Lean muscle mass refers to the weight of your muscles without including extra fat or water weight. Having an optimal amount of lean muscle is important for strength, mobility, hormonal balance, and metabolic health.
When you strength train and eat enough protein, your body builds new muscle fibers. This helps increase your lean body mass. The more lean mass you have, the more calories and nutrients your body needs to sustain itself. This raises your basal metabolic rate so you burn more calories at rest.
Here are some key benefits of building lean muscle:
How much lean muscle is ideal?
Most experts recommend having at least 25-30% of your body weight coming from lean mass. So a 150-pound woman would aim for 38-45 pounds of muscle.
Ideally, you should aim for the highest amount of lean mass your body can naturally sustain with your activity levels and nutrition. More is generally better for metabolism, fitness, and function.
For middle-aged adults, maintaining your youthful levels of lean mass becomes crucial for mobility, strength and preventing weight gain as hormone levels change. This is where the anti-aging programs at Hormone Wellness Institute can help optimize your lean muscle mass along with nutrition and training.
How to build lean muscle
Building lean mass takes work, but pays dividends across many areas of health, fitness and metabolism. What steps will you take to optimize your lean muscle levels this year? Comment any questions below!