Why Is Building Muscle Important for Everyone?

well being, you again need to think again. Hypertrophy is an enlargement of existing cells that leads to an increase in the volume of bodily tissue. For our purposes, hypertrophy is an increase of muscle tissue. In other words, building muscle. Don't back away, don't shake your head and mutter that's not for me. Building muscle is for everyone at just about every stage of life. It's a critical part of staying healthy, and you don't need to pump iron to

do it. You don't need bulging veins, you don't even need to know the difference between a trapezis and adultoid. You just need to work your muscles. We spoke with Brad show Enfeld, a renowned fitness expert who has published more than a hundred papers and academic journals on exercise and sports nutrition. He said, it's not only growing muscle, it's losing muscle. If you don't resistance train, whereby you're looking to build muscle, it's really a static choice because

you end up losing muscle. A resistance training is simply working your muscles against some kind of resistance. That resistance can come in the form of weights or stretchy bands commonly called resistance bands or exercise bands, or even your own body weight. If you're doing a push up, you're using your body weight to force certain muscles to work,

and that counts. Schoenfeld said. After about the age of thirty five, the average person who's not lifting weights is gonna lose roughly a half percent of their muscle mass per year, and that percentage starts to accelerate when you get into your late fifties early sixties, and then it's exponential after that. So what's the big deal with losing

a little muscle? Being physically active, which by definition means building and maintaining healthy muscles, improves mental health, lowers the risk of stroke, improves cognitive function, improves sleep, increases joint flexibility, and improves balance. Thereby reducing the risk of falls in the elderly, and that's just a few benefits. Stronger muscles help strengthen bones and control blood sugar and cholesterol levels,

thus building muscle. Muscle hypertrophy is a much researched subject, and over the course of history, recommendations based on that research have changed. The key question is how to most efficiently build muscle given a few variables, such as the number of repetitions or reps, and the number of sets of any particular exercise. A set being a predetermined number of reps, so ten reps of say push ups maybe one set. An exercise program may call for more than

one set of that single exercise. The level of resistance or the load, say the weight on a barbell in the gym, or the attention in a resistance band or your body weight if you're doing push ups is certainly a factor too. Schoenfeld said, I think there are misperceptions about what actually builds muscle. A lot of times people think they have to lift heavy weights to build muscle.

There's actually a lot of good research showing that muscle growth can be developed over a wide array of repetition ranges. So throw out the old notion that heavy weights build strength and lots of reps somehow tone the muscles. You can get equally full muscles without pushing eye bulging weight, as long as you do enough reps that the final ones are challenging to complete. I think difficult, too impossible. In the end, the goal is too literally, on a

cellular level, build more muscle. When muscles are exercised enough, cellular level damage occurs, triggering a process in which proteins are dispatched to repair or replace the damaged cells. That process builds on existing structures like myofibrils and sacomers, a bigger muscle is born. Of course, all of that is just so much science gobbled egook. For those sertned only with looking better at a T shirt or keeping their blood sugar from skyrocketing, or simply getting down the stairs

without a hip shattering tumble. Hypertrophy can also just be doing enough exercise to be strong enough to get those jobs done. Schoenfeld said using weights is one of the best way to do it. The way that you're going to ultimately over time build muscle is by consistently challenging your body. But you can just do push ups, and other body weight exercises, things like squats, lunges or toastands that will at least early on, have positive effects on

strength and muscle growth. Over time, it gets harder to challenge your muscles, but there's ways if you're inventive, that you can just use body weight or resistance bands. The National Institute on Aging suggests its strength building exercise session two or more days a week without working the same muscle group two days in a row. Everybody is different and finding out what works for you may require some experimentation,

especially when you factor in other variables like diet. It's a good idea to consult a health professional before starting any new exercise or nutrition program. But the overall message on hypertrophy is clear. It's not something reserved for gym rats and wanna be Schwartzenegger's building muscle is crucial to good health and aging well for all of us. Today's episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How

Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com and for more podcast from my Heart radio visit the heart radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.