Why Everyone Needs to Build Muscle (It’s Not Just About Looks)
- Chris Protein
- Jan 31
- 5 min read
If you ever thought that building muscle was mainly about looks or chasing a six pack, let me stop you right there.
While looking good is a great reason to add some muscle, there are even more and deeper reasons for it.
Especially, if you are in your 30s, 40s, 50s, and up.
Muscle Starts to Slip Away
A not so fun fact: after age 30, we start losing muscle mass at a rate of 3-8% per decade.
After 50, it’s 5-10%.
This is called Sarcopenia, and affects a lot more than just seeing a little less definition. It can slow your metabolic rate, decrease performance, and make everyday tasks like climbing stairs, lifting groceries, or doing fun activities tougher and tougher.
If you have started to notice you don’t bounce back the way you used to, this can be a big part of why.
Fortunately, this loss can be reversed with a good program designed to build muscle, and doing so can have incredible benefits for almost everyone, from those looking to lose fat, age healthily, and avoid diseases.
For Fat Loss
Building muscle is not just a nice-to-have when losing weight. It is essential to burning fat, and maintaining it long term. Here's how it supports fat loss:
You burn calories during the training session itself.
You get a bump in post-exercise energy expenditure (e.g. your body burns extra calories to help recover from the workout)
Muscle tissue is more metabolically active than fat. That means you burn more calories regardless of what you are doing, sitting, sleeping, or exercising, because muscle requires more energy to maintain than fat does.
Plus, a recent meta-analysis found that resistance training ensured that people losing weight
lost it from fat, not from muscle or lean mass. When they used diet alone for the loss, only around 50-70% of the weight they lost was actually from fat. (Binmahfoz et al., 2025)
Imagine going to all the effort of losing 20 lbs, and only having half of it be from the target tissue: fat.
This explains real-world patterns we see with GLP-1 weight loss.
GLP-1 medicines, like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro can lead to dramatic weight loss by reducing appetite and thus calorie intake, which is essentially the same as using diet alone to lose the weight. As we would expect, research shows that similar to those using a diet only approach, a significant portion of weight lost while on these medications isn’t just fat, it’s also from lean mass. (Yao et al., 2024)
So if fat loss is the goal, strength training isn’t optional: it’s the thing that makes the whole process work better, from the start to long-term maintenance. It helps you burn more calories, protects your muscle while you lose weight, and makes sure the weight you’re losing is actually coming from fat.
Disease Risk Reduction and Management
A huge reason muscle matters is metabolic. Muscle tissue is one of the main places your body uses to store glucose and thus clear it from your bloodstream. This means that if muscle shrinks, the risk of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes goes up.
But following a muscle building program can be extremely helpful. In the Resist Diabetes trial, a group of pre-diabetic adults did only a minimal-resistance based program for just 3 months. Afterwards, over a third of them were no longer pre-diabetic! (Davy et al., 2017) That’s amazing!
Cancer outcomes also show improvements with resistance training. A recent systematic review on resistance training among breast cancer survivors suggests that muscle strengthening activities may be linked to lower chance of recurrence or death. (Wilson et al., 2024)
Another review on resistance exercise in cancer patients found that it helped improve quality of life and helped patients better tolerate treatment. (Zhang et al., 2024)
While cardio is thought to be king for improving cardiovascular disease, this is a bit of a myth as muscle building training can also help significantly. A large meta-analysis of long-term studies found that people who do muscle-strengthening exercise have a ~10–17% lower risk of cardiovascular disease, even after accounting for cardio exercise. This means that if you do both cardio and resistance training, you’ll likely have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than if you do just one or the other. (Momma et al., 2022)
So, don’t skip the weights if you want the best cardio outcomes. Both cardio and resistance are essential for the best protection against cardiovascular disease.
So, muscle isn’t just something you “build” in the gym, it’s something you can use to protect your health. Better blood sugar control, better treatment tolerance if something does happen, and lower risk of major chronic disease. That's a pretty good return on a couple strength sessions per week.
Lifespan and Enjoyment
One of the biggest reasons to build muscle is that it helps you live longer and enjoy life more while you’re here.
And there’s strong evidence behind that.
A large meta-analysis found that adults with low skeletal muscle mass had a significantly higher risk of all-cause mortality. In other words, having more muscle isn’t just a flex: it’s linked to a lower risk of dying from most any reason. (Wang et al., 2023)
Always nice to be hard to kill. But it's not just about adding years to your life, it's also about adding life to those years.
A long-term randomized trial found that older adults who did heavy resistance training were able to maintain meaningful strength improvements, and the benefits were still measurable years later. (Bloch-Ibenfeldt et al., 2024)
That matters because strength is what keeps you doing the fun stuff:
Hiking without your knees hating you
Carrying your own luggage
Getting off the floor easily
Staying independent, confident, and capable
So muscle isn’t just for athletes or bodybuilders.
It’s for anyone who wants to keep living an active, capable life for as long as possible… and not slowly trade their freedom for fragility.
The Bottom Line
Muscle is one of the most underrated “life upgrades” you can invest in.
It supports fat loss. It supports health. It supports longevity. It supports freedom. The best time to start building it was 10 years ago. The second best time is today. If you want help building muscle in a way that’s safe, effective, and not intimidating, that’s exactly what we do. Come in and we’ll build a plan that fits your body, your schedule, and your goals. Click here to book your first session.
Citations:
Binmahfoz A, Dighriri A, Gray C, Gray SR. Effect of resistance exercise on body composition, muscle strength and cardiometabolic health during dietary weight loss in people living with overweight or obesity: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine. 2025;11:e002363. doi:10.1136/bmjsem-2024-002363.🔗 https://bmjopensem.bmj.com/content/11/3/e002363.full.pdf
Yao H, Zhang A, Li D, et al. Comparative effectiveness of GLP-1 receptor agonists on glycaemic control, body weight, and lipid profile in adults with type 2 diabetes: systematic review and network meta-analysis. The BMJ. 2024;384:e076410. https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-076410
Davy BM, Winett RA, Savla J, Marinik EL, Baugh ME, Flack KD, Halliday TM, Kelleher SA, Winett SG, Williams DM, Boshra S. Resist Diabetes: a randomized clinical trial for resistance training maintenance in adults with prediabetes. PLoS ONE. 2017;12(2):e0172610. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0172610
Wilson OWA, Wojcik KM, Kamil D, Gorzelitz J, Butera G, Matthews CE, Jayasekera J. The associations of muscle-strengthening exercise with recurrence and mortality among breast cancer survivors: a systematic review. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. 2024;21:100. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12966-024-01644-0
Wang Y, Luo D, Liu J, Song Y, Jiang B, Jiang H. Low skeletal muscle mass index and all-cause mortality risk in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies. PLoS ONE. 2023.
Bloch-Ibenfeldt M, Gates AT, Karlog K, Demnitz N, Kjaer M, Boraxbekk CJ. Heavy resistance training at retirement age induces 4-year lasting beneficial effects in muscle strength: a long-term follow-up of an RCT. BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine. 2024.