Why Muscle Fitness Is Important

Article by Gary Holdon

When we talk about muscle fitness, most people think of bodybuilding; developing muscles for the sole purpose of muscle building. It is absolutely great that people understand that converting fat to muscles is a necessity in our society, since the average body fat percentage is too high and obtaining this by living healthy, lose weight and do exercise. So according to this philosophy we are able to accomplish both an increased muscle mass and lose weight. Ever serious quality weight loss or exercise program takes this into account. However, when it comes to muscle fitness there are lots of other healthy aspects that the simple philosophy above don’t even mention. To make up for this, I will take a closer look at muscle fitness in this article and present a few aspects with regard to health that seem to be overlooked.

Common Aspects of Muscle Fitness

Generally when people think of muscle fitness they center on cosmetic appearances. This is the most often perceived ‘contest physique’ that most people adore. There is nothing wrong with such enthusiasm, but it is some limited in scope though. That’s to say, there are a numerous of functional muscle fitness goals that could be attained in addition to the cosmetic ones.

Do You Need Strength?

Silly question. Of course you do. Just because someone looks strong does not mean that person really is strong. In order to reinforce strength, we need to work on a series of exercises that will increase the functionality of the muscle. Isolation workouts such as leg raises and similar exercises will do nothing in terms of increasing strength. Squats of heavy weight for the period of low reps, however, will increase your strength.

What Has Muscle Fitness To Do With Rehabilitation?

Since leg raises were negatively singled out in the section above, it would be momentous to mention the proper role of leg raises. While there are many of uses for isolation exercises such as leg raises, they are normally used to rehabilitation of injuries. So, an exercise such as a leg raise will strengthen an injured knee.

Endurance And Muscle Fitness

People who have exercised – and who has not(?) – knows that – dependent on how fit you are – sooner or later you will get a feeling of tiredness in your legs or arms. Every muscle has a muscle endurance capacity. For muscles that are well trained this capacity is high and for untrained muscles it is low. So what happens when you experience muscle fatigue is that they have reached their limits of endurance capacity. Well trained people who participate in sports like rowing, fatigue of muscles can be experienced pretty quickly. There is a way to remove such fatigue though; you should do a series of high repetitive body weight exercises and increase them heavily. Let’s stay with the rower example; his or her task would probably be to repeat pushups a high number of times. What then happens is that the muscles in the shoulders, arms and chest will increase it’s endurance capacity.

Be aware though; doing exercises for special muscle groups doesn’t mean to neglect exercises for other muscle groups. If you want muscle fitness you need to train all your muscles.