Ladies, do you struggle to keep up with the demands of work, family and home? Then hear us out; you are not alone in this.
Women start to lose muscle mass with age, which gives birth to many health problems. Low muscle mass leads to metabolic disorders and joint problems like arthritis. It affects bone density, making you vulnerable to injuries and chronic illnesses.
According to research, women with low muscle mass are more vulnerable to developing sarcopenia in the future. Sarcopenia is a musculoskeletal disease characterized by low muscle mass and strength due to ageing or immobility.
That’s why building muscle mass is one of the keys to a healthier and more balanced life. Muscle mass plays an important role in everything from strengthening immunity to improving mental health.
Need more proof? Check out the research-based health benefits of muscle mass mentioned below. But first, let’s find out what it is and how women can gain muscle mass.
In this blog, we will explore the following:
What is Muscle Mass for Women?
Muscle mass means the amount of the body’s collective muscle tissue and is measured in kilograms or pounds.
Muscles are of three types:
- Skeletal muscles: exists throughout the body
- Smooth muscles: present in the internal organs
- Cardiac muscles: the muscle of the heart
Yet, the term muscle mass specifically refers to the skeletal muscle. These muscles play a crucial role in movement. Muscles are like engines and play a crucial role in fitness. When your body builds muscles, your resting metabolic rate increases, leading to changes in body composition.
This doesn’t mean you will see a drastic weight change. However, your body fat percentage will decrease, resulting in a more toned and leaner appearance.
Building muscle as a woman will improve insulin sensitivity, meaning your body will use glucose efficiently.
Difference Between Lean Body Mass and Muscle Mass
Muscle mass and lean body mass; these terms are often used interchangeably but they are different.
Muscle mass means the weight of your muscles only.
Meanwhile, lean body mass includes muscle mass along with the weight of all bones, organs, body water, and skin. Shortly, it’s everything excluding the body fat.
Top 9 Health Benefits of Muscle Mass for Women
Maintaining a healthy female muscle mass is important and will help you stay active and mobile.
According to Harvard Medical School, you start to lose 3% to 5% of muscle mass per decade after age 30. Women with lower muscle mass are more prone to getting sarcopenia, which leads to physical weakness and a higher risk of injuries.
But those having a good ratio of muscle mass will get the following benefits:
1. Muscles Support Your Joints
Muscles protect the joints from slipping on some invisible ice and lower the risk of injury as you can better support your body.
Strength training exercises for gaining muscles help improve your tendons and ligaments’ range of motion and mobility. Having strength and better coordination among your muscles means you will catch yourself instead of colliding with a random object or getting hurt.
As women age, they start to get joint pain, but the hormonal effect of building muscles can help them repair tissues and alleviate some of the pain.
2. Muscle Helps to Manage Blood Sugar
Blood sugar and insulin dysfunction lead to multiple issues like heart disease, cognitive problems, and even cancer.
In most cases, obesity and diabetes exist together. A sedentary lifestyle combined with a high-carb diet is often the main culprit behind these two diseases; let us tell you how. Skeletal muscle and liver store glucose as glycogen, but when you don’t exercise enough, you lose your ability to store carbs.
When there is no place to store carbs, blood sugar spikes, and the pancreas secretes insulin. Then, your body starts to store fat, which leads to obesity and type 2 diabetes. Exercise, especially training your body with weights, can help improve your ability to store carbs.
Having more muscles means having more storage space for glucose. The Takeaway? Strength training and building muscle mass help to manage blood sugar levels efficiently and improve insulin sensitivity.
3. Muscle Strengthen Bones
Strength training and weight-bearing exercises put temporary stress on your bones. Physical resistance or tension sends a message to bone-building cells to take action. Hence, those cells rebuild bones stronger.
Having strong bones in women means you can perform daily tasks like grocery shopping and dropping kids off at school more efficiently. Losing muscle means losing bone density, which will create difficulty in performing your routine tasks. That’s why having a good female muscle mass ratio is highly important to improve the quality of your life.
4. Helps Treat & Prevent Lower Back Pain
Lower back pain is the most common among all chronic pain problems. A study found that females have a higher prevalence of lower back pain (LBP) among all age groups as compared to males.
The good news? Strengthening your lower back and abdominal muscles can help reduce back pain’s severity. Maintaining a straight posture and strength training makes your muscles stronger. This also protects your spine from unnecessary load, reducing the incidence and severity of LBP.
5. Improve Mental Health
Every emotion has a relevant posture. When you feel down or depressed, you unconsciously drop your head down and slouch.
It also works the other way around, which means you can improve your emotional state by improving your posture. Improving your workstation’s ergonomics and staying attentive to your posture are two ways to improve, but building muscles in a balanced way also helps to tackle posture-related issues.
Research proves that resistance exercise training (RET) improves the symptoms of anxiety and boosts mood. So, no matter how busy you are, you must spare some time for regular exercise to boost your mood and mental health.
6. Helps in Weight Management
Muscles are more efficient in burning calories than fat. The more muscles you have, the easier it will be to maintain a healthy body weight. Being obese makes you vulnerable to getting lower limb joint pain.
While staying active and getting rid of extra pounds can help you delay age-related joint issues. Building muscles also helps to regulate fat-burning hormones like testosterone and growth hormone.
Remember, you might not notice significant changes on the weight scale after building muscle, but you will lose inches off of your waist and start to look leaner.
7. You More Self Confident
Ladies, let’s recall what makes us feel excited and happy. Trying a new outfit, accomplishing something significant in our career, and what about looking smarter and more energetic from the inside out? It’s a fantastic feeling. Building women’s muscle mass will directly impact your self-esteem because a strong body and mind often go hand in hand.
When we feel energetic and physically strong, we can better manage our family, relationship, job, and business. The confidence you get from looking fit is unmatchable.
A systematic review found a direct association between strength training and positive body image. 6
8. Slows Down the Ageing Process
Older adults’ ability to perform routine tasks declines with age. Especially females start to get joints and bone-related issues, which lead to poor quality of life.
Research states that resistance training twice a week improves psychological functioning, as well as physical and mental well-being.
An active lifestyle and resistance training can protect females against age-related cognitive decline.
9. Builds Strength & Stamina
Your strength and endurance increase when you consistently lift weights and increase your female muscle mass. Initially, you won’t see any prominent difference, but with time, you will notice significant changes while doing your routine tasks.
For example, carrying the heavy grocery weight and skipping up the stairs will become easier than before. But do you know how it happens? When you consistently lift weights or do exercise, your muscles, tendons, and ligaments gain strength. Also, your nervous system gets better at coordinating with different muscle groups, making your movement smooth and more fluid.
However, if you don’t intentionally work to improve your strength, you will become weaker with every passing year.
How Muscle Mass Shapes Women’s Health?
Three parameters can help us to get an idea about women’s health and fitness levels. These include:
- Body fat percentage
- Bone density
- Lean muscles
A body fat percentage of around 24% is considered suitable for females. Statistical parameters T and Z scores are used to measure a person’s bone density against their age standard. A T score of -1 to +1 is considered normal bone density.
Lean muscles refer to those muscles whose efficacy is not obstructed by fat. Having a good percentage of lean muscles means your body has an increased resting metabolic rate (RMR).
This allows you to eat healthy food without excessive weight fluctuation and makes you feel and look better overall.
What’s more? Losing fat and gaining muscle mass women gives you strength so you can do what you love without feeling tired or exhausted.
Besides, here’s how female muscle mass shapes her health and impacts her overall life:
1. Working Professionals
Working women have a lot on their plate and often develop a sedentary lifestyle. After thirty, as the body loses muscle mass, it becomes vulnerable to joint pain and mobility issues.
However, having a good ratio of lean muscle mass in women can delay age-related musculoskeletal issues and keep women active and energetic even after their thirties.
2. Pregnant Women
Those pregnant women who stay active during their pregnancy are less prone to getting obesity and Gestational Diabetes Mellitus.
Doing moderate exercise has no side effects for pregnant ladies and newborns. In fact, doing those exercises that involve pelvic floor muscles may make childbirth easy.
3. Women Athletes
Women athletes have less than 20% fat percentage and higher flexibility. They have increased bone density and high muscle mass, which reduce the risk of falling and fractures.
4 Effective Tips for Building Muscle Mass as a Women
Here are some must-follow rules and practical tips to build muscle mass as a woman:
1. Female Muscle Growth Diet
Roughly you need to eat 2000 to 2,500 calories per day to develop lean muscles. Remember to avoid junk food, which leads to water retention and fat gain. Add a lot of proteins and foods containing creatine (an organic compound and leucine (a muscle-building amino acid).
The following foods are rich in protein:
- Eggs
- Soybeans
- Greek yoghurt
- Chicken breast
- Cottage cheese
- Pulses and lentils
2. Train Hard
Add progressive overload and constantly challenge yourself to gain muscle mass. You can do this by increasing the number of sets you perform and applying more resistance to perform an exercise.
Meanwhile, don’t forget to pay attention to the mind-muscle connection. Instead of mindlessly doing exercises, focus on your target muscle groups. Stay focused during every moment to get the best results after each session.
3. Take Proper Time for Rest & Recovery
Building muscles as a woman might seem hard, but it’s actually not. All you need to do is plan your sets carefully, leaving enough time for recovery. At least spare one complete day every week for recovery, and don’t perform any challenging activity during your rest day.
Remember, sparing proper time for rest & recovery is a necessity; it’s not an option.
Get Enough Sleep
Lack of sleep reduces your concentration focus and is one of the biggest enemies of muscle growth.
Sleep deprivation leads to:
- Reduced muscle growth
- Delayed muscle recovery
- Increased risk of injuries and falling
- Badly impact muscular endurance & strength
Make sure to sleep for at least 6-8 hours so your muscles can get proper time for recovery.
How to Calculate and Track Muscle Mass?
Accurately measuring your muscle mass is impossible since it depends on various factors. Muscle mass refers to the most active tissues that burn many calories, even at rest.
It’s hard to measure the weight of each body tissue, and it’s not helpful either. However, one of the best ways to calculate muscle mass is figuring out what percentage of your body weight is fat and what percentage is lean mass. To measure lean mass, you first need to calculate body fat percentage and subtract it from 100%.
You can also measure muscle mass in a clinical setting or doctor’s office using various methods. You can measure your muscle mass by calculating:
- Body Fat Percentage
- U.S. Military Formula
- MRI/ Ultrasound
- Body Circumference Measurements
- Skinfold Caliper Method
To measure muscle mass at home, you can use a measuring tape. Using it, measure the circumference around different body parts, including the bicep, chest, and upper thigh. Take these measurements once a month to see the changes in your muscle mass.
Getting Lean Muscle Mass can Help Women to Improve the Quality of their Life!
Building muscle as a woman can help you to appear lean and healthy. Muscles make your movement more fluid and make you capable of executing daily tasks like laundry, grocery, and desk work more efficiently.
To gain muscle mass, you need to be attentive to your diet. Add protein-rich foods to your routine diet and stay away from junk. Strength training and consistently adding resistance to your workout will also help develop muscles.
Give proper time to your muscles for recovery and get enough sleep; that’s how you can build muscle mass as a woman and live your life to its fullest.
At The Lady Fitness, we provide holistic health solutions for women to transform their lives. Read our blogs to know more!