BUILDING AND MAINTAINING MUSCLE

Why is this such an important topic?

Regardless of your fitness goal, building and maintaining muscle needs to be a priority. Whether you’re trying to burn fat, get stronger, or just live freely and fully outside the gym, the amount of muscle on your body will play a key role in determining your success.

When it comes to weight loss, what most people are trying to achieve is to burn fat. The only way to do that is by putting your body in a caloric deficit, which means that you want to burn more calories than you consume. This is where building muscle comes into play. You see, the more lean muscle you have, the more calories you’ll burn, in turn making it easier to comfortably stay in a caloric deficit and burn excess body fat.

Obviously, if you’re looking to make strength gains, building and maintaining muscle is key. Even if performance isn’t a priority and all you’re focused on is health and longevity, muscle still matters.

Several studies have tied increases in muscle mass to all sorts of reduced risks for negative health outcomes in the long term. Simply put, you need muscle to live a long, free, full life.

ONE THING TO TRY THIS WEEK

We’ll dive a lot deeper into how you can effectively build and maintain lean muscle in blog posts throughout the rest of the month, but from a high level, it really just boils down to this:

Fuel your body with proper amounts of food (protein in particular), prioritize sleep, and regularly work resistance training into your weekly exercise routine.

This week, let’s start with the basics. Make sure to incorporate some resistance training at least three times this week. You can squat, deadlift, and press, or just follow our daily workout on the Sentry App to check off all the boxes.