Why is muscle mass so important to long-term fitness?
When you want to get into good physical (and mental) shape, exercise naturally becomes a priority. However, it’s easy to perhaps concentrate on the wrong kind of fitness regime. If you want to help your body and make sure you live a healthier lifestyle, it pays to start working on one thing in particular: muscle mass.
Why does muscle mass matter?
The main reason we want to promote the importance of muscle mass is that put simply; it helps you to make more of your weight loss. Getting rid of that excess fat is always positive but making yourself lighter isn’t always quite as healthy as it might sound. Weight loss can become a negative if you go too far: it’s important that you lose fat but keep muscle.
So, measuring and looking after your muscle mass is by far the most important thing that you can do to help improve your physical conditioning. If you start to reduce too much on your muscle mass, then you can find problems such as:
- Lacking physical strength
- A lack of energy
- Reduced mobility
So, if you want to determine how healthy you are, it’s important to look beyond merely your actual weight. Muscle mass matters even more considering that our muscle mass starts to decline after the age of 40 naturally. By age 40, you could begin to see as much as 8% of your muscle mass degrade over the next coming ten years – and this keeps happening until we hit our 70s, where it can accelerate even further.
Lower muscle mass means that you’re more likely to suffer from injuries and falls, and more likely to see delayed recovery from standard illnesses.
How can I improve my muscle mass?
Most of the time, you should look to work on the way that you live first and foremost. Improving your diet, making it more balanced in general, is often an excellent first step to overcoming this problem. However, if you wish to help really improve muscle mass, then you need to up your intake of two things in particular: Vitamin D and Protein. Protein helps to restore the muscles after a workout, while Vitamin D helps to reduce the extent of breakdown.
In terms of exercising itself, you should look to take on resistance training as much as you can. This is often seen as the most effective form of training for your muscles, making it much more likely that you can see quicker results. A combination of regular exercise built around resistance training, alongside a more balanced diet that encourages protein and Vitamin D intake will be essential.
Remember, then, that you should not take weight loss alone as a sign of good health: a healthy body is one that has strong muscle mass, not just a lack of fat.
