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:

• What To Eat, Take, And Do Before A Workout
• Creatine: Very Different For Young & Old People
• Ginseng: Exercising With Less Soreness!
• Taurine’s Benefits For Heart Health And More
• Topping Up Testosterone? What To Consider

Take care!

Cortisol, or “the stress hormone” to its friends, is produced by your adrenal glands, and is generally considered “not fun”.

It does serve a purpose, of course, just like almost everything else our body does. It serves as part of the “fight or flight” response, for example, and helps you to wake up in the morning.

While you do need some cortisol (and a small percentage of people have too little), most of us have too much.

Why? Simply put, modern life is not what 200,000* years of human evolution prepared us for:

• Agriculture (which allowed us to settle down and cease being nomadic) happened during the last 6% of those 200,000 years.
• The Industrial Revolution and the onset of modern capitalism happened during only during the last 0.1% of those 200,000 years.

*the 200,000 years figure is conservative and doesn’t take into account the 200,000,000 years of pre-hominid mammalian evolution. Doing so, on the basis of the mammalian brain & physiology being what’s important here, means our modern stressors have been around for <0.0001% of the time we have.

So guess what, our bodies haven’t caught up. As far as our bodies are concerned, we are supposed to be enjoying the sunshine of grassy plains and the shade of woodland while eating fruit.

• When the alarm clock goes off, our body panics and prepares us to either flee or help fight the predator, because why else would we have been woken so?
• When we have a pressing deadline for work, our brain processes this as “if we don’t do this, we will literally starve and die”.
• When people are upset or angry with us, there’s a part of our brain that fears exile from the tribe and resultant death.

…and so on.

Health Risks of High Cortisol

The long-term stressors are the biggest issue for health. Unless you have a heart condition or other relevant health problem, almost anyone can weather a brief unpleasant surprise. But if something persists? That prompts the body to try to protect you, bless it. The body’s attempts backfire, because…

• One way it does this by making sure to save as much food as possible in the form of body fat
• It’ll also increase your appetite, to make sure you eat anything you can while you still can
• It additionally tries to protect you by keeping you on the brink of fight-or-flight readiness, e.g:
  • High blood pressure
  • High blood sugar levels
  • Rapid mood changes—gotta be able to do those heel-turns as necessary and react quickly to any possible threat!

Suffice it to say, these things are not good for your long-term health.

That’s the “Why”—now here’s the “How”:

Lowering your cortisol levels mostly means lowering your stress and/or lowering your stress response. We previously gave some powerful tools for lowering anxiety, which for these purposes amounts to the same thing.

However, we can also make nutritional and lifestyle changes that will reduce our cortisol levels, for example:

• Reduce (ideally: eliminate from your lifestyle) caffeine
• Reduce (ideally: eliminate from your lifestyle) alcohol
  • Yes, really. While many understandably turn to alcohol specifically to help manage stress, it only makes it worse long-term.
  • Additionally, alcohol directly stimulates cortisol production, counterintuitive as that may be.

Read: Alcohol, Aging, and the Stress Response ← full article (with 37 sources of its own) from the NYMC covering how alcohol stimulates cortisol production and what that means for us

As well as reductions/eliminations, are some things you can add into your lifestyle that will help!

We’ve written previously about some:

Read: Ashwagandha / Read: L-Theanine / Read: CBD Oil

Other things include, no surprises here:

• The Mediterranean diet (nutritious and delicious): https://10almonds.com/mediterranean-diet
• Get 7–9 hours (good quality!) sleep per night: https://10almonds.com/time-pillow-talk
• Get regular exercise (the regularity matters most!): https://10almonds.com/keep-on-keeping-on

Progressive Relaxation

We’ll give this one its own section because we’ve not talked about it before. Maybe you’re familiar. If not, then in a nutshell: progressive relaxation means progressively tensing and then relaxing each part of your body in turn.

Why does this work? Part of it is just a physical trick involving biofeedback and the natural function of muscles to contract and relax in turn, but the other part is even cleverer:

It basically tricks the most primitive part of your brain, the limbic system, into thinking you had a fight and won, telling it “thank you very much for the cortisol but we don’t need it anymore”.

Take a Hike! Or a Stroll… You Do You!

Last but not least: go connect with your roots. Spend time in the park, or at least the garden. Have a picnic, if the weather suits. Go somewhere you can spend time around leafy green things under a blue sky (we realize the blue sky may be subject to availability in some locations, but do what you can!).

Remember also: just as your body’s responses will be tricked by the alarm clock or the housework, they will also be easily tricked by blue and green stuff around you. If a sunny garden isn’t available in your location, a picture of one as your desktop background is the next best thing.