What is the difference and connection between male fitness and muscle gain

To put it simply, muscle building is essentially a branch of male fitness, but the coverage, execution logic, and evaluation standards of the two are completely different from the same dimension. There is no saying that one includes the other or is more noble. Many boys who are new to sports are most likely to confuse the two. Either they think that fitness requires building big muscles, or they think that building muscles is just a fool's errand. In fact, they are all cognitive deviations.

There is a brother who works in the backend at the gym I often go to. When he first applied for the card last year, he suffered a backache due to sitting for a long time every day. The doctor asked him to exercise more. He comes here three or four times a week. He first swims breaststroke for 20 minutes, then does a few sets of high pull-downs and seated shoulder presses to adjust his posture. Occasionally, he does it with friends. A busy session of spinning, and a shower and home refreshed after practice, this is the most typical ordinary male fitness. He does not need to calculate any caloric surplus, nor does he need to worry about whether each set of movements has reached exhaustion. As long as it can relieve the discomfort of sitting for a long time and release stress after get off work, the goal has been achieved. But if you are rushing to gain muscle, that is a completely different set of rigorous logic. During the two months when I was preparing for the amateur bodybuilding competition last year, everything I ate had to be weighed on a scale every day. Protein was accurately measured at 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight. I didn’t even dare to stay up late to watch football because I was afraid. The cortisol rises and the muscles are lost. Each set of bench press and deadlift has to drag the force trajectory, and it is stuck in the last half of failure. I have gained 4 kilograms of pure muscle in two months, and my body fat has dropped below 10%. The cost of time and energy behind it is not at the same level as ordinary fitness.

Because the thresholds and goals of the two are far apart, there has been an ongoing debate on the Internet about the two. One group says that "fitness without the goal of building muscle is just a waste of time." The other group says that "what you train is dead muscle, which is not as useful as running five kilometers." Both of these opinions are actually quite extreme. The former imposes his own muscle-building goals on all fitness people. The goal is to move the muscles and improve health. If you insist on letting people practice according to the standards for competition preparation, it is really a bit of trouble. The latter has no understanding of the physiological function of muscles and proper growth. The improvement of basal metabolism and strengthening of joint stability brought about by muscle training are difficult to achieve with pure aerobics. Especially after men are over 30 years old, muscle mass naturally loses about 1% every year. Proper resistance training to increase muscle mass can prevent middle-aged gain and knee wear better than running around every day.

However, noisy and noisy, when it comes to the actual training process, it is impossible to completely separate the two. For example, the former programmer brother, after practicing for more than half a year, his rounded shoulders and hunchback have improved. When he wears a T-shirt, he finds that his shoulders can be stretched out, and there is still a faint line of triceps on his arms. Now he will take the initiative to ask me how to supplement protein and whether I want to increase the number of movements in each group, either for competition, or because I want to look better wearing a vest in the summer. This is actually a typical example of the natural extension of ordinary fitness to the need for muscle gain. On the other hand, people who specialize in muscle building cannot do without the logic of basic fitness. The basic skills of warm-up, stretching, and core stabilization are not solid. Muscle building is not only inefficient but also very easy to get injured. I used to have a training friend who was eager to bench press the weight. He only did two minutes of warm-up before starting a heavy weight, which directly strained his rotator cuff. After more than three months of rest, he lost almost 10 kilograms of muscle. Almost half of the muscle-building results of the previous half year were wasted.

To put it bluntly, the relationship between the two is like the relationship between walking after a meal and professional marathon training. People who walk do not have to force themselves to practice to run a full marathon, and people who practice marathon also gain a foundation from walking and jogging step by step.