All too often we hear people saying “I don’t want to build a lot of muscle” and always we have to chuckle a bit because there is a big misconception of how to build muscle.
I don’t blame people because the knowledge among most of us is very poor when it comes to physiology.
Heck, even science does not fully understand or know everything about muscles. For example they continue to find new muscles in the body.
So you can first change the mindset that “all is known” and probably re-set your own mind too.
The new mindset you should have is “how might that work” and “why is that” and use that when you talk about muscle.
Muscles are essential for your well-being and the fewer you have the more prone you are to:
- Pain
- Disease
- Mental disorder
- Being dependent on others
- Developing diabetes
- Developing cancer
- And so the list goes on…
To understand how much muscle we actually need we might want to look at it from as many aspects as possible. We can measure all the health markers out there and compare them with ie strength, endurance and stamina. The size of the muscle will show us some correlations to how strong you might be but to train for a certain size does not equal to train for good human health. A good example is to grow muscle by using performance enhancing drugs like steroids to grow muscle.
In that case we grow muscle on the cost of other parts of our health.
A good marker for muscle and health is to measure how often we are sick, how often we are in pain, how good quality our sleep is in and what our performance is at work. How durable are you for stress? How durable is your mind?
Here is my advice.
I think you should be moving 7 days a week and if five days of those have some kind of structured training it will clearly just make you a happier and more productive person. You will not gain muscle like a body builder unless this would be your focus because building muscle is extremely difficult and expensive for the body. Worst thing that could happen is that you would gain muscle and would have to lose it (that is much easier) or you might end up actually feeling 10 times better than you are today.
Tell me what do you have to lose?
Kind regards
Rickard
Ps. You want to know more about muscle you can check out this video about that topic: