The difference and connection between male fitness and muscle gain

Men's fitness is a general term for all physical activities that aim to improve physical condition and meet individual sports needs. Muscle gain is a subdivided vertical goal of fitness. The two are included and included, but there are essential differences in behavioral logic, execution standards, and evaluation systems.

A while ago, I was chatting with Lao Zhang from the fitness park downstairs. He said that he pulls the horizontal bar and does parallel bars every day, and after three years of training, his arm circumference is still 32cm. He said that those in the gym who develop big muscles are "dead muscles" and are useless. I didn't have the nerve to expose it at the time - he called it generalized fitness, and he was focusing on the goal of gaining muscle. The two things are not a set of evaluation standards, and there is no way they can step on each other.

Let’s talk about the most intuitive way of distinguishing: you invite friends to play basketball for an afternoon on the weekend, and when you are sweating, you turn around and go to drink skewers and drink cold beer. This is fitness.； You stop playing for half an hour because you are afraid of consuming too many calories aerobically and losing muscle. So when you get home, you immediately make a spoonful of protein powder and eat two chicken breast buns without sauce. This is definitely to build muscle.

The goals of fitness are too scattered. Some people want to reduce the high blood pressure on the physical examination sheet, some people want to be able to carry a 30-pound baby and climb the sixth floor without gasping for breath. Some people just want to find something to sweat and relieve stress after get off work. Some people even just want to take a check-in photo and collect KPIs for Moments. These are all considered fitness, and there is no uniform passing line. Just feel comfortable and achieve the small goals you want. Even if you just walk around the community for 20 minutes every day, walking is better than not walking at all.

But muscle gain is different. The goal is nailed down: through resistance stimulation + nutritional supplement + adequate rest, the increase in skeletal muscle cross-section is quantifiable. Has the arm circumference increased by 1cm in three months? Has the deadlift weight increased from 60kg to 80kg? Did the weight increase by 2kg without changing the body fat? If it is there, it is effective; if it is not there, it is just a waste of practice. There is no room for ambiguity. A knowledgeable veteran can look at your training diary and diet record and tell at a glance whether you will be able to gain muscle this month or not, and whether you will be able to show off.

I was talking to some friends who have been practicing for five or six years before, and we all had some arguments about the execution path for muscle gain. Street fitness enthusiasts believe that body weight can fully achieve muscle growth. As long as progressive overload can be achieved and the horizontal bar pull-ups are increased from 5 to 20 at a time, beautiful latissimus dorsi can still be built. ； The bodybuilding-style training school believes that it is necessary to carry weights and perform isolated stimulation in order to effectively stimulate deep muscles, and the efficiency is more than twice as high as bare hands. Both arguments are valid, they just adapt to different needs - if you don't have the conditions to go to the gym, you can still build muscles by practicing bodyweight exercises at home, just a little slower. ； If you are looking for quick results, systematic weight-bearing training is definitely more reliable. But no matter which school you belong to, there are three hard requirements for building muscle: training should give enough stimulation to the muscles, the diet should have a caloric surplus, and eat at least 1.6g of protein per kilogram of body weight every day. If you lack any of them, it will be useless. There are no such rules in fitness. You can move however you like. Being happy is the most important thing.

The connection is actually not that mysterious. No one knows how to accurately burn calories and weight when they first come into contact with exercise. They all get started by practicing blindly. I was just messing around with fitness in the first two years. I played badminton today and went swimming the next. My weight was quite stable, but my shoulders were still slumped even when I was wearing a T-shirt. Later, I wanted to hold them up a little better in a shirt, so I turned to muscle building. My squat legs increased from an empty bar to 100kg. I ate eggs and drank milk every day. My arm circumference increased by 3cm in a year. Several friends around me lost weight and lost weight, so they naturally started doing resistance muscle building. It was a natural transition.

Nowadays, there are always people on the Internet arguing about whether fitness will build dead muscles. The essence is to confuse the two. If you are working out just for health and comfort, then there is no need to get big. Just take a walk and play ball every day. ； If your goal is to gain muscle, then muscle circumference is the core evaluation criterion, and there is no need to listen to outsiders' nonsense - people with high muscle mass have a much higher basal metabolism than people who sit for a long time, and can easily lift heavy objects and climb stairs. There is no such thing as "dead muscle", it's just a stereotype.

Harmful, to put it bluntly, there is no distinction between high and low. Whether it is fitness by moving casually, or muscle building by striving to gain size, as long as you move, it is better than sitting on the sofa and scrolling through your mobile phone. Which one you choose depends entirely on what you want.