However, it doesn’t work the other way: an increase of Lean Body Mass is not always an increase in muscle.  That’s because body water makes up a significant portion of your Lean Body Mass. To illustrate this point, here’s a body composition analysis of a 78.9 Kg male.

Body Composition Analysis taken using InBody

44.4 (Total Body Water) + 16.1 (Dry Lean Mass) = 60.5 Lean Body Mass

Water made up more than 55% of total body weight, which is normal for healthy adult males.

Notice how from a body composition standpoint, Lean Body Mass is made up of three components, two of which are water.  

Everything else is grouped together in what’s called your “Dry Lean Mass,”

which includes your bone minerals, protein content, etc.

Muscle gains definitely contribute to LBM gains, but so does water, which can fluctuate throughout the day depending on hydration status, diet, and physical activity.

It’s also important to note that muscle itself contains water – a lot of it.  According to the USGS, muscle can contain up to 79% water content.  Research has also shown that resistance training promotes the increase of intracellular water in both men and women.

All of this points to two main problems when talking about “lean gains”:

1.  Big Lean Mass gains, when it occurs quickly, are largely increases in body water

2.  It’s difficult to say with any certainty how much any gain in Lean Body Mass is due to Skeletal Muscle Mass without using the right tools. 

How to Measure Your Lean Body Mass and Muscle Mass

Body Composition Analysis taken using InBody technology

Since there’s a significant difference between Lean Body Mass and Skeletal Muscle Mass, how is it possible to know how much of each you have?

Let’s start with what not to do: do not try to use a scale to calculate changes in Skeletal Muscle Mass.

It’s a popular method to estimate muscle gain using a combination of the number on the scale and advice from fitness magazines.

The problem with using a scale to estimate progress is there are so many factors that can influence an increase in body weight, a few of which include:

·  An undigested meal or drink

·  Water retention due to glycogen

·  Water retention due to sodium

·  Body Fat gain due to being in a caloric surplus

There is only one way to calculate what is happening to your Lean Body Mass: h. Without testing your body composition, there will be no way to know what any gain or loss in your body weight is due to.

Most methods of body composition analysis will at the minimum divide your body into Lean Body Mass (this may be referred to as Fat-Free Mass) and Fat Mass.  These methods include:

·  Skinfold calipers

·  Hydrostatic Weighing

·  Air displacement plethysmography

Each of these has their pros and cons, and accuracy may vary depending on a number of factors unique to each testing method.

For more in-depth body composition analysis, you would need to look to two more sophisticated methods: dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA)and Direct Segmental Multi-Frequency bioelectrical impedance analysis (DSM-BIA). Not only will these methods tell you how much fat you have, but they will differentiate your skeletal muscle mass from your lean body mass. 

So, Lean Body Mass, Muscle Mass, Lean Mass, Which Is it?

Back to our originally three statements: which is correct to say?  Let’s review:

·  Lean Muscle: You should stop using this term because it is misleading.  All muscle is “lean muscle,” and it is a confusing mix of two real terms: Skeletal Muscle Mass and Lean Body Mass.

·  Muscle Mass (or Skeletal Muscle Mass): Yes, it is likely true that if you’re performing resistance training/weight lifting workouts and adding enough protein to your diet, a percentage of the change is likely due to muscle mass development. But remember that skeletal muscle mass is part of LBM. Things get tricky when you start putting numbers on your muscle mass gains. Everyone’s body composition is different, and the proportion of your skeletal muscle mass to Lean Body Mass will not be the same as someone else’s. ·  This makes accurate estimations even harder unless you have access to sophisticated tools that can differentiate between LBM and SMM.

·  Lean Mass (lean body mass):  This is probably the best and safest term to use to describe your gains.  When you use this term, you’re telling people that you have gained weight from muscle and water, not body fat.

However, that’s all you can really say.  Because of the nature of Lean Body Mass, it is very hard to say how much of the gain is due to water and how much is due to muscle (which is largely water to begin with). A gain of 5Kg of LBM is not 5Kg of pure muscle,

When it comes to tracking your muscle gain (or fat loss), it all comes down to what tools you’re using to measure your progress.  If all you are working with is a weight scale, then all you will ever know for sure is your weight is increasing or decreasing. It would be hard to differentiate the weight gain from water, muscle, or body fat. If you are serious about accurately measuring your muscle gain and assessing your health, go get a body composition analysis. Then – and only then – can you tell people that you gained 5Kg of muscle with confidence.

Contact My Body Composition Solutions for an analysis of your composition and more information.

Disclaimer: This article should not substitute professional medical advice. When starting a new diet or exercise plan, always consult your physician and exercise professional first.

Information in this article has been extracted and edited from InBody USA ‘Lean Body Mass and Muscle Mass – What’s the Difference?’

This post was updated on August 24, 2018, for accuracy and comprehensiveness. It was originally published on September 24, 2015.

 This article includes words and phrases that link to several other information resources.

You don’t need anyone to tell you that smoking is bad for your health.  Smoking impairs the immune system and is associated with a long list of cardiovascular, autoimmune, respiratory and neurological diseases. The list of common symptoms of tobacco-related diseases includes shortness of breath, persistent cough, and frequent colds or upper respiratory infections.

Specifically, the substances you ingest while smoking a cigarette have a direct effect on both the innate and adaptive immunity, suppressing the normal development and function of the cells that are responsible for driving immunity in the body. Nicotine, in particular, has been shown to be a potent immunosuppressive agent by affecting the immunosurveillance properties of dendritic cells, highly-specialized cells of the immune system.

Imagine this; your body fights for your survival every single day of your life, and in the meantime, you can be counteracting these efforts every time you decide to smoke. Is that cigarette worth your health?

2.  Drink Alcohol in Moderation

Alcohol is often associated with celebrations and anniversaries, but if you abuse it, your immune system suffers.  Alcohol consumption is a contributing factor to organ damage, specifically the liver, and is known to slow down recovery from tissue injuries. Try to stick within the standard drink guidelines, however it is important to remember that factors such as gender, age, mental health, drug use and existing medical conditions can change how alcohol affects you.

A standard drink provides 10g alcohol and is equal to:

• 100ml wine
• 285ml full strength beer
• 60ml port or sherry
• 30ml spirits. (2)

Alcohol intake exceeding the recommended intake disrupts essential immune pathways and, in turn, impairs the body’s ability to defend itself against infections. 

It is worth stating that alcohol-related immune system disturbances have been implicated in the development of certain types of cancer, including but not limited to head and neck cancers among alcohol users. Before you start thinking that this is a problem isolated to chronic alcohol users, keep in mind that acute binge drinking, also known as a Saturday night, has the ability to severely impair the body’s defence system.

3.  Try to Minimise Stress

Chronic stress is like poison for your body; it has a negative impact on every aspect of your health, and it’s even more dangerous due to its ability to creep up without you consciously acknowledging it.  One of the many systems responsible in the body for handling difficult situations is the immune system. Specifically, cells of the immune systems are equipped with receptors that recognize stress hormones, such as cortisol. 

Even acute stress can mess up your immune system by increasing the release of inflammatory-promoting cytokines in the blood, a special type of immune cell that signals other cells and affect their function. Stress, immunity, and disease can affect each other in reciprocal ways, but these relationships can be moderated by life stage, other environmental pressures and goals, stressor duration, and protective factors, such as good sleep. Make sure you have a healthy strategy to help you relieve the symptoms of stress like exercising or spending time with friends and family. 

4.  Get More Sleep

Speaking of sleep, it is a strong regulator of immunological processes and works to enhance the memory of the adaptive immune system. When you deprive your body of adequate sleep, you simultaneously make it more susceptible to many infectious agents. Sleep deprivation not only makes you more susceptible to infections like the common cold or the flu, but it also makes it so much harder to recover from the bacteria or virus infection that eventually manages to enter your system.  

While you are sleeping every night, your body uses this time to strengthen the immune system and move T cells to the lymph nodes, the vessels of the immune system responsible for filtering harmful substances. These T cells produce cytokines which are called to action when there is inflammation in your body or when you’re under stress. During periods of inadequate sleep, cytokine production is diminished, further hurting your immune system.  So, feel free to hit that snooze button, and in case you come down with the flu, feel free to hibernate for a few days.

5. Exercise Regularly – But Don’t Skip Rest Days

Most people have a love-hate relationship with exercise.  This particular argument will only add to your love towards exercise. Studies have proved that regular physical activity may enhance the immune system and provide protection against infection.

Furthermore, regular resistance exercise increases your muscle mass, which acts as a protein reserve when the immune system is working to stave off disease. Simply put, the more muscle mass you build through a healthy diet and regular exercise, the more equipped your body is to fight off infection and keep you strong and healthy. Conversely, getting rid of bacteria or virus infection will be a lot harder if you have been neglecting the gym.

But don’t forget to take your workouts outside. Exercising outside is a great way to both destress and reap the benefits of Vitamin D. Vitamin D deficiency has also been linked to an increased susceptibility to infection, so when the weather permits try to go outside and enjoy the sun.

Unfortunately, no one can stay young forever, and as the body ages, its natural defences begin to waiver.  The good news is that regular physical activity in the elderly may counteract the actions of time and boost the immune system so that it can protect the body from infection and disease.

Nonetheless, like everything else in life, too much of a good thing can be bad.  Being a couch potato suppresses the immune system, but the opposite extreme can be equally detrimental. Repeated bouts of strenuous exercise, also known as overtraining syndrome, can lead to symptoms like immune dysfunction, so make sure to maintain a healthy balance between regular physical activity and exhaustion.

6.  Eat Enough Nutritious Foods

Every system in the body requires energy to function properly. This energy is provided by food sources in the form of calories. Indeed, insufficient intake of calories may lead to micronutrient deficiencies and suppress the immune system and its vital functions. In fact, malnutrition is the most prevalent cause of immunodeficiency around the world.  

Food is powerful; it has the potential to make or break every chemical pathway in the body that sustains you. Because of that, it makes sense that the healthier your food choices are the stronger your immune system & subsequently your health will be. 

Certain nutrient deficiencies have the potential to alter immune responses and damage the way your immune response to infections. Vitamins and nutrients with antioxidant properties can provide protection against free radicals. Adding an abundance of foods high in naturally occurring antioxidants like citrus fruits in your diet is the key to maintaining a healthy immune system. Exposure to environmental conditions such as UV light, cigarette smoke can ultimately take its toll on the immune system and drive the production of free radicals in the body. Antioxidants fight the free radicals and restore the structural integrity of cells and membranes in the body. Examples of such antioxidants include zinc, selenium, iron, copper, vitamin C, A, and E. Foods high in vitamin C, A, and E, in particular, may also increase the activation of cells involved in tumor immunity.

Plant-derived bioactive compounds, known as phytonutrients, also play an important role in strengthening the immune system.  Polyphenols, flavonoids, isoflavonoids, carotenoids, and phytoestrogens, are some of the few phytonutrients that have the ability to enhance the immune system with their immunity-boosting superpowers. Dietary intake of phytochemicals promotes health benefits and protects against chronic disorders, such as cancer, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, and inflammation. Also, their natural origin poses lower side effects when compared to chemotherapy or radiotherapy and promises a brilliant future for their use in treating specific types of cancer.  

Finally, there is emerging research linking gut health to the immune system and there is promising research highlighting the benefits of probiotics supplementation in improving the body’s response to bacterial infections.

Balanced nutrition, especially in terms of adequate vitamin, mineral and protein intake (for those essential amino acids), enhances the resistance against infections. If you are not sure that you can provide everything your body needs through your diet alone, it might be worth investing in a quality multivitamin to help cover any inconsistencies from your diet. 

7.  Maintain a healthy body fat percentage

It has been observed that overnutrition can potentially increase the risk of inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.  A healthy body fat percentage ranges between 10-20% of the total body weight for men and 18-28% for women. Therefore, a percent body fat higher than this may impair the immune response.

Studies have shown that the link between obesity, insulin resistance, and diabetes could be explained through the subsequent activation of the innate immune system. The same system that is implicated in the pathophysiology of obesity-related liver damage.  A healthy immune system does an excellent job in protecting you from disease, but permanent activation causes the release of immune cells that promote inflammation in the body, making it a lot harder for the immune system to concentrate on its primary goal; to keep you healthy.  

The solution is simple in this case. You can reverse the negative effects of a high body percentage by improving your body composition. Less body fat, specifically visceral fat, equals less immune cells circulating in the bloodstream, promoting inflammation and wreaking havoc on the natural processes of the body.  

In addition to losing fat, gaining more muscle mass, as we spoke about before, can further improve body composition and reset a dysfunctioning immune system, laying the foundations towards long term health.

                        Regular Body Composition Analysis is the ideal way to monitor your fat percentage.

You may read this article and think that all these are just too much change for you. Small changes are still a step in the right direction. Change your habits one at a time to help support your immune system, and it will help you bounce back quickly next time you catch a common cold. After all, a strong, healthy body depends on your daily decisions.

Contact My Body Composition Solutions for an analysis of your composition and more information.

Disclaimer: This article should not substitute professional medical advice. When starting a new diet or exercise plan, always consult your physician and exercise professional first.

Information in this article has been extracted and edited from InBody USA blog ‘7 Ways to Boost Your Immune System’written by  Rafaela Michailidou is a Biomedical scientist, and a freelance health and wellness content writer. Aspiring to help people achieve their goals, she is currently studying to be a Health Coach. 

 This article includes words and phrases that link to several other information resources.

(1)  Source: According to a 2015 report by AIG.

(2)  Source: eatforhealth.gov.au

Why this is better: It’s safe to assume that in most circumstances, when people want to get “bigger”, they want their muscles to get bigger, not their waistlines.  By defining your goal as being Lean Body Mass gain (muscle is the biggest component of Lean Body Mass) and putting a number to it, you have a numerical goal to work towards.

“I want to lose 10kg of fat”

Why this is better: Similar to getting bigger, when people say they want to lose “weight”, it’s safe to assume that they really want to lose fat.  You don’t want to lose muscle – muscle is metabolically active tissue that serves many important roles: from maintaining your metabolism to supporting healthy bone density to keeping a healthy immune system.

It’s likely that some muscle loss will occur when you try to lose fat, so by monitoring the changes in your body composition, you’ll be able to keep an eye on this and minimize any losses that may occur by making the necessary corrections in your diet and exercise program.

Tracking Changes In Your Body Composition Lets You Set Reachable Time-Based Goals

Sometimes, you start a fitness journey because you have a special event coming up. Maybe you’re going on a vacation and you want to have a rockin’ body when you hit the beach.  Maybe there’s a wedding coming up, and you want to make sure you fit into a new/favourite dress.

Point is: there’s a deadline you want results by, and you want a solution that will help you get there. This is a really common situation, so common that nearly every fad diet or gimmicky product makes time deadlines a critical part of their marketing. These diets and products all claim to solve an immediate problem, which makes people feel better, and which is why popular magazines just love promoting them (looking at you, Cosmopolitan).

There are no shortcuts to losing weight, gaining muscle in a very short amount of time. But instead, by tracking your progress by tracking your changes in body composition, you can actually set real goals with real results that you can actually achieve.

Let’s build on the goals we made before, this time adding a reasonable time frame.

“I want to build some muscle in the next 5-6 months”

When you try to build develop muscle and Lean Body Mass, there are a lot of factors that go into whether or not you achieve that goal.  What type of exercises you do, the degree to which you properly perform your exercises, whether you lift heavy with few reps or light with many, how often you strength train, how often you rest…the list goes on, and that doesn’t even include proper nutrition.

However, assuming that you do everything perfect and you’re a beginner, experts posit that you can gain roughly 1 kg of muscle a month with consistent, proper training. If you’re not a beginner, your rate of lean mass growth will be slower as you get closer to your genetic limit for natural muscle development.

Knowing this, if you’re just getting started, you can track your progress every month and expect to see up to a 1 kg increase every month until you reach your goal of 3-5 kg of muscle by following a challenging lifting program.

Here’s how your composition history can look with muscle gain:

When you use your body composition to track your progress, it suddenly doesn’t matter as much how much you can lift, or how many reps you can do. Instead, what matters is that you’re working towards a physical goal – getting bigger and more muscular – and you’re doing it in a way that you can reliably track towards a realistic goal.

“I want to lose 10kg of fat in 5-60 months”

In some ways, losing Fat Mass is easier than building Lean Body Mass and muscle.  There are many types of exercise that encourage Lean Body Mass development, many workout plans to organize them in, and it requires significant amounts of rest and recovery. Fat loss, on the other hand, requires less arguably less planning and actually occurs faster than muscle gain. 

To lose Fat Mass, you need to be in a caloric deficit (taking in less calories than you use) and maintain it carefully over an extended period of time.  This isn’t rocket science, and virtually every peer-reviewed study that includes groups that undergo a caloric deficit experience fat loss. Here are three published in 2015 alone. Hypocaloric diets work.

How quickly can you lost fat? Many studies and health groups, including the Centres for Disease Control, report that by reducing your caloric intake by 3,500 calories a week typically results in ½ kg of fat loss.

Here’s how your composition history can look with fat loss:

Note: ½ kg of fat loss, not weight loss.  If you’re just a scale to measure your rate of change, you may experience even more “weight loss,” but if you’re on a hypocaloric diet, especially one that focuses on cutting out carbohydrates, you might experience additional water weight loss.

That’s because water bonds to glycogen at rate of about 4 grams of water: 1 gram of carbs. If you’re much lower on carbs than you usually are, you’ll be retaining less water and weigh less accordingly.

When you use your body composition to track your progress with fat loss, you can account for what’s actually being lost when you see your weight decrease on the scale. This helps you avoid mistaking your weight loss for water weight loss or (hopefully not) muscle loss.

Why is this important to know? If you’re tracking your body composition changes instead of simple scale weight changes, you won’t be confused when you gain a few pounds back after reintroducing carbs into your diet.  You’ll know that this weight is water, not fat.

Also, by being patient and tracking a pound or two of fat loss each month, you can stay motivated by knowing you’re making real changes that will last in your body. Gaining water weight is as easy as refueling on carbs, but gaining actual fat? That requires you to be in a caloric surplus over a period of time.  Eat within your Total Daily Energy Expenditure, and you can expect your fat mass to remain stable.

Tracking Changes In Your Body Composition Helps You Reduce Negative Changes In Your Body

Unfortunately, the truth is that “positive” results– increases in muscle and decreases in fat – usually come paired with negative consequences.

·  Gaining Fat with Muscle

If the results you’re working for are muscle gain, you may end up experiencing some unwanted fat gain as a side effect.  This is due to the nature of the diet you should go on to encourage muscle tissue growth: namely, a caloric surplus.

Getting sufficient nutrients/calories – particularly carbohydrates and protein – is essential for encouraging increased muscle and strength. However, just as eating fewer calories than you use causes a decrease in fat, eating more than your body “needs” will cause a gain in fat over time.

For some people, gaining a little extra fat is not a big concern, but for others it is – especially if clothes start to not fit properly.  By tracking your body composition changes, you’ll be able to track both muscle and fat gain, allowing you to change your diet or exercise routine if you feel that you’re gaining too much fat.

·  Losing Muscle with Fat

The opposite is true when you try to lose fat. With large reductions in fat due to a hypocaloric diet, you can lose Lean Body Mass and Skeletal Muscle Mass.  Muscle is healthy tissue that you should work hard to preserve.

Fortunately, you can minimize the loss of muscle while reducing fat mass by increasing your protein intake and by performing resistance training. In a study of overweight police officers, the group that ingested casein protein supplements and performed regular resistance training experienced less loss of muscle tissue and increased strength vs. the group that simply dieted.

By tracking your body composition changes, you’ll be able to keep an eye on any losses in muscle development.  Just like for people who want to build muscle, if you see that your negative change – loss in muscle – is becoming too great when you track your body composition changes, you can made the necessary adjustments to your diet and workout plan to help mitigate that loss.

Tracking Progress and Setting Reachable Goals Leads to Success

Tracking your progress over time is one of the most important things you can do to ensure your reach your health and fitness goals.  Whether that’s gaining muscle, losing fat, or both, by accurately tracking your progress with something measurable instead of something visual – like a mirror – or unreliable – like scale weight – you will be able to reach your goals faster.

That’s why tracking progress with your body composition delivers results: it offers objective, measurable values in your body that translate into physical results.

With more muscle and less fat, you’ll be stronger, look fitter, and will be healthier. You’ll be able to gauge this progress objectively instead of guessing, and you’ll be able to make smart adjustments in your training as needs be.

Contact My Body Composition Solutions for an analysis of your composition and more information.

Disclaimer: This article should not substitute professional medical advice. When starting a new diet or exercise plan, always consult your physician and exercise professional first.

Information in this article has been extracted and edited from InBody USA ‘Why Tracking Changes in Body Composition Leads to Results’

originally published on March 24, 2016..

 This article includes words and phrases that link to several other information resources.

First, let’s examine how the stress hormone affects your Fat Free Mass (your muscles and muscular development). As far back as 1964, researchers have suggested this hormone hampers protein synthesis. Protein synthesis = development of new muscle.

Researchers mimicked a stressed state in healthy test subjects by adding cortisol to their systems via IV and oral tablets. They found that cortisol and inactivity were linked with loss of Lean Body Mass, muscle loss, and negatively affected body composition overall. While inactivity can have this effect alone, the catabolic effect of cortisol seemed to play a significant role in muscle loss.

While we may not understand everything about the stress hormone yet, researchers are beginning to understand the effect that chronic stress can have on muscle recovery.

A study published in the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research in 2014 was conducted to determine the relationship between stress and muscular recovery. Over the course of a 4-day period, the subjects’ perceived energy, fatigue, and soreness levels were measured after a bout of strenuous resistance exercise.

Over time, perceived stress can end up wearing away at both your mental and physical health. What’s worse, it doesn’t take weeks or months to start seeing the effects. It only took 4 days for researchers to notice a statistically significant impact on perceived energy, fatigue and soreness levels.

And it’s not just in our heads either. The results from the study also showed that over time, stress (whether it originates from an external event or perception) negatively influenced the recovery of muscular function after exercise.

Fat Mass *

Of course, that’s what we found just from looking at Fat Free Mass. Next, let’s look at how cortisol affects Fat Mass.

In 2000, University of California’s Health Psychology Program conducted a study designed to assess whether women with central fat distribution displayed consistently heightened cortisol reactivity when presented with nerve-racking situations.

What the study concluded was that stress-induced cortisol secretion could contribute to an increase in Fat Mass. Interestingly, when comparing subjects with greater fat content vs. leaner subjects, they found that the leaner subjects were more at risk than the subjects with greater body fat percentages.

The implication of this study suggests a fat gain positive feedback loop could occur if left unchecked: more stress -> more cortisol ->more body fat -> more stress

This is where the danger starts to become apparent. It’s not that it hinders one specific aspect of your overall fitness development– it impacts every aspect of it. Building muscle and losing fat becomes harder while under stress while gaining fat becomes easier than ever before. It’s clear that feeling stressed out can have a serious effect on your body and fitness level.

And that’s not the worst of it. Sure, there’s plenty of data that shows how stress makes it harder to reduce body fat and limit the benefits of exercise. But there’s just as much concern in the fitness community that elevated levels can derail one of the most important factors to achieving a healthier body: your diet and sleep.

How Stress Can Derail Your Diet and Sleep

Keep in mind that achieving a healthy body composition is more than just building muscle and losing fat.

Maintaining a proper diet and getting enough sleep every night are necessities if you expect to make meaningful progress but that it can be difficult if you suffer from chronic stress.

A study conducted in 2016 by the Health Care Department or the Metropolitan Autonomous University was designed to observe whether there is a relationship between obesity, depression and emotional eating. Depressive symptoms have often been associated with obesity, and the study ventured to see how anxiety and depression can trigger emotional eating and subsequent weight gain.

Emotional eating occurs when people eat to deal with stressors – often overeating high-calorie sweet or fatty food. After examining the results of over 1,000 subjects and their emotional eating habits, the data suggested that depression-related emotional overeating can have a statistically significant impact on obesity and that emotion management may prove effective in obesity prevention.

Stress is hard enough to handle in small doses, but chronic stress can have complex, detrimental effects on your emotional health (which in turn, ends up impacting your overall health). While the benefits of maintaining good nutrition and managing your calories are well established, it is becoming clear that how you address the triggers of stress is just as important when you are constructing your diet plan.

But stress can impact not only your diet but your sleep. The average adult barely gets enough sleep as it is, with about a third of adults reporting less than 6 hours of sleep every night. Chronic stress can make it harder to fall asleep, resulting in an endless cycle.

Consider the findings of a study conducted in 1997 by the University of Chicago’s Department of Medicine. The expressed purpose of the study was to determine the relationship between sleep loss and cortisol levels.

Long story short, the study concluded that when your body doesn’t get enough sleep, your cortisol levels can rise anywhere from 37-45%, which according to researchers can “accelerate the development of metabolic and cognitive consequences of glucocorticoid excess.”

Translation? The increased cortisol levels can seriously threaten your muscle development (never mind the reduced GH and testosterone levels caused by your lack of sleep) and make it that much harder to reach your fitness goals. Even partial sleep loss is enough to raise your cortisol levels and bring on the entire host of problems that come along with it.

Understanding and Managing Stress

When you embark on your fitness journey to improve your health, there are so many different factors that come into play you might start to feel overwhelmed, especially when it seems like you aren’t making any progress.

Ironically, worrying that you aren’t making any progress may reduce/limit any positive benefits that you get from exercise.

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools you can utilize. Making sure you get enough sleep is crucial to managing for both your stress levels and mental health. Research has shown that mindfulness practices like meditation, pilates and yoga can help lower stress, along with other positive benefits.

The key to stress management is to make sure you have something positive that you can turn to in your time of need. Because if you don’t have a plan, stress can cause health problems and end up as one of the biggest barriers between you and your fitness goals.

The fact that chronically elevated stress levels have a negative effect on the humans is hardly a revelation these days – symptoms ranging from a depressed emotional state to compromised immune system has been well-established. The more we study stress and try to understand how it specifically affects the human body, the more we realize that it might be one of the underlying issues holding us back in the pursuit of a healthier, happier life.

Don’t let stress hold you back!

Contact My Body Composition Solutions for an analysis of your composition and more information.

Disclaimer: This article should not substitute professional medical advice. When starting a new diet or exercise plan, always consult your physician and exercise professional first.

Information in this article has been extracted and edited from InBody USA ‘Can Stress Hurt Your Fitness?” originally published on October 12, 2016 and updated on November 21, 2018, for accuracy and comprehensiveness. It was written by Brian Leguizamon, a content marketing specialist. Brian has worked with Shopify, Gigster and a bunch of start-ups you’ve never heard of. 

 This article includes words and phrases that link to several other information resources.

Many tend to assume that body fat is either good or bad for you. But it’s more complex than that.

While research supports the idea that people with high body fat levels are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome, body fat levels that are too low are not necessarily good for you either.  The reality is that there’s more to body fat than meets the eye.

Essential vs. Storage Fat: What’s the Difference?

To start, there are two main types of body fat: essential fat and storage fat.

As its name implies, essential fat plays a critical role in your overall health and cellular processes.  In Exercise Physiology: Nutrition, Energy, and Human Performance, essential fat is described as,“…the fat in heart, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, intestines, muscles, and lipid-rich tissue of the central nervous system and bone marrow.”

As metabolic fuel, essential fat makes sure that you have sufficient energy reserves and it helps conserve body heat when needed. It also protects your internal organs and joints from injury, acting as a soft, fluffy cushion.

As chemical messengers, they help ensure that bodily processes like metabolism, growth, and immune functions are going as smoothly as planned. Finally, essential fat plays an important role in a woman’s reproductive abilities.

Normal bodily functions will go haywire if essential fat falls below the recommended minimum level of 5% in men and below 15% in women. Women have high essential body fat ranges as a result of childbearing and reproductive needs.

Meanwhile, nonessential or storage fat is accumulated body fat for energy reserves. This is the fat that you notice in your body.

What is Body Fat Percentage?

Put simply, body fat % is the amount of fat you have in your body, excluding your fat-free mass (or lean body mass). Your fat-free mass is made up of your bones, organs, muscles, and body water.

Your body fat percentage (also known as percent body fat) reflects how much of your weight is made up of body fat. It is calculated by dividing the weight of your body fat mass by your total weight. Currently, there is no official standard for acceptable body fat percentage values.

At InBody USA, we recommend a body fat percentage range of 10-20 percent for males and 18-28 percent for women.

How Certain Body Fat Percentages Look in Men and Women

Before we go through the pitfalls of dangerously low body fat, let’s take a look at the following five body fat percentage ranges in both men and women.

Excessive: >25% (Men); >32% (Women)

Excess fat will be present in the entire body — often concentrated in the abdominal area, thighs, and hips. 

Individuals within this range of body fat percentage have an increased risk of metabolic or cardiovascular disease. Obesity is also linked to poor self-esteem as well as low energy levels.

Overfat: 20-25% (Men); 28-32% (Women)

Men and women who fall in this body fat percentage range may not have as much excess body weight as those in the previous category but still have excess body fat.

While it is true that some people in the overfat category will be overweight, it’s also possible to have a normal or average body weight but have too much body fat. This is also known as sarcopenic obesity or skinny fat.

Like their obese counterparts, possible issues include low energy levels, higher risk of metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease, poor self-esteem due to physical appearance, and a shortened life expectancy.

People who are skinny fat are also particularly vulnerable to health problems because they have similar body compositions as people who are overweight, but may have very few visual indicators that can warn them of their health risks.

Average Fitness: 15-20% (Men); 23-28% (Women)

Men in this body fat percentage category are often described as moderately lean and fit. While muscle definition may not be obvious, outlines and striations may slightly appear.  A bit of vascularity may be present in the arms.

For women, this category is neither slim nor overweight. With more body fat around the thighs and buttocks, curves will begin to form in the hips.

Both men and women may have some muscular definition but it may take on a softer appearance. Off-season athletes typically fall in this category. People in this category typically enjoy high energy levels, better sleep, and good overall health. They may also look good in tight fitting clothes which in turn leads to better self-esteem. Health issues due to excess body fat are less likely to develop over time.

Athletic Fitness: 10-15% (Men); 18-23% (Women)

Men and women who fall in this body fat percentage category have the classic beach body look. They are lean, muscular, and clearly fit. There is little fat to pinch and muscle definition is particularly obvious in the shoulders, arms, and abs. Professional athletes may fall into this category.

Vascularity may appear in the arms but it may not as pronounced in the legs among men. Women with this body fat percentage may have fat in the arms and legs but it’s not as obvious than those with higher body fat percentages.

Besides looking really fit, individuals with this body fat percentage tend to enjoy excellent overall health and well-being. They also experience less cravings due to regular physical activity and strict adherence to a diet that works for them.

Exceptional Fitness /Bodybuilder Range: 3-10% (Men); 12-18% (Women)

This body fat percentage category often includes bodybuilding competitors and fitness models.

Muscle definition tends to be high in both men and women and there is very little fat. Bodybuilders, for instance, may aim for the extreme low end of this range on cycles when they are competing because in order to have a competitive look, they require next to no body fat.

This is an incredibly difficult body composition to maintain consistently over time, especially at the lower end of this range.

Throw into the above numbers, other factors like age and actual fat layout or distribution across the body, and you can see why it can become such a confusing topic.

Health Risks and Dangers of Low Body Fat in Adult Men and Women

Men who have less than 6 percent body fat and women with less than 16 percent body fat are considered too low. They are typically bodybuilders in contest training or fitness models on the day of their photoshoot. These individuals have gone to great lengths such as going on a strict diet and exercise regimen for weeks.

You might be thinking that these body fat percentage ranges are actually healthy because they are still above the essential fat values. 

But, not so fast.

In a 12-month case study conducted by the International Journal of Sports Physiological Performance, researchers tracked the body composition and physical state of a male competitive bodybuilder whose body fat percentage was around 4.5 percent for competition.

Researchers indicated that several negative outcomes consistent with overtraining, such as decreases in physical performance and reduction in immune system function, had occurred.

A more recent investigation showed that in order to achieve these extremely low body fat levels, these athletes had to rely on steroids and other drugs to help them achieve their goals, common practices within the field of bodybuilding/figure competition. What is now becoming clear is that these practices, while useful for helping attain the desired look, are associated with significantly greater risk of heart disease and liver dysfunction.

These athletes went on to explain that these negative physiological changes are unfortunate, but necessary, repercussions of competitive bodybuilding.

Female bodybuilders, on the other hand, experience an additional side effect of having an extremely low body fat percentage — the temporary stop of menstruation or amenorrhea. It forms one part of a condition known as the Female Athlete Triad.

Additionally, competitive female bodybuilders have been shown to share the same eating-related habits as those with bulimia. They may shun social events that involve dining out and may not have the time for other activities. Female bodybuilders may also experience other reproductive and fertility issues.

Bodybuilders’ Bodies Are Not Ideal

Despite their impressive physical appearances, bodybuilders do not have an ideal body composition.

Their sports demand they put their body through stress to the point where normal biological functions become impaired. Therefore, looking like a bodybuilder should not be a goal (unless you’re a bodybuilder).

Can Low Body Fat Improve Sports Performance?

While low levels of body fat seem to be associated with improved sports performance, body composition alone is not a great predictor of athletic success. There is little evidence for any health benefit when men drop under 8 percent in body fat and when women drop under 14 percent body fat.

Additionally, trying to achieve a body fat percentage that is similar to professional bodybuilding goals can lead to a slew of health issues and complications like impaired body thermoregulation, increased risk of injury, fatigue, loss of muscle tissue, and suboptimal body performance.

The Takeaway: Going Beyond Body Fat Percentage

Although your body fat percentage is a significant and useful metric, relying on it alone will not provide you with solutions or answers that can improve your overall health and fitness.

You will need more specific values than your body fat percentage and weight such as your skeletal muscle mass, visceral fat, and even segmental lean analysis. This will not only help you maintain a healthy body fat percentage in respect to a healthy weight,  but it can also help you figure out if you have muscle imbalances, reduced muscle mass, or are not eating enough.

Your body is a very complex system of specific components working together. Think of body fat percentage as merely a single tree in a large forest. It’s important to get as much information as possible about the health of the entire forest and not just for one specific tree.

By completing regular body composition analysis you will not only have a much better understanding of this, but it is a method by which you can track your progress if improvement is your goal.

Contact My Body Composition Solutions for more information.

Disclaimer: This article should not substitute professional medical advice. When starting a new diet or exercise plan, always consult your physician and exercise professional first.

Information in this article has been extracted and edited from InBody USA ‘Is It Healthy to Have a Low Body Fat Percentage?”

published on August 9, 2018 and written by Kyjean Tomboc, a nurse turned freelance healthcare copywriter and UX researcher.

 This article includes words and phrases that link to several other information resources.

You probably don’t think about your body composition when you’re thinking about your metabolism. But you should.

You probably think about it in terms of speed: “My metabolism is fast” or “my metabolism is slowing down.” 

People are naturally afraid of their metabolism slowing and the weight gain they know comes with it. To some extent, those worries are well-founded.

Metabolism is linked with weight gain and loss because of its a biological process involved with energy and calories.  

A well rounded and accepted definition of metabolism is: the process by which your body converts what you eat and drink into energy. During this complex biochemical process, calories in food and beverages are combined with oxygen to release the energy your body needs to function. 

Notice how it doesn’t mention anything about the speed you process your food. That would be digestion.

In medical terminology, metabolism Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), which is the minimum number of calories your body needs to perform basic bodily functions. This includes all the involuntary processes in your body such as breathing, digesting food, pumping blood, brain activity. BMR is usually expressed in terms of calories. Your Basal Metabolic Rate also has another interesting quality: the more Lean Body Mass (which includes muscle, water, and minerals) you have, the greater your BMR will be.

When we talk about metabolism, we should always start the conversation with how many calories your body needs. But because your BMR and Lean Body Mass are linked, that means any conversation about metabolism becomes a conversation about your body composition.

Your BMR is calculated when you have an InBody composition analysis. Having this available to you is a valuable tool when monitoring your body’s overall health changes. 

Metabolism 101

Let’s take a deeper look at what you might call a “slow” metabolism. Far from being an issue of fastness or slowness, weight gain is almost always the result of a caloric imbalance that goes unchecked over a long period of time.

To clarify, your Basal Metabolic Rate is not the only factor that plays into your overall caloric needs, and it’s not the total amount of calories you need in a day. There are two other major influencers, which are:

• Your energy level–how active you are 
• The thermic effect of food–the energy your body uses to digest your food

These taken together with your Basal Metabolic Rate provide your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). This is the number of calories your body burns in a day.

BMR is a necessary piece of information to estimate TDEE. Although they’re not exact, there are multiplication factors for estimating your TDEE based on your activity level and BMR. These are based on multiplying your BMR with an activity factor–a number between 1 and 2–that increases the more active you are (and decreases when you are less active, regardless of your appetite).

The table below gives you multiplication factors to apply to your BMR to establish your TDEE. Using this information will assist in determining how many calories are required to maintain your current body weight.

In our previous example, the person has a BMR of 1437. They consider themselves to be moderately active. Therefore, their TDEE is 2227 calories. If weight loss is their goal, they work on fewer calories, if weight gain is what they’re after, then a surplus of calories will be required.

As with any dietary plan, you will expect to see changes over time.  All this hard work has to produce results, right? So, how long will it take to see results? Unfortunately, that is going to vary for each individual. A good rule of thumb is to weigh yourself every 1 – 2 weeks.  If you are looking for a more precise analysis, you should get your body composition measured as well. Another important factor to consider: your BMR. Since your BMR is closely linked to your lean body mass, any changes will affect the number of calories you burn.

For example, if your plan is to gain lean body mass, and over a period of time you are successful in doing so, your energy needs are going to increase. This is why it is so important to be measuring body composition.

A diet is much more than creating a calorie deficit. It’s important to use a BMR calculator or body composition analyser to understand how much energy your body needs. Without this information, you won’t know how much food you need to add or remove to your diet in order to achieve your goals. With this information, you’ll see quicker results and reach your goals faster.

Improving and Increasing Your Metabolism

With the correct exercise and dietary plan, you can make your metabolism work for you. It all goes back to improving and maintaining a healthy body composition.

Because your body needs more energy to support itself when it has more Lean Body Mass, working to increase your Lean Body Mass can actually increase your Basal Metabolic Rate, which can have a huge impact on your TDEE once you factor in your activity level.

Many people simply maintain their metabolism or avoid a “slowdown” (which as we’ve seen, is a myth right up there with muscle turning into fat) is an important goal. How can you be sure to stay away from creating a decrease in your metabolism?

In short: by maintaining the Lean Body Mass that you already have. That means maintaining your Skeletal Muscle Mass.

Your Skeletal Muscle Mass isn’t the same as your Lean Body Mass, but it is the overall biggest contributor to it. It’s the muscle that you can actually grow and develop through exercise, and increases/decreases in SMM have a strong influence on increases/decreases in Lean Body Mass.

Skeletal Muscle Mass is best developed through strength training and resistance exercise along with a proper diet. A regular exercise plan that includes strength training and resistance exercise will help you maintain your Skeletal Muscle Mass.

This can be especially important as you age. As people become older and busier, activity levels tend to drop and a proper diet can become harder to maintain as responsibilities increase. Poor diet and nutrition can lead to loss of Lean Body Mass over time, which leads to a decrease in overall metabolism–not a slowdown.

So what can be done to improve and increase your metabolic rate? Just like with most things in life, the key is finding your body’s perfect balance. 

Balance Your Diet And Boost Your Metabolism – The Truth About Metabolic Flexibility

At times, a well-intentioned and thoughtful dietary plan doesn’t match the metabolism of the person practicing it. Even though someone may be led to believe that 1,800 calories is right for his or her diet regimen based on age and gender, our metabolisms might not require that caloric intake, ultimately resulting in weight gain despite our well-intended efforts. 

In the end, most individuals will end up blaming their issues with weight loss on a “slowing metabolism,” illustrating the importance of understanding how the relationship between a balanced diet and body composition can actually lead to a boosted metabolism. 

Contradicting health articles do not help the confusion. They preach that carbs should be eaten before you work out, as they will improve your performance. They also say to eat more fats like peanut butter or avocados. Others say that if you don’t eat at all, your body will burn more calories, and you should instead refuel with carbs or recover with protein to build muscle. Is your head spinning yet?

You’re not alone if you ever feel like every health article you see contradicts the one you saw the day before.

This is where the perpetual carbs-versus-fats debate comes into play. Everyone’s quick to tell you about their success with the Keto diet or how more balanced macros improved their performance in the gym.

In reality, there’s no perfect diet. Everyone’s preferred macronutrient ratio and calorie intake depend on their unique resting metabolic rate, activity level, food sensitivities, and more. But there is one thing everyone can count on: 

Your body will – or should – use what you give it.

What is Metabolic Flexibility?

If you eat a lot of fats, fat will be your body’s primary source of fuel. If you eat a lot of carbohydrates, glucose will be your body’s primary source of fuel. If you eat more protein than anything else – you guessed it – your body will burn more protein for energy.

Metabolic flexibility is your body’s ability to adapt to metabolic demands. When things change – such as changing what time you eat breakfast or what you eat for breakfast – your body is forced to change the way it metabolizes your food.

When you eat, your food is either burned for energy or stored if what you ate was in excess of your energy needs. Any excess carbohydrates are stored as glycogen(which serves as quick energy reserves) or fat tissue if glycogen stores are full. Any extra fat is also put away for later use, as fat tissue.

How flexible your metabolism refers to how efficiently your body can switch between using carbs or fats for fuel – or, more importantly – how efficiently it can use what is already available.

Someone with great metabolic flexibility can burn carbs when they eat them. They can also burn fat when they eat it, or when they don’t eat at all. People with flexible metabolisms can “flex” between carbohydrate metabolism and fat oxidation relatively easily.

For example, a person with great metabolic flexibility does cardio in the morning on an empty stomach. Because their metabolism is highly flexible, their body powers through the workout on fat tissue that already exists. The same person, however, could eat oatmeal and a banana an hour or two before their workout and instead use those carbs as fuel (instead of storing them for later use).

A flexible metabolism gives your body more leeway when determining what fuel source to use. Take the example of the person doing fasted cardio in the previous section. If that person was metabolically inflexible and exercised on an empty stomach, he or she would first burn through the glycogen (stored carbohydrates) in their body – leaving the fat untouched.

This is why it’s so hard for many people to burn fat: They are metabolically inflexible.

If you’re very metabolically flexible, eating calorie-dense, sugar-laden, or very fatty foods from time to time won’t always be an issue for your body. Your body can convert those calories into energy without much negative aftermath. 

Those who are metabolically flexible carry more mitochondria in their muscles, which allows them to produce energy more efficiently. Having too few mitochondria, or having dysfunctional mitochondria, limits the amount of energy a person can produce. It makes switching between fuels difficult, which makes utilizing any stored body fat between meals almost impossible. This is why metabolically inflexible people tend to snack often.

Training Your Metabolism to be More Flexible

The key to understanding metabolic flexibility is understanding how insulin regulates our energy. A healthy person with normal insulin action can effectively switch between fats and carbs as fuel. An insulin-resistant person cannot do this as effectively.

Insulin is the hormone that regulates your blood sugar by taking glucose into your bloodstream. There are two primary states of being as it relates to a person’s metabolism: fed and fasting.

During fed conditions (e.g., having just eaten,) your insulin levels will be high due to incoming food. During fasting conditions, someone who is very metabolically flexible will easily be able to tap into stored body fat. The workings of insulin are vast, and you can learn more here, but these points are essential to understanding metabolic flexibility:

• All of the food you eat, regardless of its macronutrient composition, sparks the release of insulin.
• Insulin is a factor in deciding which fuel source your body uses.
• When insulin levels are low, your body primarily burns fat.
• When insulin levels are high, your body primarily burns carbs and stores fat.

One of the best–and easiest–ways to improve your metabolic flexibility is to exercise. If you’re generally sedentary, adding exercise to your days is a surefire way to kick your body into a fat-burning mode it’s never experienced before. If you already exercise regularly, add more variety to your workouts.

Varying the type of training you do (strength training, intervals, and some sort of aerobic or endurance activity) might just give your body the nudge it needs to tap into your fat reserves. Different types of exercise use different mixes of fuel and eventually may train your body to use different fuel sources during day-to-day activities.

Fasted cardio is one type of exercise intended to tap heavily into your body’s fat reserves. Doing high-intensity cardiovascular exercise with little to no glycogen stored can train your metabolism to be more flexible.

Another way to improve your metabolic flexibility is intermittent fasting (IF). Remember the person who used body fat as fuel during their morning fasted cardio? That worked because his or her body was trained to use the available energy in the absence of food.

Metabolically inflexible people would just feel atrocious in the same scenario because their bodies don’t know how to function without incoming energy (food). If you can’t make it more than two-to-three hours without food, you’re impairing your body’s ability to utilize your body fat. Work slowly to increase your spacing between meals.

Timing your nutrient intake can help your body use fat more efficiently, and the longer the fasting period, the more your body has to tap into its fat reserves, which may be one way to combat obesity.

You should also test out different macronutrient ratios. The fewer carbohydrates you consume, the more your body will have to rely on fat sources for fuel. This is the premise behind the ketogenic diet. Try cutting out added sugars and overly processed grains first. Then you can try reducing your carb intake even further by cutting out starches like potatoes. If keto’s not for you, try out the paleo diet, which is also low in carbs and higher in fat and protein.

While it’s encouraged to consume fats, avoid trans fats and too many saturated fats. Try to get your fats from nutrient-dense sources like olive and coconut oils, avocados, nuts, seeds, and fatty fish. Another good source is foods containing high antioxidants. Antioxidant consumption has been linked to a reduced risk of metabolic syndrome, as well as an increase in insulin sensitivity. 

Wrapping Up

The link between our metabolism and body composition is strong, and it prompts many questions. How much Lean Body Mass do you have? What might your Basal Metabolic Rate be? What are the benefits of hot and cold exposure when it comes to your metabolism? These questions should be answered first before starting any weight loss or diet program. Getting the information you need and the answers to these questions by getting your body composition accurately tested is a great first step in your journey.

Contact My Body Composition Solutions for information regarding regular analysis to assist with monitoring your BMR.

Disclaimer: This article should not substitute professional medical advice. When starting a new diet or exercise plan, always consult your physician and exercise professional first.

Information in this article has been extracted and edited from InBody USA ‘Metabolism 101- A Look Inside Your Body’s Energy Engine”

published on March 18, 2020. This article includes phrases that link to several other information resources.

  (1) Source: InBody USA article ‘How to Use BMR To Hack Your Diet’ 15/03/2018

When someone wants to lose excess weight, the first thing they do—or the first thing they’re told to do by their friend who acts as their personal trainer —is to adopt a low-carb diet. This can definitely lead to fat loss but cutting carbs shouldn’t be a hard and fast rule in body composition, especially when it comes to gaining muscle.

Carbs usually aren’t restricted if muscle growth is the goal. It seems like weightlifters and athletes know some things about carbohydrates that the general public doesn’t: carbs aren’t the enemy to achieving your body composition goals.

Like a lot of things in life, there are carbs that will help you reach those goals and carbs that will prevent you from reaching those goals. Out of all of the types of carbs, complex carbohydrates play a largely important role in building muscle mass.

Carbohydrates and Building Muscle Mass

Think about it: building anything takes a lot of time, energy and resources. Building muscle is no different. The body requires a lot of energy to power through workouts that result in bigger, stronger muscles. Where does the body get most of that energy? Usually from carbs.

Energy from Complex Carbohydrates

Out of all the energy sources for the human body, researchers have found that carbohydrates are the main source of energy in the human diet. This means that carbs aren’t just for athletes. Carbs are a great source of energy for anyone’s daily activities, including exercise.

You can think of carbohydrates as a source of fuel for the body, otherwise known as calories. As you’ve probably heard, there are two types of carbohydrates: simple carbs and complex carbs. 

What are simple carbohydrates?

Basically, simple carbohydrates are sugars, all those lovely substances that have the kids bouncing off the walls and you wondering why the scales continue to lie about your real weight.

Raw sugars, brown sugars, glucose, fructose, sucrose; all simple carbs and an extra kilo of weight in the making.

If you want to cut simple carbs out of your life, stay right away from sodas, baked treats and cookies, fruit juice concentrates and pretty much all breakfast cereals.

What are complex carbohydrates?

Your average complex carb comes in one of two forms: fibre or starch.

Fibre is great because it helps to keep our digestion working as it should so we stay regular. Fibre also helps to control cholesterol.

Where will you find complex carb fibre? In fruit, vegetables, beans, nuts, and whole grains. (1)

If you’ve ever heard of an athlete eat candy before a game or training session, that’s because simple carbs, like white sugar, are one of the fastest ways to spike energy. However, this energy kick cannot be maintained for long. Complex carbs may not be as readily available for immediate energy as simple carbs are, but they’re more efficient and healthier. Complex carbs provide sustainable energy, which means the energy is constant and there’s no “crash” like with simple carbs. 

One of the main reasons why complex carbs sustain energy throughout the day is because they take longer to digest. Simple carbs like fruit are easy for the body to break down and get rapidly digested, so they don’t provide energy for a long period of time. Complex carbs like starches are slow to digest and therefore slowly provide calories, giving you continuous energy for a longer period of time. 

Because of their slow-release properties, complex carbs should be the largest component of daily energy intake.

Isn’t Protein More Important Than Carbs for Building Muscle?

When you think of building muscle, you may think of a high-protein diet. Protein is extremely important in building muscle because the amino acids (the building blocks of protein) help repair and maintain muscle tissue. Essentially, protein helps you recover from workouts because muscles slightly tear during exercise.

If protein is so important, why put an emphasis on carbs? Well, complex carbohydrates don’t get enough credit when it comes to the important roles they play in muscle gains.

Some of the ways that complex carbs help to build muscle include:

1. Carbs help regulate muscle glycogen repletion

You may have heard of glycogen stores before. Glycogen is a form of glucose that is stored for later use. When the body needs energy, glycogen kicks into gear and acts as a ready fuel source. 

Carbohydrates and glycogen go hand in hand because carbs are stored as glycogen. When carbs are low, glycogen stores are low. When carbs are consumed, glycogen stores are full.

Since glycogen is used for energy, it’s important to replenish those stores. This is why researchers recommend to consume carbohydrates immediately following exercise; it replenishes glycogen stores for future use.

2. Carbs prevent muscle degradation

One concern about low-carb diets is muscle loss.

A Netherlands study compared a low-carb diet to other diets and found that restricting carbs results in protein loss. This is because restricting carbs causes an increase in the amount of nitrogen that get excreted by the body. Nitrogen is a component of amino acids (the stuff that forms muscle proteins), therefore nitrogen loss indicates that the muscles are breaking down.

3. Carbs help muscles recover from exercise

The role that carbs play in recovery goes back to glycogen stores. Immediately after exercise, athletes need to replenish their glycogen stores in order to prevent glycogen depletion.

Glycogen depletion, when glycogen stores have run out, causes gluconeogenesis. This is when the body forms glucose from new sources to compensate for the lack of glucose from carbohydrates. When this happens, the body turns to sources like fat and protein to fill this need. Protein acts as the last line of defense when energy is required, meaning that energy accessibility is running very low. 

When the body breaks down protein to make more glucose, it takes from the muscle, causing them to waste away. 

Gluconeogenesis is more common in carbohydrate-free diets, so be sure to consume healthy carbs to prevent this. 

Replenishing glycogen stores with complex carbs is important to prevent protein breakdown and muscle wasting.

Why Athletes Consume a Lot of Carbs

There are many reasons why athletes don’t adopt low-carb or carb-free diets. They know those good carbs are a necessary nutrient to help them power through training sessions, resulting in muscle maintenance and growth.

Some of the reasons why athletes consume a fair amount of carbs include:

1. Carbs prevent muscle weakness

By now, you understand the importance of glycogen stores. Some glycogen is even stored in our muscles. 

When you use those muscles during exercise, you tap into the glycogen stores in that particular muscle. When you lift weights with your arms, for example, you’re accessing the glycogen in your biceps.

Some athletes take advantage of glycogen by loading up on carbohydrates (by consuming carbs a day or more before a workout) to maximize the muscle glycogen stores. This can delay fatigue and even improve athletic performance, making for a better workout and stronger muscles.

2. Carbs improve athletic performance

Out of the three macronutrients, carbs are the most efficiently metabolized. 

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the Dietitians of Canada, and the American College of Sports all share the position that high carbohydrate availability is associated with improving performance during high-intensity exercise. 

Why? Because carbohydrates are the only macronutrient that can be broken down quickly enough to provide sustained energy during high-intensity training. 

Both carbohydrates and protein will both provide 4 calories per gram. But it is much easier for your body to digest and use the calories from a gram of carbohydrate than it is a gram of protein. 

Research has shown the link between nutrition and athletic performance is greater than initially believed.

3. Carbs repair muscles

During exercise, muscles slightly tear. Muscles feel sore after intense exercise because of this minor damage that allowed the muscles to exert more force than during regular activity.

After exercise or during rest, the muscles need to be repaired and rebuilt. Just like for building muscle, protein and glycogen is needed for that muscle repair. 

The importance of glycogen for muscles can’t be over-emphasized, and in order to maintain glycogen stores, carbohydrates are needed.

What Happens to Muscle When Carbs are Low

With the popularity of low-carb diets, it’s important to discuss the major concern that muscle mass is at risk of deterioration when carbs are low. 

Now that we know how important carbs are to build muscle, let’s discuss some of the possibilities when carbs are restricted.

Muscle is Broken Down For Fuel

The body looks to complex carbs as its main energy source. When carbs aren’t available, the body breaks down protein, i.e muscle, for fuel. 

Carbohydrates are stored as glycogen, which is a readily available source of energy for when it’s needed. Dietary protein, however, isn’t really meant to be stored in the body specifically as an energy source.

When the body breaks down muscle tissue for energy, it does so to access the amino acids (the building blocks of protein). The amino acids are then broken down into glucose and used for energy.

Carbs help to prevent this process encouraging protein sparing, which means they conserve muscle tissue by providing energy instead. When carbs are present, the body will use carbs first and foremost for energy. When carbs aren’t available, muscle gains that you have worked so hard to achieve can be lost.

Replenishing glycogen stores by consuming complex carbs prevents this muscle loss.

Decreased Athletic Performance

Decreased energy due to low-carb consumption may affect athletic performance. When glycogen stores are low, athletic performance is decreased.

Muscle strength can be compromised and fatigue increases when glycogen stores are low.

It’s widely accepted that athletic performance is somewhat dependent on carbohydrate consumption. Therefore, consuming carbs before the workout for energy and after to replenish glycogen stores are important contributors to improved exercise performance

Everyone knows that protein is important for building muscle, but without carbs, the gains just aren’t the same. Complex carbs are vital for sustained energy, athletic performance, and overall muscle building.

However, the type of carbs and when they’re consumed are also vital to experience these benefits.

When to Consume Complex Carbs for Muscle Building

The time of carb consumption also impacts athletic performance and muscle building. 

It’s important to consume complex carbs before an intense workout so that glycogen stores are full enough to fuel the training. Consuming complex carbs immediately before a workout could lead to digestive distress, so try to limit complex carb consumption to up to a few hours before an intense workout. If you’re short for energy before an event, lean towards simple carbs.

After exercise, it’s important to consume complex carbs to replenish those glycogen stores for later use.

Balancing Carb Consumption

The amount of complex carbs you eat depends on your body composition goals. Generally, very low carb consumption (<5%) is used for weight loss, while adequate carb consumption (55-60%) is used for muscle gain. 

Athletes may pile on the carbs as they are required to train day-in and day-out. So it makes sense that they should consume a higher carb diet than the average person because they have higher energy needs. For non-athletes, it’s generally suggested to adopt a more balanced diet. Even if you’re mostly sedentary, you should still consume some carbs to fuel your daily activities. 

If the goal is to build muscle, we now know to eat all three macronutrients, including a fair amount of carbs.

Take Away

You try to go to the gym most days, but then you decide to take a rest day.  Maybe a rest day turns into a few days off….and before you know it, three weeks have passed you by without one day of exercise.  Like many who take a workout break, you wonder: “Have I lost my muscles?” or “How long before I’m out of shape?”

There are lots of reasons to take a break from your workout routine — vacation, harsh weather, work demands, family obligations, etc.  Even the most dedicated fitness enthusiast may be forced to stop for a while due to sore muscles, illness, or injury.

You shouldn’t push yourself to work out every day without a break because your body needs rest and recovery days to repair muscle fibres and strengthen itself between workouts.  It’s a well-known fact that training recovery is a critical component of an exercise program, and for most people, this consists of one to three days of rest depending on intensity of the activity.

However, if you go beyond a week without activity, you begin to experience the effects of “detraining” (also called deconditioning), a phenomenon in which you lose the beneficial effects of training.  As opposed to rest and recovery, detraining is an extended rest interval that results in reduced physical fitness. 

The good news is that deconditioning is reversible once you get active again. 

Factors that affect loss of fitness

The extent of fitness loss you experience depends on several variables. These include the length of your layoff, your age and your level of fitnss.

Time away from the gym

In general, just two weeks of detraining can lead to significant decline in physical fitness.  A study from the Journal of Applied Physiology concluded that just a fourteen-day break significantly reduces cardiovascular endurance, lean muscle mass, and insulin sensitivity.

What would happen if you took an even longer break from exercise – say, 2 months? One study found that 2 months of detraining in elite athletes resulted in unfavourable changes in body composition, impaired metabolic function, and development of cardiovascular risk factors.  Although the time it takes to lose fitness levels depends on how fit you are to begin with and how long you’ve been exercising, even the most religious gym-goers will experience loss of fitness after an extended hiatus.

Age

As people age, aerobic capacity, muscle quality, as well as agility naturally decline.  It is important to exercise and stay active as you get older to preserve functional fitness.  One study looked at the effects of detraining on elderly adults, both short and long term, and found that losses in fitness gains are compounded as you age.  It’s important to track how your body is changing as you age because the loss in muscle mass and strength can decline rapidly, and soon even daily life activities suddenly become more difficult.

Level of Fitness

The fitter you are, the longer it can take for your body to get out of shape.  For example, trained athletes tend to experience more gradual declines during detraining than your regular gym goer.  For someone who works out a few times a week and is “moderately fit”, it may take two to four weeks to see significant detraining effects.  Someone who is training more intensely will take longer to experience de-conditioning.

The physiological impacts on your body

When you stop exercising, many physiological changes occur.  You begin to lose the cardiovascular gains you’ve made, such as your heart’s ability to pump blood more efficiently, your body’s improved capability to use carbohydrates for fuel, and your muscles’ enhanced capacity to process oxygen.  Any improvements you’ve seen with your blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and blood sugar may diminish. You may experience some weight gain. If you’ve been strength training, the gains in muscle size, strength, and endurance you worked so hard for will taper off.

Aerobic Capacity

It is well known that working out is good for your heart – it becomes more efficient pumping blood, and as a result, getting oxygen to the rest of your body.  When you go a few weeks without physical activity, your heart not only begins losing its ability to handle extra blood flow, your body’s ability to effectively use oxygen, referred to as VO2 max, declines.

Research shows significant reductions in VO2 max within two to four weeks of detraining, which is attributed to decreased blood volume and cardiac output.  Another study found that most of the aerobic capacity gained through exercise over two to three months is lost within two to four weeks.

What does this mean for you?  After a few weeks of sitting around rather than being active, you’ll start losing your and cardio and find yourself out of breath after climbing that flight of stairs.

Muscle Strength

When you cease exercising, you will undoubtedly notice changes in your muscles.  They will become smaller and weaker. If you’ve been doing high intensity exercise or weight training, you’ll find a reduction in your muscular endurance.

A detraining period of 12 weeks results in decreased muscle mass and muscular strength, although the muscles can return to pretraining levels.  The good news is that retraining can occur more quickly as a result of a concept known as “muscle memory”.

While strength performance may be maintained for up to four weeks of detraining, power and endurance may decline significantly in this time period as found in one study.  In another study, postmenopausal women trained with resistance bands for twelve weeks and found a significant adverse effect on their muscle power during a four-week detraining period.

The bottom line? You may maintain your strength longer than power or endurance; however, after a month of sitting, you’ll find that carrying those groceries will be a bit more taxing and you’ll fatigue quicker than before.

Blood Pressure

Lowered blood pressure is a well-known benefit of regular exercise.  In fact, exercise is a medically accepted lifestyle change to treat hypertension.  A study that looked at the blood pressure responses in a group of prehypertensive men saw a decrease in blood pressure during a six-month period of training, and a rise in blood pressure after just two weeks of inactivity.

Of course, stopping your exercise routine does not mean you will have high blood pressure.  However, if you already have hypertension, it is important to realize you may need to consult with your doctor if you’ve been using exercise to lower your blood pressure and you anticipate a period without exercise.

Blood Sugar

Normally, your blood glucose rises after you eat, then drops as your muscles and other tissues absorb the sugar needed for energy.  Exercise is an effective way to lower blood glucose levels, but if you stop working out, your blood sugar levels may remain elevated after a meal.

Blood sugar levels have been found to have remained elevated after just 3 days of inactivity in young, generally healthy individuals. (1)  The unfortunate consequence of being sedentary is that consistently raised glucose levels raise your risk of heart disease and diabetes.

The upside? Even a small amount of moderate exercise improves how your body regulates glucose and getting back to your routine will help you ward off preventable health conditions.

Fat Mass

One fear you may have is that your clothes will begin to feel a bit tight as your weight creeps up and your body goes from being toned and firm to plumper and flabbier.  Detraining has been found to have negative effects on body composition, with an associated weight gain and a decrease in metabolic rate.

A few factors may contribute to an increase in your body fat when you stop working out: 

First, your calorie requirement will decrease.  As you lose muscle mass, your metabolism slows down as your muscles lose some of their ability to burn fat.

Secondly, you’re not burning the same number of calories as you used to because you’re moving around and working out less, so if you don’t adjust your food intake accordingly, those additional calories will be stored as fat. Something you should be wary of is visceral fat aka belly fat. 

So, if you eat the same way you’ve been eating while you’re on a workout hiatus, your body won’t be burning the extra calories without an adjustment to your diet– and you will likely put on weight.

 How to Manage a Detraining Period

The best way to stop fitness losses is to not abandon exercise in the first place.  That doesn’t mean you should never skip a workout. Honour your body with needed rest and recovery.  If you train hard, taking a break will help improve your muscle development and aerobic fitness and help you avoid overtraining syndrome.

But if you’re injured or very ill, you absolutely should rest.  Life can get in the way of your normal fitness routine, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. Take time to rest and recover and get back on it when you’re feeling better. 

Here are some tips to help minimize the negative consequences of abandoning your workout schedule if you aren’t forced to completely stop exercising for an extended time:

Crosstrain or try “light” activity that’s not part of your usual regimen, such as yoga, walking, or bike rides.

Try a chair workout or add stairs to your daily routine.

Scale back your workout schedule if time is the issue.  Try just 1-2 sessions per week, break your workout into several shorter sessions, or incorporate a few sessions of high-intensity interval training.

Try working unaffected muscle groups if you’ve stopped exercising due to an injury such as a broken bone or ruptured tendon.

Maintain good nutrition while consuming adequate protein to minimize muscle loss.

Regaining fitness after a break

While it’s hard to predict exactly how long it will take you to regain your previous level of fitness, it probably won’t take as long to retrain to your peak condition as it did to become fit in the first place. Just don’t start adopting a sedentary lifestyle. 

Keeping track of your progress is a pretty vital part of your self motivation. Having a Body Composition Analysis when your ready to return is the best way of establishing a ‘line in the sand’ for your own comparison. Whether you’ve had them in the past or not is irrelevant. This is about seeing your progress from this point in time.

                                                 Contact My Body Composition Solutions for more information.

Disclaimer: This article should not substitute professional medical advice. When starting a new diet or exercise plan, always consult your physician and exercise professional first.

Information in this article has been extracted and edited from InBody USA ‘What happens to your body when you stop working out?’ byJennifer Boidy, RN is a freelance healthcare content writer from Manchester.

This post was updated on September 10, 2018, for accuracy and comprehensiveness. It was originally published on August 1, 2017.

  (1) According to a study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise

It’s a classic dilemma.

To maximize weight loss, you are tracking every calorie, substituting junk food with healthier alternatives, and cooking all of your meals at home. All of your hard work is paying off. As long as you stick to your plan and don’t cheat; the weight is just going to keeping coming off. You have already lost 10Kg and feel unstoppable!

That’s when life gets in the way.

Maybe it’s your birthday celebration. What would everyone think if you didn’t take a slice of your own birthday cake? Or your best friend is back in town and just wants to indulge for the entire day! Unfortunately, quinoa isn’t what your friend was craving for.

You’ve already made so much progress, so you think, “I can eat my cheat meals this weekend and splurge for a couple days and it won’t affect me that much right…”.

When Monday comes, you weigh yourself for your weekly weigh-in and you can’t believe it: you’ve gained 2Kg.

Two months to lose 5Kg and then one weekend to gain 2Kg. The daily morning workouts. Eating nothing but steam vegetables and skinless chicken breasts. And counting every calorie. Wasted.

First the bad news: no, your scale isn’t lying to you, you gained 2Kg. But the good news is it’s definitely not 2Kg of fat. Most likely it is nothing more than water weight.

But how do you know for sure?

Can I Gain Fat in One Day?

Let’s get one thing straight: you can’t gain a kilo of fat in a day, or even 2kg in one weekend. Biologically, it would be astounding if you did. You are very much aware of how difficult it is to lose fat quickly, but don’t laugh when I tell you, in theory, it is just as “difficult” to gain fat.

Fat gain or loss has a lot to do with your energy/caloric balance–how many calories you take in vs. how many calories you use during the day.  If you are using more energy than you take in, your body gets some energy it needs from your fat stores.  If you’re taking in more energy– eating beyond your body’s needs–then the opposite happens: you build fat stores.

A common theory in the health and fitness world is that there are around 3,500 calories stored in a pound of fat. The theory goes that if you reduce your daily caloric intake by 500 every day of the week, in 7 days you’ll lose ½ kg of fat.  Conversely, if you overeat by 500 calories a day, you can gain a ½ kg of fat in a week.

500 Calories x 7 Days = 3,500 calories/week or 1 lb/ week 

The point is it TAKES TIME to gain or lose fat.

Of course, it is much easier than you think to overeat 500 calories a day. A large blended coffee-flavoured drink once a day will do it.

In order to gain a ½ kg of fat, you would need to add about 500 calories a day on top of your normal diet, every day, for about 7 days.  This makes gaining any significant amount of fat from even the craziest all-out cheat days extremely unlikely.  

To gain 2 kg of fat in a day, you’d have to eat about 17,500 calories on top of your daily caloric limit. Not even Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson can consume that many calories!

What is Water Weight?

So, if that 2 kg of weight isn’t fat, then what is it? And how long is it going to stick around?  The answer involves your body’s favourite energy source: a molecule called glycogen.

Glycogen is an energy source that is produced primarily from carbohydrates.  Your body loves glycogen because it’s an easily accessible energy source that provides a lot of energy.

Glycogen also has an interesting attribute: it bonds really well with water.  In fact, for every gram of carbohydrate in your body, there are about 3 to 4 molecules of water bonded to it. This can cause some large increases in weight, but weight due to water, not fat. Depending on what kind of diet you were on, loading up on carbs on a cheat day can increase your weight noticeably.

If you were trying to lose fat, you likely were trying to cut carbohydrates out of your diet.  It’s a very popular technique, and diets structured around low carbohydrate and low caloric intake are about as basic a diet as they come.  The Mayo Clinic notes that a diet targeting low carbohydrate intake constitutes about 60-130 grams of carbs a day.  Some popular diets – such as the Atkins Diet – target extremely low levels of carbohydrates, as low as 18 grams a day.

If you’re consuming 60 grams of carbs a day, you’re holding onto approximately 210 grams of water. That’s about half a pound of water.

But if on a cheat day, you decide to eat and drink whatever you want and load up to 300 grams of carbohydrates (the average number of carbs eaten by men (1)), you would be retaining around 1kg of water. 

If you were on a 60 carbs/day diet, you could be 700 grams heavier already.  If you went up to 400 grams of carbs, you could add on almost 1.5kg of water.

However, glycogen is far from the only substance or factor that can cause your body to retain extra water.  Excess sodium (salt), something commonly found in your favourite cheat meals, can also cause your body to hold onto the water on top of the water held onto by your glycogen.  Once you factor in the effects of other things you ate and drank, your hormones, and your unique body composition, you can see why your weight can fluctuate so much.

Once you return back to eating a low carb, low sodium diet, your body will naturally shed the extra water weight you gained.

So, Can a Cheat Day Ruin My Body Composition?

A cheat day every once in a while will not erase weeks and months of hard workouts and careful calorie counting. You can’t put on kilos of fat over one weekend.

Changing your body composition and losing weight is a long-term process, but if you do it right, you’ll have long-term results.  Quick fixes and crash diets that focus on cutting out nearly all carbohydrates for a short period don’t actually achieve lasting results, and now that you understand a little about glycogen, you also understand why.

However, this doesn’t mean you can get carried away on cheat days.

It’s so easy for your cheat day to become a cheat weekend, and your cheat

weekend to suddenly become a cheat week. Before you know it, you are

back to your old eating habits. Try a cheat meal instead and make sure you

plan a workout before to rev your metabolism.

Your body will thank you the next day.

Bottom line: it’s OK to indulge once in a while!

Making cheat days a part of your routine makes it easier for you to manage them. Just make sure after you’ve had your fun, you get back on your fitness journey and keep working towards your goals.

Disclaimer: This article should not substitute professional medical advice. When starting a new diet or exercise plan, always consult your physician and exercise professional first.

Information in this article has been extracted and edited from InBody USA ‘Does a Cheat Day Undo a Week at the Gym?” updated

on September 17, 2018, for accuracy and comprehensiveness. It was originally published on February 17, 2016.

(1)  Source US department of agriculture