Muscle

by Johnny Nguyen

At a Starbucks in Mendocino I was making small talk with a stranger. As predictable when someone learns that I’m a fitness trainer, she started telling me that she wanted to get into shape – burn a little fat off from here, tone this flab there and maybe shape this area a little. But definitely she did not want to put on muscle. She assured me that she’s “not into all that.”

I politely changed the subject while subtly assessing her body. While it’s true that she needed to lose some fat, this lady had virtually no muscle. Her skin just hung from her bones like skin on an old peach you discover in the back of the fridge. Her body lacked shape, and she probably had been noticing a steady appearance of soft bulges where there used to be none. She didn’t know it, but her body is on a downward spiral toward functional decrement, physical frailty and fat accumulation.

And it was then that I wanted to make the theme of this month’s newsletter about muscle.

Muscle Mass

Muscle is typically accepted of well-paid, professional athletes. Outside of this group it is generally deemed the traits of guys who are meatheads, Neanderthals or non-intellects who drag their knuckles across the floor of a gym. And muscle on a woman? Well, she’s a gender transgressor, a freaky indelicate, or… gulp… a man. There are many juvenile name-callings from which to choose.

The fact is, muscle has many roles in our lives, men or women. Muscle transcends social perception and cultural ideals. It facilitates life, improves life, and saves life. It gives us the ability to create the world in which we live, allows us to become who we are, and defines us as functional, dexterous human beings. It is mostly misunderstood.

Below are several benefits we enjoy by carrying around muscle, that part of us that helps to regulate our interior functions, so that we may continue to enjoy our exterior world.

Essential Organs

Our muscle mass provides protein reserves for essential organs like skin, brain, heart and liver. These organs have constant protein turnover, so when they are depleted as a result of turnover, fasting or starvation, muscle provides the necessary proteins. If you sit in a meeting for too long, or missed a meal or two, proteins are shuttled from your muscles to these important organs to keep them functioning properly. Or if you were with the Donner party and were stuck in the mountains, you’d want to be the one with the most muscle to survive the treacherous blizzard. Or be eaten.

Recovery from Acute Illness or Injury

Protein is critical for recovery from acute illness such as cancer or trauma such as burn. Someone who suffered a burn to half of his or her body needs 1.4 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight a day. Add another half gram for organ requirement and accelerated immune cell activity and this amount reaches 2 g/lb./day. To give you an idea of how dramatic this increased need is, the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) is 0.36 gram per pound of bodyweight per day. This means a normal 160-pound person requires 58 grams of protein per day; to recover from a severe burn, the same person requires 320 grams of protein a day – over five times the RDA amount. Basically, the protein requirement for recovery from acute stress is far higher than that resulting from even starvation (Biolo, 2002).

When recovering from a major illness or trauma, no one wants to eat a dozen chicken breasts per day. And, to begin with, people who are suffering typically fail to eat adequately. In this case the body breaks down muscle protein to meet the recovery need. For this reason, people with low muscle mass respond poorly to acute stress. Survival from severe burn injury is lowest in those with low muscle mass (Pereira, 2005).

The Recovery Process

Not only does muscle provide the protein necessary for recovery from trauma and acute illness, it also provides the strength key to the recovery process. Muscle strength provides a quicker return to daily activities and, therefore, a faster recovery process. Because trauma typically results in an acute loss of muscle, those with a pre-existing deficiency in muscle mass fare worse in the recovery process. And in those with pre-existing deficiency in muscle mass, trauma might push them beyond the point where complete recovery is unlikely. This could explain why many elders, after breaking a hip, may never walk again – some dying within a year. The elderly typically have low muscle mass to start.


Muscle and Cardiac Disease

People suffering congestive heart failure typically lose muscle mass; those with already low muscle mass face an uphill battle. Muscle provides the functional capacity necessary to begin a truly effective exercise routine to fight the progression of the disease, or to reverse it. Muscle also provides the metabolic support to control some of the factors that cause heart diseases, such as insulin resistance.

Muscle and Aging

Muscle and strength loss are associated with aging, and this loss has a devastating effect on the quality of life and, ultimately, survival. If left unchecked, this loss can accelerate and result in unkind conditions: premature frailty, likelihood of falls, and increased challenge in doing everyday things. The ultimate outcome is, therefore, a decreased quality of life, increased dependency, and the heart-breaking commitment to institutionalization.

The good news is that the rate of muscle loss during aging can be controlled and, in some cases, reversed. Possessing sufficient – or even a surplus of – muscle mass gives you a healthy reserve of muscle for the aging process. Also, studies show that people can build muscles at any age – well into the 90s. So even if you’ve entered your later years with low muscle mass, it’s never too late to start building.


Muscle and Obesity

Energy expenditure in the body relies on three things: Caloric cost of eating, physical activities, and resting energy expenditure (the cost of simply keeping the body alive). While it’s obvious that physical activities impact caloric expenditure, the energy cost of muscle metabolism is less appreciated in the prevention of obesity. As a component of resting energy expenditure, muscle metabolism is a constant source of calorie burning, and more relevant to this article is the fact that it can vary greatly: The more muscles you have, the greater the caloric cost. Even at rest.

Many experts claim that increasing muscle mass may not affect resting metabolic rate appreciably. While this is true, they ignore muscle’s long-term effect on the prevention of obesity. Here’s the deal: for every pound of muscle you possess, you burn 5 extra calories per day at rest. Of course, it’s a measly amount – that is, if you’re merely analyzing only one pound of muscle in one day.

But, let’s say you gain 10 pounds of muscles – which is not unreasonable. This additional ten pounds of muscle can burn 50 extra calories per day. Still not much? Well, of course not in one day. As fat is not accumulated in one day, we should not expect to burn it in one day. Let’s look at what 50 extra calories add up to in one year: over 18,000 calories. So, if there is 3,500 calories in one pound of fat, then 18,000 calories means over 5 pounds of fat. In other words, you can burn over 5 pounds of fat in a year for doing absolutely nothing. In one decade, you would avoid putting on over 50 pounds of fat.

You get the concept, but it isn’t the end of it. This extra muscle allows you to approach your exercises and daily activities with more vivacity, resulting in greater caloric expenditure. This not only burns more fat but also keeps us functionally young.

So, you can see that muscle has many functions outside of athletics. Muscle is for everyone. And I would love to see a world in which a woman ceases to apologize for having some muscle and for being strong, and one in which she no longer has the need to make it clear that she’s “not into all that.”