Why is Building Muscle Beneficial?
Building muscle can do more for your body than just increasing strength. Yes, there’s a high that comes with hitting your squat max, but the benefit runs so much deeper than those feelings of accomplishment.
Muscle Building Offers Joint Support
Our muscles offer a huge support system to our joints. They absorb a bit of the impact that radiates through our knees and hips when running, jumping, and even walking. The more muscle we have, the more force gets absorbed, saving our joints from long-term damage. Our muscles also ensure our joints move the directions they’re supposed to. When our muscles are too weak to push against an opposing force, our joints may not be able to handle the impact, causing breaks and tears. This kind of support allows us better balance, preventing those kinds of accidents before they happen.
More Muscle Building Helps to Burn More Calories
Though the difference is not as significant as many assume it to be, increasing your muscle mass also increases your metabolism, meaning you burn more calories at rest in a day. A pound of muscle burns around 13 calories a day, whereas a pound of fat tissue only burns about 4. If you’re bulking, though, you may be needing food more than this discrepancy accounts for.
That being said if you’re putting on muscle, you’re definitely working out more often, and inherently burning more calories throughout your day.
Muscle Helps Build Strong Bones
Believe it or not, putting extra pressure on our bones is actually what helps them grow. So, loading the bones with some heavy barbell squats or a kettlebell overhead press are actually helping them become more sturdy. Bone density becomes increasingly important when it comes to aging. Bone mass gradually decreases as we get older, making them more fragile and thus more susceptible to breaks, in a process known as osteoporosis. This is why you so commonly hear about Grandma’s hip breaking after a small fall from the stoop. Building muscle can help prevent these accidents from happening to you in the future.
Muscle Helps Blood Levels
Gaining strength can even help our blood composition. Our muscles use both glucose and fatty acids for fuel. This keeps our blood sugar levels down. Elevated blood sugar can cause long term effects, such as blood vessels damage and a higher risk of heart disease, stroke, and nerve problems.
Yes, Muscle Makes You Look Good
Yes, there are the obvious aesthetic benefits to adding muscle mass to your frame. Your clothes will fit better, some people might consider you more attractive, and you’ll feel more confident. Those are all big reasons that drive guys to spend hours in the gym pumping iron in the pursuit of gains. There’s no shame in making your aesthetic a reason to get in the gym – it still leads to all the other health benefits.
While there’s so many reasons to focus on muscle building, there’s more to it than just showing up to the gym, hefting some weights, and calling it a day. You’ll need to be a bit more intentional for effective muscle growth. To build muscle, you must push your muscles to the limit, then let them recover and grow stronger as they do. And to do this, you must create the proper recovery environment for them when you’re not in the gym.
This means your quest to build muscle involves a host of variables over a 24-hour period. The things you do in the gym to push your muscles to the limit count. So does the “work” you put in during the other 20 or so hours when you’re away from the gym, everything from rest to nutrition to active recovery. All of this can affect how you build muscle.
