Why Building Muscle is Soooooo Important

When people start a training regiment any good coach would start with the question, what are your goals?  The majority of the population will give an answer that sounds a little like this:

Men - I want to feel good, lose some fat, build muscle and get stronger.

Women - I want to feel good, lose weight and tone.

These answers are actually identical in nature. You see, building muscle is one of the greatest things you can do for your body. If you’d like to get lean, you need to build muscle. If you want to get “toned”, you’ll need to tone something and it’s not fat or bone but muscle. So both men and women need to focus on building muscle in order to achieve these general goals.

The reality is that both men and women believe that building muscle is easy and losing weight is hard. This can’t be further from the truth.  I often hear, I want to tone, but I don’t want to get too bulky, Building muscle however is extremely difficult. It takes time, dedication and focus on a variety of things in your life. Thing like caloric intake, macro balance, hydration, sleep, stress regulation, and specific training. You don’t just show up, lift weights and magically build a huge physique that scares people when you enter the room . Losing weight on the other hand is much simpler, don’t eat like a jerk and move.

Building lean muscle doesn’t only shape and tone your physique, it allows you to maintain your weight thus avoiding the cursed scale fluctuations that so many experience. If staying ‘lean” is your goal, you need to have a good base of muscle.  Muscle helps with the breakdown of fat and having more muscle allows you to burn more calories at rest (increased metabolism). It also takes a lot more calories to maintain muscle and therefore easier to keep body fat in check.

Since muscle takes longer to build, it takes just as long to lose, if constantly used. Let me explain. If you spend 6 months building muscle, eating well and then have a vacation where your not eating very well for a week, that one week isn’t going to have much of an impact on your body overall. You’ll feel a little bloated but you won’t lose a bunch of muscle, nor will you gain a substantial amount of fat. This is the key to maintaining a physique you are happy with as it allows for flexible eating. Eating clean most of the time and having a few meals or even days where you eat what you want will not sabotage your gains as much as some are let to believe.

Finally men and women obviously build muscle at different rates due to the difference in their hormonal responses. Generally men have more testosterone levels then women and are therefore able to get bigger.  If you’re afraid of getting “too big” don’t be, it’s next to impossible for someone who’s not actively trying to pack on a significant amount of muscle. On the contrary, most athletes who try and put on muscle have a difficult time even when they’re doing all the right things.

In my next article I’ll be discussing what one needs to do to build lean muscle effectively and safely so stay tuned.

If you have any questions regarding this write up, please email them to

bonaathletics@gmail.com

or comment in the post.

Lift Heavy, Lift Often,

Silviu Bona