I have been writing about diet for years now as it relates to digestion, hormone balance, autoimmune disease, blood sugar balance, brain function, aging, weight loss, and so on. But just recently I have been reading a book called “Body by Science” that has opened my eyes to a whole other piece to the health puzzle – muscles.
What we learned in school and what is still being taught is that metabolically muscles don’t really have much to do with the health of the rest of the body. Yes, it is important to have good muscle tone so that we can move effectively to be able to do what we want to do in our lives, but there has never been a mention of muscle function having an effect on our biochemical health. It was known that muscles store sugar for rapid energy production to feed the movement fibers in the muscle, but the belief was that this sugar never left the muscles to affect any other tissues.
Well science marches forward and new information shows us that muscles are like many other tissues in the body – they produce massive amounts of hormones and chemical messengers that impact the health of our brain and organs. They now know that the amount and tone of your muscles directly impacts how well you heal from injuries and illnesses. Even such things as the likelihood of contracting various diseases and cancers decreases as your muscle strength and tone increases.
So now I am going to have to add muscle strength into the same health equation that I have been focusing on with diet. For instance, I have been telling everybody for ages that type 2 diabetes is a sugar/carbohydrate intolerance disease – which it is. New information is now adding the need to consider muscle tone and mass as part of the equation in resolving diabetes. Studies have shown that the more ideal the level of muscle in a person, the better their sugar control system works. So
being a couch potato is a part of the diabetes causation picture as much as what you are eating while on that couch.
The challenge with muscle research is that most methods of working out do not really optimize muscle strength and tone. The reason is because muscles are made of many different types of muscle fibers. The three main ones are the slow twitch, medium twitch, and fast twitch fibers. For most muscle movement we use the slow twitch fibers. They are not heavily dependent on sugar for energy and they are able to work hard and then recover to work again within a few seconds. If we continuously work a muscle and fatigue all the slow twitch muscles, then the medium twitch muscles come online to work. They are more sugar dependent for energy and they take much longer to recover once they get fatigued – about 10 to 30 minutes. If we are really pushing hard continuously and fatigue all the slow and medium twitch muscles, then lastly the emergency fast twitch muscles come online. These fibers are highly sugar dependent and they are also the fibers that trigger the most muscle growth when they get fatigued. When fast twitch fibers get fatigued, they can take a week or longer to recover.
When most people work out, they will do an exercise that only calls for a small portion of their muscle fibers to work at a time, so they end up only using their slow twitch fibers for most activities. To push into using medium and finally fast fibers, you have to be pushing your exercise to the absolute max.
I have written about this approach to exercise when I wrote about what is now called High Intensity Interval Training. Back when I first wrote about this approach to exercise, that fancy name had not been invented yet. Now it is becoming all the rage as the “best” way to condition your body in the least amount of time. But the book I am reading now shows how this type of high intensity aerobic exercise is actually not as beneficial as the right kind of weight lifting – super slow lifting. The research even shows that you will get a better aerobic workout from super slow weight lifting than you get from running or other aerobic activities. The physiology of this is fascinating.
I will do a newsletter on the specific techniques for this type of exercise at a later time. Right now I want to focus on energy. This is the real key to understanding the power of muscles in health. Inside all our cells are little powerhouse factories called mitochondria. They convert our food – sugars and fats – into cellular energy. And quite literally how well they are working determines how healthy we are and how old our body is functionally. As we age our energy factories slow down and don’t produce the energy like they used to. By the time we are in our 60’s, they may be operating at only 50% of normal. Without energy we can’t do the chemical things we have to do to stay healthy. We can’t manufacture new proteins to repair our cells. We can’t form hormones and neurotransmitters to make our brain and body function right. Everything slows down in what we think of as aging.
Muscle optimization reverses this process and kicks up the activity of the mitochondria in our body. I use the word optimization because individual genetics determines just how much muscle we can build. Also, it is possible to build too much muscle as some body builders have done. So we are after our own genetic optimum for our maximum health.
The key takeaway message from this newsletter is that muscle strength may be the missing link that will make a lot of health challenges finally fall into place. It is a ray of hope that gives us a way to directly improve our metabolic health with more than just diet alone. I know the struggles I have had with trying to get my health in line using primarily diet and fasting. I keep hitting a plateau and not being able to get to the level of health I am seeking. Now I have a completely different piece of the puzzle. I am excited to see what I can achieve with this new understanding.