Contents
- Why don’t women want more muscle?
- Muscles improve insulin sensitivity
- Excessive weight loss destroys muscle tissue
- Muscles as an endocrine organ
- The role of brown adipose tissue
- Muscles and Brain Health
- The role of muscles in the health of the circulatory system
- Sarcopenia begins in your XNUMXs!
- Dr. Araujo you should do!
- The importance of muscles during illness
- Muscles as a gift that you can give yourself
- Instead of fat, let’s focus on muscles!
Why don’t women want more muscle?
Women have less muscle than men and more fat, which makes women’s bodies more rounded. Of course, the figure is an individual matter, and the appearance of our bodies is determined by genes, age and lifestyle, including the diet we use every day. Unfortunately, the stereotypical thinking among women is often that they do not need to take care of their muscles, and strength training will make them similar to men by excessive muscle hypertrophy (hyperplasia).
Some women believe that if they start lifting weights, they will lose their feminine charm. This myth is not supported by female physiology because our bodies produce ten times less testosterone for muscle development than men’s bodies. For their growth, you also need solid training and an optimal supply of protein, without these conditions, we will not become the female version of Arnold Schwarzenegger 😉
Women should not be afraid of muscles because they have many functions in our lives. Often, muscles are underestimated by the fair sex and we think of them either from a figure or physical point of view, where their role is limited to supporting the body’s organs and bones in the right place, locomotion and generating the strength needed for everyday activities.
Muscle, however, is a wonderful organ in our body that performs many more functions than these, which you may never have heard of before. In this article, you will learn why every woman should start taking more care of her muscle tissue.
Muscles improve insulin sensitivity
One of the most important roles of muscles in the body is the ability to store glucose (from carbohydrates) in the form of glycogen, which is an energy reserve for the body that is used every time we move. We use muscle glycogen during exercise or other activities. Thanks to this mechanism, you can eat carbohydrates without fear of being stored as fat. The more muscle you have, the more you can get away with eating an extra serving of pasta or a slice of bread.
It is also important for counteracting insulin resistance and diabetes. Strength training and any other effort involving the muscles to work cannot be considered only in terms of the number of calories burned. This is less important than the proper functioning of the hormones.
If you are low in muscle, sedentary, and eat more carbohydrates than you tolerate, the chance of developing insulin resistance increases because your body produces more insulin than normal to get rid of excess glucose in your blood, leading to a loss over time. that cells stop responding properly to it. If the condition persists undiagnosed and if not treated for an extended period of time, it can eventually lead to diabetes.
Exercise and the development of muscle tissue can improve insulin sensitivity, which contributes to the fact that when eating large portions of carbohydrates, we do not have to worry that they will harm us or be deposited in the form of unwanted fat, because larger muscle tissue guarantees better metabolism.
Excessive weight loss destroys muscle tissue
Unfortunately, women often eat poorly balanced diets that are low in calories and nutrients. In pursuit of a slim figure, wanting to quickly get rid of the accumulated fat, we test low-calorie diets that guarantee us lower weight in the short term, but we also lose muscle mass along with fat.
The problem is not to use these inadequate diets once, if you are young, the body can cope and regain balance as soon as you start eating healthy. Worse, if these diets were used quite often, they always led to a yo-yo effect, and instead of finally losing weight, you gained a lot of weight.
The amount of fat in the body has increased while the amount of muscle has decreased drastically. In this situation, the ability to store glycogen is also lower and you start to gain weight after each extra grain of rice ☹
Now let’s think about all the draconian diets we have used throughout our lives: cabbage, Copenhagen and even the very popular fruit and vegetable fast by Dr. Ewa Dąbrowska, which, in addition to its health benefits, can contribute to a significant loss of muscle tissue. Consider it – 40 days on vegetables and fruit alone will not remain indifferent to your muscles. The body must be supplied with amino acids to rebuild and regenerate cells, and if it does not get them from food – breaks down the muscles, which are the storehouse of protein.
On such diets you will lose weight, yes, but at the expense of metabolically active tissue. If you repeat this post regularly – be careful – the older you get, the more difficult it is to rebuild lost muscles, which can have dangerous consequences, which will be discussed later in this article.
Muscles as an endocrine organ
Dr. Gabrielle Lyon places special emphasis in her practice on the importance of muscles in our lives, promoting the idea that they are the key to health and longevity. She created the concept of Muscle Centric Medicine, which emphasizes the significant role of muscles in maintaining vitality, healing the body, improving metabolism, building a slimmer figure, and fighting age-related diseases. Strong muscles are not only a way to keep the body fit, but also influence the physiology of other organs.
Based on recent research, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon also loudly says that muscles are the body’s largest endocrine organ that produces hormone-like substances – myokine (Greek: myeo – muscle, kinos – movement). In response to exercise, the skeletal muscles in the body produce hundreds of myokines that enable communication between the muscles and other organs: the brain, adipose tissue, pancreas, bones, liver, blood vessels, immune system, skin. The biological role of myokines has a positive effect on many processes taking place in our body and thus points to muscles and exercise as the basic factor in maintaining health.
The role of brown adipose tissue
Irisine is a myokine discovered in 2012 at Harvard University in Boston that transforms white fat into brown fat. This process consumes a lot of energy, so it can promote weight loss. White adipose tissue (WAT) is a store of energy derived from food surplus. It is a kind of unwanted and disliked fat when our bodies overgrown with it. A certain part of white adipose tissue cells called SVF (stromal vascular fraction) cells produce pro-inflammatory cytokines, so excess fat carries a risk of metabolic diseases.
Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is found mainly at the back of the neck and along the length of large blood vessels. The main function of BAT is to maintain body temperature and to distribute heat around the body through a process called thermogenesis. It uses fats as an energy source to produce heat. About 50 – 80% of brown adipose tissue cells are mitochondria, or energy factories. If you suffer from the constant feeling of cold, your hands and feet are constantly cold – your brown fat is not doing its job or you don’t have enough of it. People with more BAT are often found, even in winter, wearing short sleeves, they are still warm.
Activating and stimulating brown fat will not only improve your body temperature, but it can help to improve metabolism and prevent metabolic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and insulin resistance. Due to muscle stimulation, physical effort increases the production of irisin – myokine responsible for the transformation of unwanted white fat into brown adipose tissue, which is metabolically active. By using your muscles, you melt unwanted fat, and at the same time produce more BAT – you improve your metabolism and save on gloves and thick turtlenecks, winter is finally not scary for you!
Brown adipose tissue is also formed during exposure to cold, so ice-cold showers are also its excellent activator, I do not even mention sea salt, so that we do not get unnecessarily cold 😉
Muscles and Brain Health
Not only do we need our muscles to move, as is obvious to us, but they also have an impact on brain health. However, we do not see this dependency so easily. The discovery of BDNF (brain – derived neurotrophic factor) – a neurotrophic factor of brain origin contributed to the perception of the role of muscles and exercise also in the aspect of taking care of the brain.
BDNF is like a nutrient that protects neurons in the brain from damage and is involved in the formation of new brain cells. In addition, it strengthens the connections between neurons, and therefore affects our learning ability and memory. It also prevents faster aging of nerve cells and protects against dementia. A relationship was also found between the amount of BDNF and our well-being. BDNF levels are low in people who are depressed.
In order to increase its production, feel better, protect the brain from aging, but also make it work better, it is enough to start using our muscles. Scientists have proved that during exercise, the level of the miraculous substance that feeds our brain increases.
You start exercising, your brain works much better than before, your mood improves and new ideas appear on how to effectively improve your weight loss 😉
The role of muscles in the health of the circulatory system
The circulatory system provides every cell in our body with oxygen and nutrients. It is believed that this process is stimulated by a beating heart, which uses the arterial and venous systems to move blood around the body. This definition is not wrong, but oversimplified, and can be confusing when physicians use it to improve cardiovascular health.
We usually imagine the circulatory system as it was presented to us in schools in the textbooks of anatomy and physiology. Unfortunately, these illustrations are incomplete and do not reflect the complexity of the circulatory system. The arteries and veins are at the heart of such drawings, while the smaller capillaries that supply blood directly to every corner of the body are ignored. Take a look at the picture below which shows how the circulatory system is represented in schools (left) and what it actually looks like (right).
Most of the cells in our body lie within 50 micrometers of the capillary. To be aware of what it looks like, let’s imagine a human hair that is about 17 micrometers thick. This means that almost every cell in the body is about three times the thickness of a hair from the capillary.
The circulatory system works well when it is able to deliver oxygen and nutrients to every place in the body – this is what our cellular microflora depends on. How does the oxygen in the blood get from the arteries to the capillaries? The work of our skeletal muscles is a mechanical stimulation that causes the smooth muscles in the walls of the arterioles to relax and open (vasodilation), causing a pressure drop that draws blood from the arteries to the capillaries.
Now let’s recall the illustrations of the circulatory system in the anatomy textbooks again. It depicts the heart as the main stimulator of blood flow through the body, in fact it is the working muscles that draw blood to the tissues that need it. When we lead a sedentary lifestyle – the body lacks exercise and then it is the heart as the pump that is responsible for the movement of blood. It does a lot of hard work and is overloaded. Strengthening the heart is about relieving it through physical activity, whereby the skeletal muscles help deliver blood to every cell in the body. During exercise or other physical activity, blood is constantly shifted from one working area to another, nourishing the tissues involved and removing waste from them.
The total length of blood vessels in the human body is about 125 kilometers. If placed in one string, they would wrap the Earth almost three times. Thanks to the work of our muscles, they are able to provide blood and nutrients to billions of cells, the functioning of our body and its health depend on it. There are approximately 600 muscles in the body just waiting for you to activate them. Don’t sit, get up, move!
Sarcopenia begins in your XNUMXs!
When we think about old age, we have 65+ seniors in front of our eyes. Unfortunately, it turns out that, from a physiological point of view, our bodies start to age much earlier. Sarcopenia (Greek: sarcos – muscles, penia – loss) is a phenomenon of the loss of muscle mass, reducing their density and strength, which results in deterioration of physical fitness. If we do not take care of our muscles since our youth, if we follow strict diets, lead a sedentary lifestyle and eat insufficient amounts of protein, muscle loss may occur even at the age of 30.
After the age of 80, this process may accelerate due to the reduction in the production of hormones that support muscle tissue. The body produces less growth hormone, less testosterone and less estrogen, which adversely affects the condition of our muscles. Sarcopenia is a dangerous phenomenon because muscle strength is a factor that determines our fitness until old age. Nobody wants to be bedridden at 50. We, women, should take care of the muscle tissue much earlier, because it is easier to build it in youth, and more difficult after the age of XNUMX, although it is fortunately not impossible.
It is very important to take care of the strength of our legs, because thanks to them we can enjoy independence until an old age, without having to ask for help during everyday activities, such as getting up from the floor or a chair. Strong muscles also protect the bones from fracture, which is unfortunately quite a common misfortune for elderly women. Osteoporosis weakens the bones, and lack of exercise enhances this effect, which can lead to dangerous falls and bone fractures.
Dr. Araujo you should do!
Brazilian physician Claudio Gil Araujo has developed a simple fitness test that anyone can do at home and takes less than one minute. Araujo noticed that older people had problems with simple tasks such as getting up from a chair or picking something up from the floor. People had problems with coordination and balance. The doctor decided to develop a test to assess the performance of his patients. He examined over two thousand people aged 50 to 80.
The test is best performed in loose-fitting, non-obstructive clothing, barefoot. We start in a standing position, then without using our hands we perform a full squat on the floor with the legs crossed. When we sit down, stand up to an upright position without using your arms or hands to support you. It looks like:
10 – the maximum number of points that can be scored in this test – 5 for sitting down and 5 for standing up. If one hand or knee is used, one point is subtracted at a time. Point is deducted for wobbling and losing balance. The fewer points you score in this test, the weaker your muscle strength.
As an interesting fact, my colleagues from work at the age of 40 and 50 were not able to do this test at all. One colleague tried and sat down on the mat, then he was unable to lift himself from it with the strength of his own muscles. Is in my age. I decided to run this test a few days ago. I managed to slam it without any problem, moreover, I did it 30 times in a row, until my muscles were exhausted. I’m not as bad as I thought 😉 but it doesn’t mean that I should give up strengthening my muscles. Are you able to complete this test correctly?
The importance of muscles during illness
You may never have thought of muscles in this way, but they play a very important role during illness, when we are bedridden, in hospital. Unfortunately, being ill is also sometimes associated with reluctance to eat, the body focuses on curing, we do not feel like eating, and sometimes even have the strength to eat. Muscles are therefore used by our body as a source of amino acids that are needed for the work of other, more important organs, their regeneration and reconstruction.
The more muscles you have, the better it is for you if you are at risk of developing severe diseases that will immobilize you. Muscle mass can contribute to survival in difficult moments of the disease and accelerate recovery. The state of breakdown of muscle proteins is called catabolism and may result from stress such as long-term illness and hospitalization. Patients with more muscle tissue have a better chance of recovery and even surviving in critical situations fighting for health with a serious disease. During the raging virus, we should especially think about the condition of our muscle tissue.
Muscles as a gift that you can give yourself
Dr. Brooke Kalanick, speaking to women of all ages, and especially those in the perimenopausal and menopausal periods, points out that muscles should be treated as a gift that should be given to oneself. At 20, we don’t think about tomorrow, so we don’t care about old age at all. At the age of 30, if a woman trains and practices sports, she is mainly motivated to improve her figure.
At the age of 40, the perspective begins to slowly change and we think more and more often about what will happen to us, how we will age. If we have been neglecting training and exercise so far, it may be time to reform our thinking. Anyway, it is never too late to change. You can start even at the age of 70, as Joan MacDonald has proved, starting his adventure with training at this age. Look at her metamorphosis for yourself, isn’t it motivating and inspiring?
Instead of fat, let’s focus on muscles!
Strong muscles are a guarantee of strength, metabolic health as well as a better appearance of the body. So what if we manage to lose many kilos, while with fat we also get rid of valuable muscles, which are a very important element in a shapely figure. Skinny fat is the case where someone is thin, still having a lot of fat in their body and not enough muscle to give their body a slimmer appearance. We women do not have to be afraid of strength training, we will not become bodybuilders immediately by lifting weights.
More dangerous than this is the lack of exercise and exercise, which can lead to muscle loss, and then not only does our figure suffer, but also strength and motor coordination deteriorate, the circulatory system has more problems, the body becomes less sensitive to insulin, the brain is devoid of BDNF conditioner, the skin loses its firmness faster, the risk of metabolic diseases increases.
Everyone focuses on unwanted fat when losing weight, but it may be worthwhile to reverse the perspective and invest in your healthy and strong muscles. I hope the information in this article will help you somehow think about muscle strengthening training. You don’t have to start with heavy weights right away. Step by step, you can rebuild your muscles using your own body weight to begin with. For women who have never had dumbbells in their hands, you can even start with pink weights 😉 as long as it motivates them to start their adventure with training and strengthening our valuable muscles.
Źródła:
Katy Bowman «Move Your DNA» Anders Hansen “A healthy brain in a healthy body” https://blog.mymetabolicmeals.com/muscle-mass-effect-insulin-resistance/ https://www.endocrine.org/journals/endocrine-reviews/myokines-in-muscle-organ-crosstalk https://academic.oup.com/edrv/article/41/4/594/5835999 https://drgabriellelyon.com/muscle-centric-medicine/ https://aminoco.com/blogs/recovery/maintaining-muscle-when-youre-sick-stressed-or-injured https://paleoleap.com/the-importance-of-muscle/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srEy7JzLvL8&t=22s