Build Muscle (Healthily!)

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What Do You Have To Gain?

We have previously promised a three-part series about changing one’s weight:

  1. Losing weight (specifically, losing fat)
  2. Gaining weight (specifically, gaining muscle)
  3. Gaining weight (specifically, gaining fat)

And yes, that last one is also something that some people want/need to do (healthily!), and want/need help with that.

There will be, however, no need for a “losing muscle” article, because (even though sometimes a person might have some reason to want to do this), it’s really just a case of “those things we said for gaining muscle? Don’t do those and the muscle will atrophy naturally”.

Here’s the first part: How To Lose Weight (Healthily!)

While some people will want to lose fat, please do be aware that the association between weight loss and good health is not nearly so strong as the weight loss industry would have you believe:

Shedding Some Obesity Myths

And, while BMI is not a useful measure of health in general, it’s worth noting that over the age of 65, a BMI of 27 (which is in the high end of “overweight”, without being obese) is associated with the lowest all-cause mortality:

BMI and all-cause mortality in older adults: a meta-analysis

Body weight, muscle mass, and protein:

That BMI of 27, or whatever weight you might wish to be, ignores body composition. You’re probably aware that volume-for-volume, muscle weighs more than fat.

You’re also probably aware that if we’re not careful, we tend to lose muscle as we get older. This is known as age-related sarcopenia:

Protein, & Fighting Sarcopenia

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, our featured expert in the above article, recommends getting at least 1.6g of protein per kg of body weight per day (Americans, divide your weight in pounds by 2.2 to get your weight in kg).

So for example, if you weigh 165lb, that’s 75kg, that’s 1.6×75=120g of protein per day.

There is an upper limit to how much protein per day is healthy, and that limit is probably around 2g of protein per kg of body weight per day:

Protein: How Much Do We Need, Really?

You may be wondering: should we go for animal or plant protein? In which case, the short version is:

  • If you only care about muscle growth, any complete sources of protein are fine
  • If you care about your general health too, then avoiding red meat is best, but other common protein sources are all fine
  • Unprocessed is (unsurprisingly) better than processed in either case

Longer version: Plant vs Animal Protein: Head to Head

What exercises are best for muscle-building?

Of course, different muscles require different exercises, but for all of them, resistance training is what builds muscle the most, and it’s pretty much impossible to build a lot of muscle otherwise.

Check out: Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)

Prepare to fail!

No, really, prepare to fail. Because while resistance training in general is good for maintaining strong muscles and bones, you will only gain muscle if your current muscle is not enough to do the exercise:

  • If you do a heavy resistance exercise without undue difficulty, your muscles will say to each other “Good job, team! That was hard, but luckily we were strong enough; no changes necessary”.
  • If you do a heavy resistance exercise to the point where you can no longer do it (called: training to failure), then your muscles will say to each other “Oof, what a task! What we’ve got here is clearly not enough, so we’ll have to add more muscle for next time”.

Safety note: training to failure comes with safety risks. If using free weights or weight machines, please do so under well-trained supervision. If doing it with bodyweight (e.g. press-ups until you can press no more) or resistance bands, please check with your doctor first to ensure this is safe for you.

You can also increase the effectiveness of your resistance training by doing it in a way that “confuses” your muscles, making it harder for them to adapt in the moment, and thus forcing them to adapt more in the long term (e.g. get bigger and stronger):

HIIT, But Make It HIRT: High Intensity Resistance Training

Make time for recovery

While many kinds of exercise can be done daily, exercise to build muscle(s) means at the very least resting that muscle (or muscle group) the next day.

For this reason, a lot of bodybuilders have for example a week’s schedule that might look like:

  • Monday: Upper body training
  • Wednesday: Lower body training
  • Friday: Core strength training

…and rest on other days. This gives most muscles a full week of recovery, and every muscle at least 48 hours of recovery.

Note: bodybuilders, like children (who are also doing a lot of body-building, in their own way) need more sleep in order to allow for this recovery and growth to occur. Serious bodybuilders often aim for 12 hours sleep per day. This might be impractical, undesirable, or even impossible for some people, but it’s a factor to be borne in mind and not forgotten.

See also:

Overdone It? How To Speed Up Recovery After Exercise (According To Actual Science)

Anything else that can (safely and healthily) be done to promote muscle growth?

There are a lot of supplements on the market; some are healthy and helpful, other not so much. Here are some we’ve written about:

Take care!

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    Sleep less than six hours? Your risk of type 2 diabetes could be higher. Study sheds light on the complex sleep-diabetes link.

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  • Sleep Through Insomnia – by Dr. Brandon Peters

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    First, what this is not: a guide to get better sleep tonight.

    Rather, what it is: a guide to get better sleep in the near future (six weeks).

    The way it delivers this is primarily Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), in 6 weekly lessons, each divided into 3 activities:

    1. Reflection
    2. Education
    3. Setting goals

    Now, all parts are important, but we’d say the biggest value here is in the education segment, in part because it helps the reader understand why the reflection is important, and how to usefully set the goals.

    “Reflection” may sound quite wishy-washy, but in fact it is very science-based, with questions as prompts, which effectively amount to the “gathering data” part of science.

    “Setting goals”, for its part, is intended to be a progressive, step-by-step approach to get you to where you want to be with your sleep.

    The style is instructional pop-science, with everything made easy to understand. There are an abundance of scientific references for those who wish to delve further, and sometimes he does go into more neurological detail than a book written by a psychologist might (Dr. Peters being a medical doctor, board-certified in neurology and sleep medicine, and with extensive training in CBT-I).

    Bottom line: if you’d like to sleep better and you have the will to commit to a 6-week program (which will not ask anything arduous of you, but you will need to show up for it and do the things), then this book can give you a much better long-term fix than telling you to change your sheets and put your phone away.

    Click here to check out Sleep Through Insomnia, and sleep easy!

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  • The Conquest of Happiness – by Bertrand Russell

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    When we have all our physical needs taken care of, why are we often still not happy, and what can we do about that?

    Mathematician, philosopher, and Nobel prizewinner Bertrand Russell has answers. And, unlike many of “the great philosophers”, his writing style is very clear and accessible.

    His ideas are simple and practical, yet practised by few. Rather than taking a “be happy with whatever you have” approach, he does argue that we should strive to find more happiness in some areas and ways—and lays out guidelines for doing so.

    Areas to expand, areas to pull back on, areas to walk a “virtuous mean”. Things to be optimistic about; things to not get our hopes up about.

    Applying Russell’s model, there’s no more “should I…?” moments of wondering which way to jump.

    Bottom line: if you’ve heard enough about “how to be happy” from wishy-washier sources, you might find the work of this famous logician refreshing.

    Click here to check out The Conquest of Happiness, and see how much happier you might become!

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  • The Mindful Body – by Dr. Ellen Langer

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Fear not, this is not a “think healing thoughts” New Age sort of book. In fact, it’s quite the contrary.

    The most common negative reviews for this on Amazon are that it is too densely packed with scientific studies, and some readers found it hard to get through since they didn’t find it “light reading”.

    Counterpoint: this reviewer found it very readable. A lot of it is as accessible as 10almonds content, and a lot is perhaps halfway between 10almonds content in readability, and the studies we cite. So if you’re at least somewhat comfortable reading academic literature, you should be fine.

    The author, a professor of psychology (tenured at Harvard since 1981), examines a lot of psychosomatic effect. Psychosomatic effect is often dismissed as “it’s all in your head”, but it means: what’s in your head has an effect on your body, because your brain talks to the rest of the body and directs bodily responses and actions/reactions.

    An obvious presentation of this in medicine is the placebo/nocebo effect, but Dr. Langer’s studies (indeed, many of the studies she cites are her own, from over the course of her 40-year career) take it further and deeper, including her famous “Counterclockwise” study in which many physiological markers of aging were changed (made younger) by changing the environment that people spent time in, to resemble their youth, and giving them instructions to act accordingly while there.

    In the category of subjective criticism: the book is not exceptionally well-organized, but if you read for example a chapter a day, you’ll get all the ideas just fine.

    Bottom line: if you want a straightforward hand-holding “how-to” guide, this isn’t it. But it is very much information-packed with a lot of ideas and high-quality science that’s easily applicable to any of us.

    Click here to check out The Mindful Body, and indeed grow your chronic good health!

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Related Posts

  • Keep Inflammation At Bay
  • Homeopathy: Evidence So Tiny That It’s Not there?

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Homeopathy: Evidence So Tiny That It’s Not There?

    Yesterday, we asked you your opinions on homeopathy. The sample size of responses was a little lower than we usually get, but of those who did reply, there was a clear trend:

    • A lot of enthusiasm for “Homeopathy works on valid principles and is effective”
    • Near equal support for “It may help some people as a complementary therapy”
    • Very few people voted for “Science doesn’t know how it works, but it works”; this is probably because people who considered voting for this, voted for the more flexible “It may help some people as a complementary therapy” instead.
    • Very few people considered it a dangerous scam and a pseudoscience.

    So, what does the science say?

    Well, let us start our investigation by checking out the position of the UK’s National Health Service, an organization with a strong focus on providing the least expensive treatments that are effective.

    Since homeopathy is very inexpensive to arrange, they will surely want to put it atop their list of treatments, right?

    ❝Homeopathy is a “treatment” based on the use of highly diluted substances, which practitioners claim can cause the body to heal itself.

    There’s been extensive investigation of the effectiveness of homeopathy. There’s no good-quality evidence that homeopathy is effective as a treatment for any health condition.❞

    The NHS actually has a lot more to say about that, and you can read their full statement here.

    But that’s just one institution. Here’s what Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council had to say:

    ❝There was no reliable evidence from research in humans that homeopathy was effective for treating the range of health conditions considered: no good-quality, well-designed studies with enough participants for a meaningful result reported either that homeopathy caused greater health improvements than placebo, or caused health improvements equal to those of another treatment❞

    You can read their full statement here.

    The American FDA, meanwhile, have a stronger statement:

    ❝Homeopathic drug products are made from a wide range of substances, including ingredients derived from plants, healthy or diseased animal or human sources, minerals and chemicals, including known poisons. These products have the potential to cause significant and even permanent harm if they are poorly manufactured, since that could lead to contaminated products or products that have potentially toxic ingredients at higher levels than are labeled and/or safe, or if they are marketed as substitute treatments for serious or life-threatening diseases and conditions, or to vulnerable populations.❞

    You can read their full statement here.

    Homeopathy is a dangerous scam and a pseudoscience: True or False?

    False and True, respectively, mostly.

    That may be a confusing answer, so let’s elaborate:

    • Is it dangerous? Mostly not; it’s mostly just water. However, two possibilities for harm exist:
      • Careless preparation could result in a harmful ingredient still being present in the water—and because of the “like cures like” principle, many of the ingredients used in homeopathy are harmful, ranging from heavy metals to plant-based neurotoxins. However, the process of “ultra-dilution” usually removes these so thoroughly that they are absent or otherwise scientifically undetectable.
      • Placebo treatment has its place, but could result in “real” treatment going undelivered. This can cause harm if the “real” treatment was critically needed, especially if it was needed on a short timescale.
    • Is it a scam? Probably mostly not; to be a scam requires malintent. Most practitioners probably believe in what they are practising.
    • Is it a pseudoscience? With the exception that placebo effect has been highly studied and is a very valid complementary therapy… Yes, aside from that it is a pseudoscience. There is no scientific evidence to support homeopathy’s “like cures like” principle, and there is no scientific evidence to support homeopathy’s “water memory” idea. On the contrary, they go against the commonly understood physics of our world.

    It may help some people as a complementary therapy: True or False?

    True! Not only is placebo effect very well-studied, but best of all, it can still work as a placebo even if you know that you’re taking a placebo… Provided you also believe that!

    Science doesn’t know how it works, but it works: True or False?

    False, simply. At best, it performs as a placebo.

    Placebo is most effective when it’s a remedy against subjective symptoms, like pain.

    However, psychosomatic effect (the effect that our brain has on the rest of our body, to which it is very well-connected) can mean that placebo can also help against objective symptoms, like inflammation.

    After all, our body, directed primarily by the brain, can “decide” what immunological defenses to deploy or hold back, for example. This is why placebo can help with conditions as diverse as arthritis (an inflammatory condition) or diabetes (an autoimmune condition, and/or a metabolic condition, depending on type).

    Here’s how homeopathy measures up, for those conditions:

    (the short answer is “no better than placebo”)

    Homeopathy works on valid principles and is effective: True or False?

    False, except insofar as placebo is a valid principle and can be effective.

    The stated principles of homeopathy—”like cures like” and “water memory”—have no scientific basis.

    We’d love to show the science for this, but we cannot prove a negative.

    However, the ideas were conceived in 1796, and are tantamount to alchemy. A good scientific attitude means being open-minded to new ideas and testing them. In homeopathy’s case, this has been done, extensively, and more than 200 years of testing later, homeopathy has consistently performed equal to placebo.

    In summary…

    • If you’re enjoying homeopathic treatment and that’s working for you, great, keep at it.
    • If you’re open-minded to enjoying a placebo treatment that may benefit you, be careful, but don’t let us stop you.
    • If your condition is serious, please do not delay seeking evidence-based medical treatment.

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  • Grapes vs Strawberries – Which is Healthier?

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Our Verdict

    When comparing strawberries to grapes, we picked the strawberries.

    Why?

    In terms of macros, grapes have more than 2x the carbs while strawberries have more than 2x the fiber, making this category an easy win for strawberries.

    In the category of vitamins, grapes have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B6, and K, while strawberries have more of vitamins B3, B5, B9, C, and E, making for a 5:5 tie with comparable margins of difference.

    Looking at minerals, grapes have more potassium and manganese, while strawberries have more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc. A clear win for strawberries here.

    When it comes to polyphenols, both of these fruits are abundant in many polyphenols, but it might interest you to know that strawberries have slightly more resveratrol than red/black grapes! Still, it’s close, and there are many other polyphenols in both, and honestly we’re calling this category a tie.

    Adding up the sections makes for a compelling overall win for strawberries, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!

    Want to learn more?

    You might like:

    Can We Drink To Good Health? ← while there are polyphenols such as resveratrol in red wine that per se would boost heart health, there’s so little per glass that you may need 100–1000 glasses per day to get the dosage that provides benefits in mouse studies.

    If you’re not a mouse, you might even need more than that!

    To this end, many people prefer resveratrol supplementation ← link is to an example product on Amazon, but there are plenty more so feel free to shop around 😎

    Enjoy!

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  • Meditations for Mortals – by Oliver Burkeman

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    We previously reviewed this author’s “Four Thousand Weeks”, but for those who might have used a lot of those four thousand weeks already, and would like to consider things within a smaller timeframe for now, this work is a 28-day daily reader.

    Now, daily readers are usually 366 days, but the chapters here are not the single page chapters that 366-page daily readers usually have. So, expect to invest a little more time per day (say, about 6 pages for each daily chapter).

    Burkeman does not start the way we might expect, by telling us to take the time to smell the roses. Instead, he starts by examining the mistakes that most of us make most of the time, often due to unexamined assumptions about the world and how it works. Simply put, we’ve often received bad lessons in life (usually not explicitly, but rather, from our environments), and it takes some unpacking first to deal with that.

    Nor is the book systems-based, as many books that get filed under “time management” may be, but rather, is simply principles-based. This is a strength, because principles are a lot easier to keep to than systems.

    The writing style is direct and conversational, and neither overly familiar nor overly academic. It strikes a very comfortably readable balance.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to get the most out of your days, this book can definitely help improve things a lot.

    Click here to check out Meditations For Mortals, and live fulfilling days!

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