Having healthy muscles is fantastic for overall health. You don’t have to be a bodybuilder or a fitness fanatic, but you should exercise regularly and live a healthy lifestyle that promotes lean muscle mass.
Having more muscles reduces the risk of injury. In addition, people with healthy muscles move with more stability, have better posture, and are less likely to gain excess fat.
Unfortunately, few people understand how muscles grow and thus fail to see significant progress in the gym or to exercise at home. When you’re lifting weights or doing other exercises, results matter. You want to see progress in how much lean muscle mass you’re making and other health markers.
Understanding how muscles grow will make your workouts more effective and keep you healthier as you age. Developing muscles increases your quality of life, makes you feel stronger, and helps you avoid many health problems.
Here’s some helpful information on how you can start growing more muscles today.
The Basics: How the Body Makes Muscles
It may sound strange to people who don’t lift weights, but your muscles grow when you damage them, and your body repairs them. In the repair process, your body builds larger muscles to prevent damage in the future from doing the same type of activities.
The body replaces damaged muscle fibers with cells that form new proteins called myofibrils. When you damage your muscles by lifting heavy objects or doing other strenuous exercises, your body replaces the damaged muscle fibers with more muscle. That’s how your body grows its muscles.
If you go to the gym, you’ll see people with big muscles resulting from years of breaking down their muscles through challenging exercises and then letting their bodies recover by building even more muscle mass.
Let’s explore some of the best ways to grow muscles and help lean muscle mass develop faster.
Resistance Training Is the Best Way to Grow Muscles
Lifting weights, doing pushups, or exercising regularly, are the best ways to grow muscles. But, essentially, you must put your body through some sort of stress if you want to increase your muscle mass.
Your body responds to the conditions you put it in. If you strain it, it will respond positively by building more muscles. The body doesn’t want to feel pain, so it creates more muscles to adjust to your lifestyle.
These days, we’re not doing as much manual labor, so people have difficulty building muscles naturally. That’s why people are joining gyms and CrossFit classes; they’re finding ways to keep muscle mass and strengthen their bodies despite working office jobs.
The Benefits of Muscle Mass
Carrying around muscles has many benefits. First, it promotes overall fitness levels. If you have more muscles, you can engage in rigorous activities without becoming tired as quickly. In addition, you can lift things, walk for longer, etc.
Muscles also help improve stability. Your joints and bones have sets of muscles around them that act as stabilizers. More muscles help you avoid falling and suffering other injuries because your body is stronger and can react faster when something unplanned occurs.
Lean muscle mass also promotes faster metabolic rates, which means your body will process the calories you eat more efficiently. Many people are surprised at some of the weight-loss benefits of lifting weights. Everyone is programmed to think running or starving yourself are the keys to dropping pounds.
However, a healthy diet combined with weight training is a fantastic way to get to healthy body weight and feel better about yourself.
Training Must Be Consistent
One of the vital aspects of how muscles grow is that any training must be consistent. Your body will only respond to external stimuli if it’s done over time. For example, a single visit to the gym is unlikely to result in any meaningful muscle growth. However, regular weight training will yield impressive results.
How Peptides Influence Muscle Growth
Researchers are studying how peptides can be used to promote lean muscle mass and weight loss. For example, Ipamorelin is a peptide that’s shown in animal studies to stimulate bone and muscle growth by increasing the hormone GH.
Research in mice shows that ipamorelin increases growth hormone from three-fold to 13-fold over the baseline, resulting in an increase of almost nine percent in muscle mass and 14 percent lower fat mass. More research needs to be done in order to determine the future medical possibilities of ipamorelin since it has not been FDA approved for human use.
Conclusion
As people age, they tend to become more sedentary. As a result, we lose muscle and trade them for increased fat mass.
Understanding how muscles grow can help you prevent muscle loss and even increase your muscle mass as you age. More muscles will keep you healthy, prevent injuries, and speed up your metabolism to keep you in great shape.
If you want to start growing more muscles, exercise, eat a healthier diet, and supplement appropriately for the best results.
