Muscle and its Role in Health and Disease

Strength training not only has the obvious benefits of getting stronger, creating lean tissue, which we will talk about more, but it has cardiovascular benefits too. Strength training, all of course when performed with correct technique, taught by a highly skilled and educated Performance Coach like the Absolute team, is the most efficient and effective form of training for overall benefits that exercise gives you. Strength training is great for those who are time poor, wanting to prevent injury or recovering from one, wanting physique and composition change, and long term independence and mobility.

The Australian National Public Health Guide details that everyone should be getting a minimum of 2 x per week strength training, yet a worrying statistic is that only 9-19% of Australian adults are getting close to this with 80% of Australians doing nothing at all.

Adults are losing 50% of all strength by 90 due to muscle loss occuring from disease and inactivity. We are spending longer with reduced independence and quality of life, which makes it so incredibly important to your health to strength train.

Muscle and its role in whole body metabolism:

Muscle tissue, and the steady supply of amino acids that it supplies via the blood serves to maintain the protein content and therefore survival of tissue and organs such as the skin, brain, heart and liver and is essential for survival, particularly in periods of fasting or stress (3).

Muscle and its response to critical illness:

The stressed state which the body is under when it is ill, suffering from diseases such as cancer, or traumatic injury, imposes a greater demand for amino acids from muscle protein breakdown (5). Muscle is so important that your ability to heal wounds, recover and survive bad burns, increase life expectancy from AIDs, cancer, septic infections is so intimately linked to the amount of lean tissue you have, needing it to be able to supply the increased demand of amino acids (6,7,8).

This is just scratching the surface on why strength training is so incredibly vital for your long term health and independence. So make sure you are getting your required dosage of loading, planned and specific to your needs, by a highly skilled Performance Coach. This will ensure that you are in peak physical condition and health, not just for summer, but for the long game.

Written by Head Performance Coach David Smith