What is the difference between male fitness and muscle gain

To put it simply, the relationship between the two is that of inclusion and being included - muscle gain is a subdivision of the many goals of male fitness, while male fitness is the collective name for all behaviors with physical training as the core. The scope is much broader and is not the same thing at all.

You can just go to the gym near your home on a weekday night and you will feel the difference: in the sex room, there are boys riding spinning bikes to the music and running 5 kilometers on the treadmill at a constant speed. They just want to lose the belly fat accumulated during the New Year, practice cardio and lungs and climb stairs without breathing. This is fitness; squatting in the power area Those who stare at the arm circumference scale between pushing and pulling sets and use a calculator to calculate grams of protein during meals are doing it to build muscle, which is also considered fitness. There are also those who practice core rehabilitation for lumbar protrusion and participate in a half-marathon next month to practice endurance. This is also serious fitness, but it has nothing to do with muscle building.

When many people first get into fitness, they are easily biased by the content on the Internet. They assume that "men's fitness requires building big muscles." Some people even think that not training is equivalent to practicing in vain. This actually narrows the boundaries of fitness too narrowly. After all, most ordinary men’s pursuits of fitness are very simple: no more shoulder and neck pain from sitting for a long time, no panting like a dog after working overtime until early in the morning, no back pain after carrying the baby for two hours. Even if the muscle mass has not increased and the body fat rate has not lost much, as long as the physical condition becomes more comfortable, it is effective fitness, and there is no need to force yourself to gain muscle.

To put it bluntly, you can think of fitness as a big supermarket at your doorstep. Muscle building is just one of the muscle building powders on the shelves. You can buy this, mineral water, bread, and energy drinks when you enter the supermarket. No one stipulates that you must buy muscle building powder when you enter the supermarket. What's more, the threshold for muscle gain itself is much higher: it essentially relies on resistance training to create micro-tears in muscle fibers, and then relies on adequate protein intake and rest to repair to achieve dimensional growth. It requires that training must be progressive overload, eating and sleeping must be stuck to the standard, and the error tolerance rate is extremely low. If you stay up late for a week eating and drinking, the two centimeters of arm circumference that you worked so hard to gain last month may be lost. But ordinary fitness is much more flexible. You can play badminton today if you want, or swim tomorrow. Even if you only have time to practice shoulder and back exercises for 20 minutes twice a week, you can achieve the effect as long as you move.

I met a programmer friend before who was a typical example. When he first entered the gym, the coach tricked him into signing up for a muscle-building class. He forced himself to eat four eggs and two chicken breasts every day. After practicing for three months, his uric acid level became high. His waist also slipped due to the weight of the deadlift, and he lay down for less than half a month. Later, he simply stopped all plans to build muscle. He went to the gym to practice shoulder and back activation for 20 minutes every day after get off work, and met up with friends to ride mountain bikes on weekends. Now the shoulder and neck pain that had bothered him for two years was gone, and his overall condition was much better than when he was obsessed with building muscle. He himself complained that he was stupid before, thinking that to exercise, you have to build a big body to show others, but now he knows that what suits him is useful.

Of course, there is no need to completely separate the two. If you like clear muscle lines and want to develop chest and shoulders that can be supported by wearing a T-shirt, it is absolutely fine to regard muscle gain as your fitness goal. Just don’t be kidnapped by the saying that "boys must gain muscle when exercising". After all, fitness is for your own comfort, not to take pictures of muscles and post likes on Moments, right?