What do you imagine the final 30 years of your life to look like?
Take a few moments and outline the best-case scenario of your final 30 years.
What are you physically able to do?
Can you live independently?
Can you still have sex?
Who are you spending time with?
What are you doing in your free time?
What kinds of conversations are you having?
Are you still learning new things?
If you can do all these things right now without a problem, it’s easy to take them for granted. The older you get, the more obvious it becomes that it’s a slippery slope to losing aspects of your life that you never imagined could be in jeopardy. Here’s the crazy part; if you have sufficient muscle mass, you create a powerful moat against losing these things. Muscle mass is your ticket to long-term independence. It's your bodies superannuation.
If you don’t have enough muscle, you cannot participate in society fully.
Read that again.
If you don’t have enough muscle, you cannot participate in society fully.
It’s not that you don’t get to participate due to the purposeful exclusion of the poorly muscled. It’s simply practical. If you don’t have the strength to navigate space in public, fear will likely keep you indoors.
Fear of injury.
Fear of judgment.
Fear of the unknown.
Fear of the inability to bounce back from a mishap.
If you were too afraid to get out on your own, who could you depend on to help you consistently? Would you be willing to ask for help consistently? Would it be easier to accept that you can no longer participate and stop trying?
Do you see where this is going?
Muscle mass is the key to filling all of your years with living. With sufficient muscle mass, you keep the ability to chart your own course. The wild part is that it’s not just about being up and about and participating in the “mechanics” of life; muscle also protects your brain, and as we all know, cognitive decline is just as scary as physical decline.
Muscle protects the brain via neurotrophic factors so we also want to point out another layer of protection it provides.
Blood flow. Some neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer's, are being reexamined as vascular diseases. The short of it is that our brains break down VERY quickly if they don’t have adequate blood supply, i.e., strokes. Many of these diseases have now been connected with long-term poor blood supply.
Exercise is a reliable way to improve blood flow in the brain. Exercise, both resistance and cardiovascular, requires functional muscle mass. In other words, the ability to move your body and how consistently you take the opportunity to do so can directly influence the health of your brain.
Muscle mass is worth MORE than its weight in gold.
It’s worth your future quality of life.