Just muscles?
It tells your peripheral nervous system to grow and optimize wiring to increase recruitment and activation, attenuate signal noise, boost reflexes and responsiveness, and improve sensory feedback.
It tells your circulatory system to branch out with many small vessels and more limber large vessels, all with improved resource transmission and lots more oxygen.
It tells your connective tissues you need higher quality rigging with less friction.
It tells your bones they need to shape the fuck up and increase their density.
It tells your endocrine system to quit being cheap and give you the good stuff.
It tells your immune system to chill out and focus.
And much more. Ultimately the supply chain requirements for the additional work leaves no system untouched.
This is the wrong community for this
You are what you do. Your body will adjust to what your regular physical activity happens to be, combined with what you choose to feed it.
Muscles are incredibly inefficient.
That’s why people that work 12 hour days doing manual labor were “skinny strong”.instead of jacked.
To get huge muscles, we need to trick our bodies into thinking we randomly have to move heavy weights every once and a while.
Part of that is slowly increasing the weight so they muscle rebuilds even bigger otherwise it would just stay the same. If you stop, your body stops wasting the energy for those huge muscles and they get smaller.
inefficient
Shouldn’t that be “efficient”? They will adapt to the minimal required strength for whatever the standard is.
A pound of muscle requires many calories to maintain, more than anything else in your body, by weight.
Aside from fat. Or the brain. Or other organs
No, muscles require the most energy to maintain. Literally at rest, muscle is burning more than any other.
That’s why the body sheds muscle readily if they aren’t used, and why building muscle is so effective for general weight loss.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2980962/
Heart & kidneys > brain > liver > skeletal muscle > adipose muscle
Pound for pound. But they all are efficient, which still goes against the original thesis
Due to not wanting to move the goalposts, I’ll cede regarding organs.
That said, I meant vs fat. I should have clarified. One does does does not build or shed more organs, so I thought that was clear, but I see I was not
Also said, I’ve seen the brain one contested quite a bit.
Again I cede to your source and acknowledge it, only clarifying I was comparing to non organ tissue.
Edit my meaning was a pound of fat, at rest, burns less and contributes less to TDEE than a point of muscle. Therefore muscle is less efficient, using more calories to continue existing per unit time.
Fair enough. And I’ll give you the vs fat part. It was unfair for me to say anyway - what was in my head when I said it was that a pound of fat is considered worth 3500 kcal, which is more energy than most things in a body. It was a shit argument that mixed points.
Overall, I think my issue is just with the simple statement that “muscles are inefficient”.
The way I interpreted that statement is that “muscles waste energy”, since that’s all the context I could get from those words. I see muscles as super efficient, just like anything else in the body in that they do as little as possible compared to what is demanded. I view that type of laziness as ultimate efficiency.
Through the rest of the thread I got little additional context, so I kept on keeping on.
I still think the op of this thread didn’t get his point across very well
The body also sheds brain cells if you don’t get enough exercise.
…and your body fighting back because its working under the design that calories are still very difficult to get on a regular basis. So its not going to use the precious calories you give it to build all kinds of calorie consuming muscle and bone mass unless you show it is necessary or that you’d eventually die without it the muscle.
