Muscular strength is often prized for athletics and aesthetics, but the benefits go even deeper. Skeletal muscle — the muscle that attaches to bones and produces voluntary body movements — is essential for overall health, longevity, and quality of life. Here’s how.
1) Skeletal muscle powers your every movement.
Our bodies are intricate machines, and skeletal muscle is the functional engine that makes our every movement possible. “Otherwise, we’d just be a bunch of bones,” says Jeff Rosga, NASM-CPT, CES, PES, BCS, a certified fitness and performance specialist and head of team member development for the Dynamic Training division of Life Time.
Practically everything we do relies on our muscles: typing on the computer, climbing stairs, walking the dog. If you participate in sports or endurance events, having strong, powerful muscles can help you perform better and ward off injury.
Losing muscle mass during the aging process or due to a medical condition can make it harder to do the activities you enjoy. And if those losses aren’t addressed, even basic, everyday movements like sitting down, standing up, and walking can become difficult, if not impossible. Once your mobility becomes limited, you’re susceptible to other health risks, including falls, fractures, and chronic disease.
Maintaining and building muscle mass throughout your life can help preserve mobility and fend off these consequences.
Improve your mobility, coordination, balance, and muscle power with this workout: “6 Exercises to Help You Get Down on the Floor — and Up off the Floor — With Ease.”
2) Skeletal muscle supports and stabilizes joints.
When your muscles are uniformly strong and properly function, they help absorb the forces placed on your joints by everyday movement, protecting them from excessive wear and tear.
Strong muscles may even guard against joint conditions like osteoarthritis, which occurs when the cartilage that cushions the ends of the bones wears down over time.
“So much of osteoarthritis is related to joint malalignment, in which different aspects of the joint start to rub against each other, leading to chronic and abnormal loading of the cartilage that leads to degradation,” says Fabrisia Ambrosio, PhD, PT, skeletal muscle researcher and director of the Discovery Center for Musculoskeletal Recovery at Mass General Brigham’s Spaulding Rehabilitation.
Keeping the muscles that surround the joints strong may promote healthy alignment, helping prevent or manage joint issues. “Currently, we have no way to modify the disease process of osteoarthritis, and so the best thing we have to mitigate some of the symptoms of osteoarthritis is muscle strengthening to restore normal joint alignment and prevent the bones in our joints from rubbing against each other,” Ambrosio says.
For tips on exercising with chronic pain, check out “How to Exercise When You Have Chronic Pain.”
3) Skeletal muscle is good for your brain.
To make your muscles powerful, it’s important to strength-train consistently. This benefits your brain as well. “Muscle contraction triggers the release of many substances associated with brain health,” Ambrosio explains.
One of those substances is a myokine, a small protein that plays a helpful role in brain function and overall well-being. In particular, myokines may help boost the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor. BDNF is vital for brain health because it enables the organ to continue growing and evolving.
Research suggests people who are sedentary have lower levels of BDNF, which is associated with degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s.
To learn about other ways that exercise benefits brain health, visit “8 Powerful Ways Exercise Benefits the Brain.”
4) Skeletal muscle is a major storage site for sugar.
Muscle mass is pivotal for regulating blood sugar, making it a powerful ally in preventing and managing type 2 diabetes as well as in fueling physical activity.
Your body breaks down carbohydrates into sugar (glucose) and funnels it into the bloodstream. Your blood-sugar levels rise, prompting your pancreas to secrete insulin, a hormone that tells your muscles to store sugar for fuel. In fact, about 80 percent of the sugar you consume gets pulled into your skeletal muscles, where it’s stored in the form of glycogen. Later, when your body needs fuel, it dips into those glycogen stores.
Building and maintaining skeletal muscle reduces the amount of sugar in the bloodstream, which may help stave off prediabetes and type 2 diabetes.
If you have type 2 diabetes, working your muscles through strength training can make your body more efficient at routing sugar to your muscles, helping to control blood-sugar levels.
Learn more: “The Ultimate Guide to Healthy Blood Sugar.”
5) Skeletal muscle is a reservoir for amino acids.
Your muscles also store amino acids, which are components of proteins, key macronutrients for building and maintaining muscle.
But amino acids play other vital roles in the body: They support blood pressure, produce hormones and neurotransmitters, provide energy, break down food, and much more. Your muscles offer a repository for amino acids so your body can recruit them for these essential functions whenever needed.
Learn more about amino acids at “How Do Amino Acids Support Muscle Health?”
6) Skeletal muscle fights inflammation.
Activating skeletal muscle through regular exercise imbues it with anti-inflammatory powers. In this way, muscle may help prevent many diseases linked to chronic inflammation, including heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and type 2 diabetes.
Muscle naturally contains fat and other lipids, which are perfectly healthy at moderate levels. But high amounts release many proinflammatory substances that contribute to chronic inflammation. Exercise, and especially resistance training, can reduce intramuscular fat content, helping restore tissue health and tamp down those inflammatory responses.
“It’s enhancing the muscle itself while concomitantly decreasing the lipid within the muscle tissue that helps with strength and minimizes the release of inflammatory factors that are detrimental to health,” says Ambrosio.
For more on using exercise and nutrition to ease chronic inflammation, see “Fighting Inflammation.”
7) Skeletal muscle supports metabolism.
It’s common to lose muscle mass as you age. Studies have shown that beginning at age 30, adults lose 3 to 8 percent of muscle mass per decade until the age of 60, at which point that rate of decline continues to increase. It’s also common for much of that mass to be replaced with fat, even if the change isn’t reflected on a scale.
This shift in body composition, especially the buildup of visceral fat that forms around internal organs, can lead to a number of metabolic issues. Maintaining or adding muscle mass may help prevent this fat gain and its associated risks.
That’s because muscle is metabolically active tissue, meaning it requires energy (calories) to build and maintain. The more muscle mass you have, the higher your daily energy expenditure and the more robust your metabolism, Rosga says.
Learn about fitness practices that support metabolic function at “3 Fitness Practices to Support Your Metabolism.”
8) Skeletal muscle is key for longevity.
Strong, healthy muscles may help you live longer. Research has shown that grip strength, a common marker of muscle strength, is a reliable indicator of longevity; greater grip strength tends to indicate a slower rate of aging, while weaker grip strength tends to indicate a faster rate of aging. (Discover three more markers and fitness tests that have been linked to a reduced mortality risk.)
There are likely many reasons why muscles can help extend your lifespan, including their ability to fight inflammation, prevent chronic disease, and keep you moving every day.
Muscles also release nanoparticles known as extracellular vesicles, which, when buoyed by resistance exercise, may play a role in healthy aging. Think of extracellular vesicles as a message in a bottle — they contain information that’s passed from one tissue, such as skeletal muscle, to other tissues. If the contents are positive, the recipient will take in the information and become healthier. But if the contents are negative, the recipient will become less healthy.
“What we’ve seen with aging is that the messages being relayed by these extracellular vesicles become negative and compromise the health of the recipient cells,” Ambrosio explains. “Whereas with muscle activity, it seems we can restore a healthier type of cargo within those extracellular vesicles and therefore have a more beneficial systemic response.”
To learn more about why — and how — to embrace movement for the long haul, visit “Fit for Life: You’re Never Too Old to Get Moving.”
9) Skeletal muscle can be built at any age.
Generally speaking, the earlier you start developing and strengthening your muscles, the better. Yet, as Rosga insists, “it’s never too late to start.”
He suggests strength training at least one or two times weekly, gradually working up to three or potentially four strength sessions per week, and to make sure to build in rest and recovery. Prioritize compound movements that engage several muscle groups, such as squats, deadlifts, pushups, and bent-over rows. And eat enough protein to support muscle recovery and growth.
Learn More About Optimizing Your Fitness & Nutrition:
- For a full-body, all-ages strength workout, check out “Strength Training for All Ages.”
- Learn how to calculate your protein needs at “Protein Power: What You Need to Know.”
- Find meal ideas with 30 grams of protein at “Here’s What 30 Grams of Protein Looks Like.”
The post What Is Skeletal Muscle — and How Does It Affect Overall Health? appeared first on Experience Life.
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