certain circumstances, the body can’t provide enough collagen to
keep the skin taut and healthy and flexible. One theory is that it has
to do with a hormone, glucocorticoids, that’s made by your adrenal
glands. When you’re bulking up, there’s more of this hormone circulating
in your blood, and it interferes with your body’s production of collagen
– just when your body needs it most.
Because the skin’s capacity to stretch is dependent on the amount of
elastin and collagen, when you body doesn’t make enough of either, any
growth of muscles will start to pull the collagen fibers apart. As they
pull apart, the epidermis thins and flattens because there’s no support
beneath it – and the end result is a scar called a stretch mark.
But why are all these stretch marks on my chest and under my arms?
In bodybuilders, stretch marks are most likely to show up under the arms
in the pec-delt tie-in region, and on the underside of the arms over the
triceps. Because those muscles can bulk up fast, the skin over them is
the most susceptible to damage. That doesn’t mean that’s the only place
that you might get stretch marks, though. Some other likely places that
stretch marks may show up include your hips, your inner thighs, your
chest and your upper back.
How come I got stretch marks, but my workout partner didn’t?
No one’s really sure what makes someone more susceptible to stretch
marks than another person, but there are some theories – and some
suggestions for making yourself less susceptible.
First, lighter skin tends to scar more easily – and that includes the
scars from stretch marks. There’s also the fact that dark skin doesn’t
show the reddish purple lines of new stretch marks as readily as fairer
skin does. On the other hand, faded stretch marks tend to show up more
on dark skin.
The tendency to get stretch marks may be hereditary. If you inherited
the kind of skin that scars easily, chances are that you’ll get stretch
marks when you build muscle and put on weight fast.
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