How to attain more muscle mass and it's contribution towards good health!
Building muscle, it’s not just for bodybuilders and people looking to get ‘jacked’. Its vital contribution towards health should have every individual chasing more!
Stepping outside on the northern beaches and you see that running and jogging tend to be a popular choice for those looking to get healthier. Don’t get me wrong, finding ways to incorporate aerobic training is great and should play a part in everyone’s exercise routine, however, it’s not going to be enough to build muscle (as with a lot of the trending fitness methods)
Why would you need to build muscle?
It may just be the best way for you to finally reach your ‘body goals’, but more importantly, transform your health.
You’re just going to look better. Whether that’s more ‘toned’, ‘fit’, or whatever adjective you want to use, adding muscle achieves it, not starving yourself and running yourself into the ground.
What’s this got to do with your health? This favourable change in your body composition is generally going to improve a number of health markers as you’ll be carrying more muscle and less fat.
Psychologically, this change in body composition can also be a huge advantage as there are a number of psychological effects from being happier with the way you look (such as improved confidence and greater body satisfaction). Naturally, a healthier mind is going to result in a healthier body.
For example:
Haines and Neumark-Sztainer (2006) showed that experiencing body dissatisfaction can result in the development of obesity and eating disorders. On the other end of the spectrum, having greater amounts of self compassion can influence your mental and physical health and even help you adhere to your training! (M Bigliassi, 2020).
Sarcopenia can begin as early as your 30’s! (Walston, 2012)
Sarcopenia is essentially the loss of muscle and the loss of strength or physical performance that accompanies it. The issue with this is that when you have significant muscle loss, your risk of illness increases (muscle is important for your immune system), you lose function (body ages faster), and you’re more susceptible to a number of chronic conditions.
“Strength declines by 10% to 15% per decade up to the age of 70 years, when the loss accelerates to 25% to 40% per decade.” (Siparsky et al., 2014)
The good news is that your muscle can be maintained and even improved through a solid strength and conditioning program that involves working large muscle groups with a relatively heavy load and improving power.
Your muscle plays a major role in how you store and use the energy from your food, such as glucose and fats. This is important for maintaining your insulin sensitivity (avoiding diabetes), providing energy (avoiding fatigue), and contributes to a body composition that equates with great health.
It’s well established that physical exercise has positive effects for your immune system, but what about possessing more muscle?
Granted these weren’t human studies, however a couple studies in animals may suggest that muscle may play a role in boosting the immune response.
“mice with more muscle mass were better able to cope with chronic viral infection than those whose muscles were weaker.” (Wu et al., 2020)
“skeletal muscles help to keep the immune system functional in chronic diseases” (Wu et al., 2020)
There are all kinds of challenges you may face in life, from surgeries to illnesses and accidents.
There have been numerous studies that show older individuals that are frail (have less muscle mass) experience worse outcomes when faced with surgeries, hospitilisations, cancer treatments and so on.
Frailty was associated with higher hospital mortality and long-term mortality… Frail patients were less likely to be discharged home than fit patients. (Muscedere et al., 2017)
Muscle mass is, in itself, a good predictor for survival in older individuals. A study by Srikanthan & Karlamangla (2014) followed a large group of older Americans over a number of years and concluded that:
*“Muscle mass, independent of fat mass and cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors, is inversely associated with mortality risk in older adults”.”
In other words, the individuals who had more muscle mass lived longer.
Now you have to take into account all of the other factors that could be contributing to muscle mass that also promote longevity, however given the fact that the study adjusted for risk factors such as C-V and metabolic health and this clear relationship still exists (along with the roles of muscle mass as I’ve outlined) you can’t go wrong with the addition of a little more muscle!
A few important points for effectively adding more muscle mass are summarised below (If you want the short version scroll to the bottom):
Lifestyle: Managing sleep and stress better. Sleep is associated with how well your dietary interventions work, how well you recover, the progress you make and so on. If improving muscle mass is a priority for you, sleep has to be too. Along the same lines, finding ways to manage stress better is also crucial. Stress doesn’t differentiate and at some point you will need a down regulation of stress to help you recover and see the gains you’ve been working for.
Diet: Without getting into the ins and outs of dietary choices, I believe the simplest thing you can do for improving your muscle mass in placing an emphasis on the amount of good quality protein you’re consuming. There’s evidence that the aging population should be having anywhere between 1-2g’s of protein per kg of bodyweight! (Lonnie et al., 2018).
Training (which I’d like to address a little deeper for this post):
First of all, you need to experience enough of a stimulus that forces you to adapt (intensity has to be great enough) and be progressively increasing this stimulus over time (progressive overload).
Unfortunately, doing your burpees into jumping jacks then down into a mountain climber may not be enough of a stimulus to grow muscle. Doing the same workout with the exact same weights for weeks on end probably isn’t helping you grow muscle either.
So what would this look like? Learning specific movements and measuring/tracking those movements so that you know how much you’ve done, and what you need to do to keep progressing (providing more and more of a stimulus over time). There are various ways you can progress in your movements, from increasing your range of motion to simply adding more weight. It won’t necessarily be a linear process, but without tracking and measuring it’s a blind pursuit.
Yes, this means if your trainer is taking you through a session without a book and pen in their hand, you’re probably not getting much closer to where you want to be.
You should also stick to a specific program for an extended period of time.
You need time to be able to improve; whether that’s adding weight, doing more sets, experiencing less pain, moving better or whatever way you’re tracking progress. If you’re completely changing your workout week to week, program hopping, or continually introducing the latest exercise you saw on instagram, then you’re not going to improve at anything and will struggle with your muscle- building pursuit.
There is general agreement that when it comes to building muscle, one of the most important factors is to be increasing volume over time (Essentially coming back to the first point).
This means it is important to gradually start doing more work. You could achieve this by hitting a few more reps, increasing the weight, or simply performing more sets as you progress through the program.
An important note: When you start increasing the amount of work you’re doing, try not to let the quality of work go in the opposite direction. Quality and quantity are key.
For someone new to resistance training, here’s a pretty simple way to start:
1. Choose some resistance training movements that feel right for you:
2. Make these movements hard enough for you that you can’t do that movement more than 20 times straight. Repeat all movements 2 times around to start off with.
3. Record what you did.
4. In between sessions, eat more protein, try to sleep well, get sunlight exposure and find strategies to cope with stress a little better.
5. Next session do the same workout but try to beat your previous records. This could be done by doing more reps, adding more weight, having more range of motion, Increasing the time it takes you to do the movement, doing more rounds (sets) and so on… If you can’t beat it one way, try to beat it in another way.
6. Once you start needing heavier weights, more sets, and more difficult exercises, break up the movements into separate sessions throughout the week. For example, you could start doing a ‘push’ session (vertical and horizontal pushing movements, + throw in some arm work) on day 1, a ‘leg’ session on day 2 (knee and hip dominant + lateral movements), and a ‘pull’ session (vertical and horizontal pulling movements, + ab work) on day 3. You could also keep doing full body workouts on each day but break up the number of sets you do among the sessions. There are multiple ways you can organise your training – play around with different variations and see what feels best.
7. Try to get at least 3 sessions in a week while leaving adequate time in between sessions to feel somewhat recovered.
8. Repeat until you’re not progressing anymore and then you can start worrying about diving deeper into ‘the optimal’ ways of building muscle that everyone loves to talk about.
If you need more personal guidance, come and pop in the new studio and I’ll gladly help you create a program that’s right for you!.
1. Haines J, Neumark-Sztainer D. Prevention of obesity and eating disorders: a consideration of shared risk factors. Health Educ Res. 2006 Dec;21(6):770-82. doi: 10.1093/her/cyl094. Epub 2006 Sep 8. PMID: 16963727.
2. Bigliassi, M, Galano, BM, Lima‐Silva, AE, Bertuzzi, R. Effects of mindfulness on psychological and psychophysiological responses during self‐paced walking. Psychophysiology. 2020; 57:e13529. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13529
3. Walston, Jeremy D. “Sarcopenia in older adults.” Current opinion in rheumatology vol. 24,6 (2012): 623-7. doi:10.1097/BOR.0b013e328358d59b
4. Siparsky, Patrick N et al. “Muscle changes in aging: understanding sarcopenia.” Sports health vol. 6,1 (2014): 36-40. doi:10.1177/1941738113502296
5. Jingxia Wu, Nina Weisshaar, Agnes Hotz-Wagenblatt, Alaa Madi, Sicong Ma, Alessa Mieg, Marvin Hering, Kerstin Mohr, Tilo Schlimbach, Helena Borgers, Guoliang Cui. Skeletal muscle antagonizes antiviral CD8 T cell exhaustion. Science Advances, 2020; 6 (24): eaba3458 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba3458
6. Muscedere J, Waters B, Varambally A, Bagshaw SM, Boyd JG, Maslove D, Sibley S, Rockwood K. The impact of frailty on intensive care unit outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Intensive Care Med. 2017 Aug;43(8):1105-1122. doi: 10.1007/s00134-017-4867-0. Epub 2017 Jul 4. PMID: 28676896; PMCID: PMC5501903.
7. Srikanthan P, Karlamangla AS. Muscle mass index as a predictor of longevity in older adults. Am J Med. 2014 Jun;127(6):547-53. doi: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2014.02.007. Epub 2014 Feb 18. PMID: 24561114; PMCID: PMC4035379.
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