Muscle, Sweet Muscle

Kelly McPherson CPT, CFT, CES

We hear a lot about muscle. It seems that everyone wants it. We see magazine pictures, movie shots and advertisements fraught with men and women in tight fitting clothes with well defined bulging muscles and nary and ounce of fat anywhere.

Other than looking really good, why do we want muscle? There are a couple of major reasons.

Aging with ability - This one seems like a no brainer, but more muscle equals more strength to perform your daily activities. Good muscles mean that as we age, our quality of life doesn't diminish as much as it would if we didn't have it. Muscle keeps us feeling young and strong.

Protecting your metabolism - While fat does take a few calories to maintain, muscle burns a heck of a lot more. The more muscle we have the more calories we burn both at rest as well as during activity. This means that with more muscle mass, we can maintain our waistlines with less effort. As we get older, we lose muscle unless we do something to prevent the loss. Eventually we lose enough muscle mass that our bodies are no longer able to burn more than we consume and we start to gain weight. The increased fat and decreased muscle mass dramatically increases our chances for nasty things like heart disease, diabetes, and a host of other things that we really don't want to deal with.

So, it looks good, it helps us age well and keeps us from getting fatter. Hmmmm.... that sounds good to me. How can I get me some of that muscle?

It's not hard, but it does take some work. The following guidelines will go far in helping to protect and build those muscles.

Resistance Training

The old adage "use it or lose it" really rings true here. You have got to push and work those muscles to keep them. There are many great muscle building activities, but unless you are a farmer who works all day doing all kinds of physical chores, getting into the gym 3 times a week to do some weight training, is really, really important.

There are many different modalities and plans for this. A good personal trainer should be able to help you sort through all the available information to help you find a plan that is right for you and your particular goals and needs.

This is a big one. You MUST feed your muscles. They are hungry. They are hungry often. Make sure to get good quality food, including protein, into your system within 20 minutes of every workout. Otherwise, you are working out and breaking down the muscle and not giving your body what it needs to build it back up again. As a result, you will be exercising to LOSE muscle. Yikes!

Another important nutritional habit, should be to eat well and eat often. Give your body the nutrients it needs to function. Something interesting to note here. . . while most of us count calories in 24 hour periods, our bodies do not do that. At any given time, our bodies are either building or breaking down the muscles. Your body doesn't care if you had cheesecake for breakfast. If by dinner, you have compensated by reducing your calories the rest of the day, your blood sugar has dropped and your body has started digesting your muscles to give you the energy you need to support your vital organs. Your body will digest a small amount of fat for this, but not much. Mother Nature has taught our bodies to hoard the fat when our blood sugar is low. Going hungry DOES NOT get rid of the fat. It gets rid of the muscle! That is not what we want and is detrimental to our waistlines in the long haul.

Imagine this scenario.

You have a good breakfast of oatmeal, fruit and yogurt for breakfast. Yum! Your body thanks you by having energy to not only perform your daily work, but also repair and build your muscles.

You have a busy morning and so you don't get anything to eat until lunch time, several hours later. Your blood sugar has dropped and so your body has begun to digest your muscle. You get a good healthy lunch inside you. Broiled chicken with veggies on romaine lettuce, apple slices and a little garlic bread. Mmmmm..... your body thanks you again by stopping to digest your muscle. You go back to work.

About 3PM, you are hungry again, but you are really busy and so you put off grabbing that protein bar in your desk. By 4PM you are ravenous and that protein bar doesn't look appetizing anymore. You head to the vending machine for a candy bar. Uh, oh. Your blood sugars go from being very low and digesting muscle to support your heart beat to being very, very high. Insulin comes in and stores all the extra calories as fat. Your blood sugars are low again and your are back to metabolizing you muscles.

By dinner time, you are tired, cranky and you would rather pick up a pizza on the way home from work than having to actually make dinner. Again you go from low, muscle digesting blood sugar levels to very high blood sugar levels. Again, insulin responds to bring your blood sugars down.

By bed time, you cave in to a bowl of ice cream and head for bed to let insulin, once again, store the extra blood sugar as fat and put you right back into a state of digesting your own muscles.

This nutritional nightmare is one of the main reasons that low calorie diets hurt you in the long run.  You may have good success with the scales, but if you are depriving your muscles of the nutrients they need and the time that they need them, then you are losing the muscle that you desperately need to sustain a healthy body for the long term.

What can we do to prevent this awful, muscle digesting, pattern? Eat. Eat often and eat well. Strive to eat a small meal every 2-3 hours. Make sure that the meal has both a carb and a protein and possibly a little fat. Something like apple slices and a handful of almonds would be great. Cottage cheese on a cup of raw spinach. Lunch meat and veggies wrapped in a whole grain tortilla. Be creative.

Muscle recovery and building happens while we are at rest. The majority of it happens while we are sleeping. While we are performing our daily activities and workouts, we are breaking down our muscles. This is not a bad thing. We break down our muscles, so that our bodies will build them up stronger and better than before. The problem comes when we don't allow our bodies the opportunity to repair the muscles.

Working out more is not always better. Now, that seems like an odd thing for a personal trainer to say, but it is true. While most of us struggle to get enough work outs in to really make any good changes, if we don't get the proper rest, the workouts that we do get are not doing us as much good as they should. Personally, I would like all of my workouts to pack as much punch as they can.

How much rest we need is a question that has yet to be answered to my satisfaction. It really seems to vary from person to person. This is where you are going to have to listen to your body. Sometimes, we feel tired until we start working out and then the energy comes back. If that happens, by all means, get in a really good workout. If, however, you start working out and you just feel drained and heavy after 10-15 minutes, continue with the duration of your workout, but cut the intensity. Go a little slower, turn down the incline, lift a little lighter. Keep it up, just don't go as hard.

Get some sleep! It is amazing! There is no substitute for it. Find a way to discipline yourself to get what you need. Your body and your waistline will reward your for it.

Take home message: To get and keep muscle, sweet muscle, you must use them, feed them and rest them. That's all there is to it. So get out there and just do it!