The difference and connection between male fitness and muscle gain

Fitness is a general term for all active exercise behaviors with the goal of improving body function and adjusting body condition. Muscle building is a subdivided training direction under fitness with the clear goal of inducing muscle hypertrophy and increasing skeletal muscle content. The two are subordination relationships of inclusion and inclusion. The confusion between these two concepts in daily life is essentially a difference in training goal orientation.

This may be a bit dry, but you can immediately feel the difference by going to a commercial gym near your home. There is a person who got into the elliptical machine after changing into quick-drying clothes after get off work. After 40 minutes of training, he was sweating. After taking a shower, he rushed home to pick up his children. When asked what he had practiced today, he scratched his head and said, "Just move around. Recently, my back has become stiff after sitting for a long time." This is the most typical ordinary fitness. There are no clear quantitative indicators. As long as you are comfortable after exercising and can relieve the fatigue of sitting for a long time, it is considered to be a standard. There are also people who first put on waist and wrist braces when they enter the house. When doing squats, they ask their companions to help shoot action videos and ask questions. They watch the timer to count down the seconds between sets. When they take out a protein bar to chew on it, they are still calculating whether they have made up for today's protein gap. Needless to say, they are rushing to build muscle.

Different training schools have completely different opinions on this matter. Veterans who do street fitness always laugh at gym lifters who train "dead muscles". They think that being able to do one-arm pull-ups and pull-ups is the real fitness, and the bulk gained just for the sake of circumference is not useful. ； Fans of bodybuilding training also feel that the muscle-building efficiency of street fitness is too low. If you want clear muscle separation, you have to rely on isolated stimulation and mechanical tension. Ten years of blind training is not as good as one year of systematic training. ； Even the logic of muscle building in the powerlifting circle is different from the previous two groups. People gain muscle purely to increase the weight of the three major events. It doesn't matter whether the latissimus dorsi is wide or whether the triceps have lines. The core goal is to be able to lift heavier bars. Just on the question of "whether muscle building is considered serious fitness", trainers from different systems can argue for half an hour sitting together. The essence is that everyone has different definitions of "fitness", and there is no standard answer at all.

But if you insist that muscle building and general fitness are two completely separate things, that would be too much. I met a friend who was doing back-end development two years ago. He first came to the gym just because his physical examination showed that the curvature of his cervical spine had straightened. The doctor asked him to do more back exercises, so he came three times a week. Each time, he followed the coach to do a few sets of high pull-downs and cable rows. He didn't think about growing muscles, he just wanted his neck to not hurt. As a result, after practicing for more than three months, I bought a new T-shirt one day and found that the shoulder line, which was too wide even in size L, was now just stretched out in size M. When I took off my clothes and took a shower, I found that my latissimus dorsi had begun to take shape, so I started to think about building muscle. Now, after practicing for almost two years, I can deadlift 140kg. Last week, I competed in a local amateur powerlifting competition and won third place. You see, many people’s journey to gain muscle begins with the most Buddhist type of fitness, and there is no clear cut-off point at all.

I used to think that people who specialize in building muscle have too much time to spend. Until I had a lumbar protrusion last year, the doctor said that my core strength was too weak to support my lumbar spine, so he forced me to practice glute bridges and deadlifts. After practicing for two months, my waist no longer hurts, and I also gained 3kg of muscle. The shirt that seemed to be baggy actually fit a lot better, and I discovered that building muscle is not something that is out of reach. Even if you have never thought about building a big body, as long as the exercise you do has a resistance component - even if it is doing 20 push-ups at home every day, or going hiking on the weekend to carry a heavy backpack, as long as the muscles are stimulated enough, the effect of muscle gain will naturally occur. ； On the other hand, if you train specifically to build muscle, you are also exercising. It can also help you improve your basal metabolism and reduce the probability of common diseases among office workers such as lumbar protrusion and frozen shoulder. To put it bluntly, they are just different stages or different branches on the same road.

Nowadays, there are always people on the Internet arguing that "exercise that does not build muscle is just nonsense", which is really unnecessary. I have an uncle who is a golfer. He is 52 years old. He plays badminton three times a week. When he has free time, he goes for a brisk walk in the park. He has never touched a barbell or dumbbell. All indicators in the physical examination are normal. He can climb a mountain faster than a 20-year-old boy. Can you say that this is not fitness? Others say, "To gain muscle, you have to go to the gym every day and eat boiled chicken breasts, otherwise it's useless." That's even more ridiculous. I know a buddy who is a high school teacher. He can only train at home for half an hour after get off work every day. He relies on a pair of adjustable dumbbells. He trains three times a week, training different parts each time.

In fact, to put it bluntly, it is far better to think clearly about what you want than to struggle with the difference between these two concepts. If you just want to move your body and avoid getting sick, then take a walk or play ball every day, whatever feels comfortable. If you want to wear a T-shirt to hold up your shoulder lines and have clear lines when you take off your clothes, then it’s good to do targeted resistance, supplement nutrition, and walk to build muscle. After all, whether it is fitness or muscle gain, the ultimate goal is to make yourself more comfortable. There is no need to shackle yourself just for a concept, right?