Your Muscles Are Your Secret Superpower!

To all the women out there - Your muscles are your secret superpower

Don’t be afraid of the M word, Muscles.

Remember our muscles are the only part of our bodies that use the chemicals stored in the form of body fat that use those chemicals as the energy reserve they are.

So the more efficient our muscles, the more body fat they can use 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

The only way to make our muscles more efficient is to do resistance training. This does not automatically make us bigger or more obviously muscled, it simply makes our muscles more efficient.

Women produce too much oestrogen (as with everything in life there are some exceptions to every “rule”, however generally speaking) to easily “grow” bigger muscles, and there are plenty of very strong people out there who we would never realise are that strong because they do not have obviously big muscular structures.

Let's be honest, if it was that easy to be obviously big or massive, don’t we think we would see more people walking around looking like that?

When was the last time you were out and about and thought to yourself that person looks physically and muscularly big, or bigger than normal? It almost never happens.

So do not be afraid of resistance training in order to be leaner for life, very few of us will ever be big, or bulky due to resistance training.

It is more important that women lift as big and heavy as they can as they produce greater levels of oestrogen which prevents muscular growth, whilst never diminishing muscle efficiency.  

What do we mean by making muscles more efficient? 

Quite simply, when we live an ordinary, sedentary lifestyle then our muscles will not have the activity they require to be as efficient, strong, reliable and adaptable as they can be. 

Giving a very poor example: if all i ever do with my arm muscles is to pick up cups of coffee then over time the nerves that control those muscle fibres can afford to reduce their efficiency, if it does not require 100% of the muscle fibres to be stimulated by nerves to lift that coffee then some of those nerves can afford to diminish in their activity over time. Now many muscle fibres can afford to be less active too. So maybe we only require 50% of a muscle to operate in order to lift this cup of coffee.

Now this muscle is less efficient, and if we put ourselves in a position of requiring chemicals from our energy reserve that is body fat, only 50% of this muscle will be able to utilise this.

We can increase the efficiency and strength of this muscle through resistance training. Most of our initial gains in strength come from “nervous innovation”, this is “forcing” the nerves to become fully operational to fire off to stimulate all the muscle fibres in a muscle. We can now hope that we have 100% of the nerves firing off and stimulating 100% of the muscle fibres. 

We now have massively improved muscle efficiency and with that strength, but with no or very limited muscle growth. That takes some considerable time. Now we have every chance of using more body fat as the chemical energy store because these improved muscles require more energy more often. Improving our ability to be leaner.

Yes we are stronger, which is never a bad thing for anybody anywhere, we are not necessarily bigger. Yes we can be heavier, because we are now denser, since muscle stores plenty of water and water is denser than fat, but as we have stated before we should never try to lose weight, we should only try to reduce body fat. 

Remember we do not walk into a shop where the clothes are listed by weight categories, they are listed by size, so we can be smaller, requiring a smaller clothing size, yet denser, and therefore heavier.

Essentially this is where the industry has let us down for so many years, and illustrates why diets simply never work and will never work over the long term. They do not understand the role of muscle in this process. 

As we diet we do not know what weight we are losing, and that always includes muscle mass, it's unavoidable on a restrictive diet. The more muscle we lose over time the more likely we are to add more body fat over time. And so the cycle repeats.

Every short term fad diet reduces muscle mass, and this reduces our body's ability to reduce body fat again and again and again. Increasing the likelihood of storing ever increasing amounts of body fat over our lifetimes. 

To make matters worse and to prove the industry does not understand this process, women have been told for decades to lift light and easy or do lots or repetitions, this is obviously wrong. That women should tone up or that light weights and high reps is toning. 

We can never “tone” a muscle, our muscles are either small, medium or large, to put it very simply. To have toned muscles is simply to reduce the body fat on top of whatever muscles we have. If we reduce our levels of body fat our small muscles will look toned, or our medium muscles will look toned, and so on.

So no one should be afraid of resistance training, as our muscles are our secret superpower when it comes to being leaner. We work them hard and heavy and they will reward us with helping us be leaner for life. Additional benefits include being stronger, and possibly less prone to injury, more mobile, adaptable to physical effort, often increased and beneficial feeling of wellbeing, more positivity, and perhaps even less prone to basic illnesses, but maybe some of that is just wishful thinking on my behalf.

Lift weights and live life, be prepared to enjoy the challenge of lifting more than we think we can, and in so doing help our muscles be more efficient to help us be leaner for life when working in conjunction with getting the food right, not by restricting that food but by timing it in such a way as to set up that demand by the body to tap into that energy reserve that we call body fat.