AT THE CROSSROADS

You have a tough decision to make: lose body fat – or build muscle mass. You are standing at the crossroads and do not know which direction to go.

Let me invite you to re-think your current position: Conventional wisdom has told us that ‘lean equals healthy’ for as long as I can remember it. More body weight, according to whoever comes up with this idea, is apparently dangerous, and body fat is a killer - while muscle is for meatheads and men who got married to a mirror.

Are these claims actually true, that being lean is the epitome of health, and that we ought to do anything in our power to declare a war on body fat?

According to various all-cause mortality studies, mild obesity as measured by BMI is in fact protective of dying prematurely, and people falling into this category have the same mortality rate as people with a normal-range BMI [1,2,3].

What? This surely cannot be true.

In fact, it is: having extra pounds on your frame lowers your risk of dying from all causes - as heavier people tend to carry more muscle mass than lighter people, and they also tend to be stronger, because more muscle means greater strength. Both factors increase your resilience to disease, illness, injury, and frailty. Muscle 1 - Fat 0.

I know you are going to say that BMI is a somewhat inaccurate indicator for mortality as it does not distinguish between muscle mass and fat mass. But since most of us do not carry Schwarzenegger-levels of muscle on our body, BMI is indeed a very useful metric for such large-scale population studies.

If we take a look at both extremes of the BMI range, we are going to find that being morbidly obese and severely underweight puts you at a much greater risk of dropping dead early.

Being skinny and frail while carrying low levels of body fat is indeed highly correlated with mortality.

Nothing to fight with in case of severe illness or injury, problems with your physical existence as you get older, and not being robust enough to prevent a radical decline of your sorry self in the first place. Since you cannot be both skinny and strong at the same time, you are going to have to make up your mind on what it is that you want.

One thing we can conclude for sure is that strength and muscle are by far more important than having low body fat levels. Vanity has nothing to do with longevity. But your deadlift does. Because if you take your deadlift to 1.5 times your body weight and beyond, you are going to build a good amount of muscle mass in the process.

Let us take a closer look on why building muscle trumps losing body fat (apart from when you are morbidly obese - in which case you need to set your priorities right):

Having low levels of muscle mass increases your risk of dying from all causes by 25% - which means you are 2.5 times more likely to drop dead early from one of the most common killers of men and women [4,5,6,7,8]. This has to do with the fact that muscle is the metabolic reservoir needed in order to efficiently withstand disease and illness.

Muscle is the organ which moves your skeleton through space. If you value being able to carry out basic physical tasks until late in life, you better start building more. In particular, the high-threshold type II muscle fibers decline first across our lifespan. As they have a greater force production capacity compared to type 1 fibers, they are also referred to as the longevity fibers. It is important to understand that these fibers have a high activation threshold – which means that the weight on the bar needs to be heavy enough for them to come into play. This is another argument against the ‘light weights’ culture which believes that wiggling a pink 2-pound dumbbell through the air will add anything to your ability to produce force. It won't. Get your fives and triples up on your barbell lifts, and make sure to keep hitting PR’s continuously.

Your bones get significantly stronger as muscles are the machines which transmit force to your skeleton. The more muscle mass you have, the greater the surface area that can transmit force to the bones, the denser and stronger they get. This contributes to a lower risk of falls as well as the prevention of osteoporosis and disability [9,10]. In fact, the ramifications of having frail bones can be so far-reaching that you run the risk of losing your physical independence one day. For example, a study published in the American Medical Journal showed that 50% of women over the age of 65 who fracture their hip in a fall are never able to walk again [11]. If Jenny from the block only knew about barbell training earlier in life, she could have possibly avoided such a debilitating scenario.

Muscle is the number one disposal site for glucose and therefore helps to manage your insulin while contributing to the prevention and management of diabetes [12, 13, 14]. The mechanism by which greater muscles mass improves insulin sensitivity is that you ‘destroy’ your muscle cells when lifting weights. For the body to repair this damage and build muscle back up, it cries out for nutrients – hence making your muscles more responsive to the messaging of insulin. The greater the amount of muscle you carry, the more insulin receptors you have, the better your uptake of glucose into your muscle cells, the lower the risk of suffering type 2 diabetes.

Skeletal muscle produces a type of immune system modulators called myokines. These are powerful molecules which counterbalance inflammation in the body [15, 16]. The more muscle mass you have, the more myokines your muscles produce, the stronger your immune system and resilience against illness are.

Muscle contributes to improved heart health by making it pump blood through the system harder and faster to complete work sets. Strength improves the functioning of all systems in your body, including your heart.

Muscle mass is crucial for boosting your chances of survival when faced with a cancer diagnosis [17,18]. When you build a solid amino acid pool as a result of building more muscle mass, you are much less likely to enter a catabolic (i.e. tissue-degrading) state, and this boosts your chances of survival [19]. Withstanding the effects of common cancer treatments is another factor important to survival. These kind of treatments often come with a high energy bill, which means that building more muscle can have tremendous benefits for developing resilience, physical strength, as well as improving your quality of life [20,21].

Your mental resilience improves with greater strength and muscle as it becomes more difficult to throw you off balance when things get challenging in life. This is something we consistently observe at Strong For Life where members tell us that they become less fazed by daunting events as a result of their numbers going up on the bar.

In contrast to all of the benefits of having more muscle mass, how do you think that losing body fat would facilitate all of these processes in the same way? Do you think that being leaner (and as such being lighter) will make your bones stronger? Or make your muscles bigger? Or make your mental resilience greater? I am failing to comprehend how losing body fat could be more important in one’s life than building up your strength and muscle mass. The conclusion is so overwhelming that the conclusion must be obvious.

Now that you have learned all of this information, which turn are going to take as you are standing at the crossroads?

Perhaps, you have already made up your mind.

In which case, I encourage you to keep going.

#strengthtraining #muscle #longevity #barbells #hamptonwick #teddington

References:

1 Flegal et al., 2005: Excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight, and obesity. Journal of American Medical Association. Vol 293, No 15.

2 Orpana et al. 2009: BMI and mortality: Results from a National Longitudinal Study of Canadian Adults. Obesity 18, 214-218.

3 Lenz et al. 2009: The morbidity and mortality associated with overweight and obesity in adulthood. Dtsch Arztebl Int. 106 (40). 641-8.

4 Li et al., 2018: Associations of muscle and strength with all-cause mortality among US older adults. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 50(3): 458-467.

5 Srikanthan & Karlamangla, 2014: Muscle mass index as a predictor of longevity in older adults. Am J Med. 127 (6): 547-553.

6 Kelley & Kelley, 2017: Short report: Is sarcopenia associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality and functional disability? Exp Gerontol. October 01. 96: 100-103.

7 Xu et al., 2021: Sarcopenia is associated with mortality in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Gerontology. DOI: 10.1159/000517099.

8 De Santa et al., 2021: Low muscle mass in older adults and mortality: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Experimental Gerontology. 152 (2021). 111461.

9 Szulc et al., 20205: Low skeletal muscle mass is associated with poor structural parameters of bone and impaired balance in elderly men—the MINOS study. J Bone Miner Res. 20:721–9.

10 Edwards et al., 2013: Muscle size, strength and physical performance and their associations with bone structure in the Hertfordshire Cohort Study. J Bone Miner Res 28:2295–2304.

11 Cooper C., 1997: The crippling consequences of fractures and their impact on quality of life. Am J Med. 103:125–75.

13 Holten et al., 2004: Strength Training Increases Insulin-Mediated Glucose Uptake, GLUT4 Content, and Insulin Signaling in Skeletal Muscle in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes. Diabetes. 53(2):294-305.

14 Jansson et al., 2022: Effect of resistance training on HbA1c in adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus and the moderating effect of changes in muscular strength: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Open diabetes research and care.

15 Pan et al., 2018: Exercise training modalities in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act. 15(1): 72.

16 Pedersen, B.K., Febbraio, M.A., 2008. Muscle as an endocrine organ: focus on musclederived interleukin-6. Physiol. Rev. 88, 1379–1406.

17 Pedersen et al., 2007: Role of myokines in exercise and metabolism. J Appl Phys. 103. 1093-1098.

18 Ena et al., 2020: Resistance Training in Breast Cancer Survivors: A Systematic Review of Exercise Programs. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 17(18):6511.

19 Hanson et al, 2016: The independent effects of strength training in cancer survivors: a systematic review. Curr Onc Rep. 18:31.

20 Kadar et al., 2000: The prognostic value of body protein in patients with lung cancer. Ann N Y Acadm Sci. 904:584–91.

21 Amitzboll et al., 2019: Effect of progressive resistance training on health-related quality of life in the first year after breast cancer surgery – results from randomized controlled trial. Acta Oncologia.