Why Muscle Matters & How to Build It

**Andy Galpin** (0:00)
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life.
Welcome to Perform.
I'm Dr. Andy Galpin, a professor of kinesiology in the Center for Sport Performance at Cal State Fullerton. In the center, our mission is to conduct and disseminate research that enhances human performance. In addition to my role as a scientist, I also work directly with high-performing athletes. This could include Olympic gold medalists, world champions, MVPs, Cy Young winners, all-stars, across multiple sports. The NHL, NBA, the NFL, PGA Tour, boxing, the UFC, and many more. So while I focus most of my career on sport and athletes specifically, my real passion is the physiology behind that. And so what I hope to share with you over this podcast is a deep dive into the physiology of human performance. Now that doesn't necessarily mean sports per se. This is really human performance at its finest, most broadest definition. This could be athletes, musicians, leaders, scientists, educators, or anything else in between. Human performance really is what you want your body to be capable of. So in order to accomplish that, I'm extremely excited to share with you the physiology behind human performance in a way that is engaging, applicable, and most importantly, useful. Today we're gonna be talking about muscle. More specifically, skeletal muscle, my favorite. Now I know when you first hear that, your mind may jump to things like sport performance and big giant muscles and bodybuilding and aesthetics. And while that may or may not be of interest to you, I will tell you candidly, it's a large interest of mine. You may be surprised to learn that muscle quality and quantity are incredibly important for your overall health and wellbeing. Yeah, you heard that right. Quality muscle is essential for the vitality of nearly every cell, organ, or organ system in your entire body. Let me give you two specific examples of what I'm talking about. First is the connection between muscle and the brain. Now, there are many lines of evidence we could utilize here, but one that I think highlights the point beautifully is a recent study on about a half a million participants, mostly middle-aged men and women. And in that, they found that about 30% of dementia cases were directly attributable to low grip strength.
Now that may sound alarming and or interesting to you, and I promise we'll get into the details of that study and many others later in the show. Now, that was an example of muscle quality or functionality. Let me give you another one regarding muscle quantity or size and how that will directly relate to longevity or lifespan. Once again, there's lots of research to pull from and we'll get into this later in the show, but it's very clear that being under-muscled is a significant problem. In fact, we know this is such a big problem. The National Institute of Health has an entire wing dedicated specifically to sarcopenia, which is the advanced loss of muscle with age. If you'd like some hard numbers to wrap your head around a little bit here, consider this. Those in the bottom 20th percentile versus the top 20th percentile, in terms of how much muscle mass you have on your entire body, well, those in the bottom portion have about two times the risk of all-cause mortality as those in the top. And so while we certainly are gonna consider functionality or quality, most important, quantity matters a lot as well. So based upon what I've just shared and more that we'll get into later in the show, to me, skeletal muscle is by far the most important organ in your entire body. Now in order to convince you of that, I'm gonna start by telling you how it actually regulates performance across the entire system. This includes everything from its relationship to how long and how well you're going to live to how it regulates your blood glucose, metabolism, and overall energy production, to other factors that you may or may not also be aware of.
After that, we'll get into what muscle actually is. How is the structure and the function of it determining how you move throughout the world? And then finally, we'll get into the assessment piece. How do you identify whether or not you have enough muscle? And if you don't, how do you go about improving that? Now, before we go too much further, I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors because they make this show possible. Not only are they on this list because they offer great products and services, but because I actually personally love them and use them myself. Today's episode is brought to you by Absolute Rest. Sleep is the bedrock of human performance, which is why I always focus on it with my elite athletes. But despite trying every wearable and even sending people to full blown clinical testing in sleep labs, we rarely got very far. That's why two years ago, I co-founded Absolute Rest, which redefines what it means to be a high performance sleeper. After tremendous success, we are now ready for our next challenge. A first of its kind sleep optimization program that combines advanced sleep technology with personalized coaching, all at a fraction of the cost of a traditional sleep study. The Sleep Lens program allows you to run a full FDA approved clinical grade sleep study from your fingertip every single night. Our team of sleep scientists then use your data to create personalized solutions that drive real changes in your sleep. No more overnight stays in creepy sleep labs, no more wearables with questionable accuracy, and no more wondering if the changes you're making in your nightly routine, habits or supplements are actually working or not. If you'd like to try Absolute Rest, go to absoluterest.com forward slash perform to secure your spot in the Sleep Lens program and save $100. That's absoluterest.com/perform. Today's episode is also brought to you by Momentus. Momentus makes safe, high quality supplements. Now, I naturally despise and frankly don't trust most supplement companies and for good reason. In fact, I recently co-authored a review article that was published in 2023, in which we found that the amount of adulterations, which are accidental contaminants or deliberate spiking, like adding stimulants or anabolic or other agents, which are not supposed to be in the product, or mislabeling is shockingly high. It ranged from about 10 to 40% of all supplements, depending on the study that you pulled. So I actually honestly spent literally years vetting both Momentus and their leadership team before deciding to officially partner with them last year. Every single Momentus product is third party tested, and that's expensive. And many are even further NSF certified for sport. But more unique than that is their vision for the future of where this frankly dysfunctional industry should go. On top of this strong ethical company value, their products are also fantastic. They're used by the best of the best, including countless professional teams, Olympic committees, 31 of the 32 NFL teams, many members of the Department of Defense and many more. They offer a range of products. For me, those are your creatine, vitamin D and fish oils. Now, none of you have to use supplements and I genuinely hope you never feel pressured to do so if you don't want to. However, they can be beneficial to some. So if you're going to use them, I strongly encourage choosing a brand like Momentus, which in my opinion has the highest safety and quality standards in the world. If you'd like to give Momentus a try, go to livemomentus.com forward slash perform to get 20% off your order. Again, that's livemomentus.com/perform to get 20% off. Okay, so why do I think skeletal muscle is so special? Well, I want to break this into two parts. The first is the quantity of muscle you have and the second is quality. Now, the quantity of muscle compared to other organ systems, say your immune system, your brain, central nervous system, or even like your bones, skeletal muscle is the one you have the most control over with lifestyle factors.