THE IMPORTANCE OF MAINTAINING MUSCLE MASS
Stubborn fat, joint pain, and poor movement patterns are all things that people experience at some point in their lives. You can bring all of these concerns to the attention of a healthcare practitioner, but it’s possible that extreme diets or over the counter supplements could be a likely recommendation.
Hopefully this hasn’t been suggested as a stand alone solution. As personal trainers, we believe that the best medicine is maintaining a balanced diet and enduring your best efforts for the correct exercises at the gym. Throughout our daily lives, we do our best to follow the guidelines for keeping an optimal level of health - avoiding as many bad habits as possible. However, avoiding exercise will always lead to complications sooner or later. There is no quick fix or shortcut.
It can be very tempting to take supplements or simply slash your calories in half in order to lose 20lbs (this is not recommended), as it may appear to achieve quicker results. This course will only result in malnutrition, potentially causing some disorders. The reality is that you cannot escape the scientific fact that resistance training yields almost too many benefits to simply ignore. The benefits that you would gain are worth the level of investment that you are putting into yourself. That in itself is more than enough reason to understand why building muscle (and keeping your gains long term) is the key to unlocking your true potential.
Why is building muscle good for your health?
At first glance, one may perceive that retaining muscle is only important for athletes or bodybuilders, when in reality, everyone needs to take this into consideration. Muscle tissue gives profound benefits that are often discredited with misinformation around its importance. So what is so great about muscle? Skeletal muscle allows you to express movement (in the form of day to day activities, for example), contributes to your overall metabolic rate, and it has been shown to deter diseases that are associated with sedentary lifestyles.
Let’s dig into each of these a little further:
How it improves movement
Consider movement as synchronized as a musical orchestra.
An orchestra can be the metaphor for your entire body, where different body parts may play different components to the symphony, yet creating one unified, harmonious production. With the help of the conductor (aka your brain), your body acts in the exact same way, sending signals from the brain to communicate to your nervous system and muscles in order to complete that task with utmost efficiency. Certain muscles and joints should be dominating or leading the movement (the soloist), and the remaining chain of muscles help to support that task in a coordinated fashion. If there is one violin player in that orchestra that is off tempo, or playing the wrong tune entirely, then it makes the entire orchestra sound off key. You can see examples of this in the human body when you experience back pain by simply bending down to pick something off the floor. Your body couldn’t recruit the correct muscles in the appropriate sequence, with the correct timing, in order to grab that pen off the floor. Something as simple as that, is in fact, not that simple at all, and could be disastrous for repetitive strain and injury when you least expect it.
How it improves metabolism
Muscle tissue is where you burn the majority of your calories.
Muscle also contributes to normal metabolic reactions that your body undergoes daily. Some examples of this include keeping you warm, or shivering when you’re cold, providing energy molecules while exercising, and delaying the onset of muscular atrophy (sarcopenia). Your body’s ability to do this is dictated by your basal metabolic rate (BMR), which is partly genetic, but mostly attributed to how much muscle mass you have. Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is how many calories your body requires to simply keep your systems functioning at rest. Let’s say your BMR is 1500 calories. If you were to do absolutely nothing all day, laying in bed, your body would utilize 1500 calories worth of energy just to do that. Factor in an active lifestyle and what you eat, then that number goes up. Now add 10lb of muscle to that person - their BMR goes way up from the initial 1500 calories, and their body turns into a natural wood burning oven, torching calories quite easily because it has greater potential to do so. Now, your BMR makes up for almost 60% of how many calories you burn daily. If you don’t carry much muscle mass, then there is a significant chance that your BMR is much lower than it could be. Take a loose example, of two people who both weigh 150lbs, with person A being 10% body fat, and person B is 35% body fat (which would be considered high). Person A and Person B both eat an entire large pizza amounting to 2000kcal. Whom do you think would have the greatest potential to burn off that pizza? Person A, of course. But again, this is not an exact or direct equation to the science, but you can appreciate that having more metabolically active tissue promotes a greater thermogenic environment, and successfully keeps your systems functioning optimally.
Article Of Interest: Facts About Fat Loss
How it improves disease prevention
Studies show that diseases like Type 2 Diabetes, coronary artery disease, and certain types of cancer risks are significantly decreased when one regularly exercises.
Building muscle inherently builds strength, and your body is able to withstand the repetitive demands of activities of daily living, with much less effort. Taking the stairs, getting your groceries, and even sitting at your desk all requires some amount of energy. If your body cannot take the challenge, then over time (weeks, months, years) the constant strain on your tissues and organs won’t be able to keep up any longer, and disease is usually the end result. Let’s take one of the most preventable diseases as an example. Type 2 diabetes is usually adult onset, and it’s diagnosis is usually due to a sedentary lifestyle. Family history can predispose you to also inherit type 2 diabetes, but studies show that an active lifestyle, paired with adequate nutrition and sleep, will significantly decrease your chances of developing the disease, even if both of your parents had diabetes. Having adequate muscle tissue again saves the day, by having the ability to absorb your free floating glucose (sugar molecules in your bloodstream) via the GLUT 4 receptor. When your muscles contract, these receptors become extremely sensitive to glucose, and their affinity grows similar to a lock to its key. Exercising stimulates these receptors and helps the body to manage blood glucose levels, utilizing it for energy. If you didn’t have significant muscle tissue, then your pancreas would have to work triple time to produce the cells required to manage that free floating glucose. Do that for some years, and you become a walking target for type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is one of the most preventable diseases out there, and all it takes is a little more physical effort to stay healthy.
Now that we know how important our muscle tissue is to our everyday lives, we are left with two thoughts:
How do I build muscle, and how do I retain it?
Building Muscle
Building muscle is usually threefold: proper and thorough resistance training, eating well, and sleeping well. Yes genetics can play a role, but consistency is the bigger contributor to seeing some well deserved gains.
Resistance Training - When trying to build muscle and getting stronger, you need to work hard enough that your body would need a reason to build that muscle you desire. You have hormone regulators that are doing their job to keep the same environment, but building muscle means you need to change that environment. In order to do this, we need to “override” your internal programming and give your body enough of a “shock” that it will say “okay, let’s lay down some muscle, in case I’m subjected to this same shock again”. This means you have to train to failure, or at least hard and thorough enough that the body will be forced to rebuild muscle tissue in anticipation that you will embark the same stimulus again sometime soon. This means that training the same muscle groups consistently (provided you eat enough protein and rest and hydrate) will eventually yield the results you’re looking for. Overriding your current environment takes consistency. How much consistency is relative, as everybody responds differently to exercise. Be patient, follow a program and I promise you the results will come.
Eating Well - There is a scientific rule of thumb for how much protein you should be eating in order to either sustain or increase the level of muscle you have. The recommended daily allowance for sustaining muscle is 0.8g of protein per kg of your bodyweight. For increasing muscle, you should be looking to consume approximately 2.2g of protein per kg of your current bodyweight. The remainder of your calories from carbohydrates and fats should be well balanced to ensure you aren’t deficient in any nutrients for normal functioning. The use of protein supplements and high protein snacks can help you get that added protein boost if you’re looking for it.
Sleeping Well - Sleep is to help you recover, rejuvenate and build. If you are not getting adequate sleep, then you aren’t giving the body the adequate time it needs to undergo all of the metabolic processes to build that muscle at all. In addition, poor sleep means poor training or performance, and will likely promote inflammation and/or risk of injury. Getting that eight hours of sleep is imperative, and not just for building muscle.
Retaining Muscle
Retaining your level of musculature looks pretty similar to the above strategies. However, the COVID-19 global pandemic had all of us looking at training a little differently without access to heavy equipment. Retaining muscle is still possible with minimal to no equipment, and we do that by shifting our focus to volume and intensity, keeping in mind the above and previous principles.
Training volume refers to how much work you are actually doing (eg total volume of reps over your session), and training intensity refers to how difficult the exercises actually are. Any effective training program where you are attempting to become stronger or build muscle must include volume and intensity. Instead of your typical barbell squat at 100lbs, you could mimic the intensity of the same exercise by incorporating principles around time under tension, eccentric loading, more sets, more reps, plyometrics, more challenging calisthenics, anything to keep the muscles woken up! It doesn’t equate to the same as being under the bar, but your body definitely knows effort and responds accordingly. Whatever muscles you’re working, whether you’re training at home or at the gym, ensure your program applies these principles to make sure you get the most bang for your buck.
Essentially, muscles keep you alive and well. They play a considerable role in your everyday life, and we need to appreciate everything muscles allow you to do. If from the above information, you continue to do nothing, then your body will have a much more difficult time maintaining your bodyweight at healthy norms. Reversing this becomes even more difficult as we age, because we would be fighting the increased rate of muscle tissue dying as we get older. Starting now doesn’t have to look perfect, but as you become more of a veteran at building muscle, you will see that applying these principles will guide you to a longer and healthier lifestyle.
If you require any further assistance with a muscle building program, see our options for acquiring a personal trainer.
References:
American Physiological Society: Exercise and Type 2 Diabetes: Molecular Mechanisms Regulating Glucose Uptake in Skeletal Muscle. Kristin I Stanford and Laurie J Goodyear. Adv Physiol Educ. 2014 Dec; 38(4): 308–314.
US National Library Of Medicine: Exercise and GLUT4 in human subcutaneous adipose tissue. Marcelo Flores-Opazo, Sean L McGee, Mark Hargreaves, Eva Boland, Robyn Murphy, Andrew Garnham.
“Fat Loss Forever: How To Lose Fat & Keep It Off" By Dr Layne Norton and Peter Baker
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