Dr. Andy Galpin

There's two other things I want to point out before we move on.

And the first is dealing with asymmetry.

Now, we're going to talk a lot about functional asymmetry, so when one muscle is stronger than another and vice versa.

But the actual amount of muscle size matters as well.

We don't have as much concrete data on this, and it also depends on your activities.

So for example, if you are an athlete of any kind, it may behoove you to have some amount of asymmetry.

This allows you to create things like rotation and torque, to be able to throw a baseball 100 miles per hour, or to hit a golf ball 400 yards, or whatever the case may be.

But that said, there's clearly a point in which asymmetry within a muscle from side to side, front to back, et cetera, is detrimental.

functionality is different in terms of quantity.

Right now, some folks are going to say 5%.

Others might cut that line at about 10%.

So if you were to get an analysis and look at, say, how much muscle you had from a DEXA scan, you're able to identify maybe your right leg versus your left leg or something like that, you would want to keep an eye on about that 10%.

Anything more than that is probably going to be a flag that there's some sort of issue or potential issue in the future.

So total amount of muscle mass, FFMI is a great way to go about it.

Asymmetry, pay attention to more than about 10%.

And the second thing I wanted to point out here is what does it look like when I gain too much muscle?

And I want to be clear here, and I believe that we've showed that in the recent paper we published.

And that is excessive amounts of skeletal mass is not detrimental in any way.

So there does not seem to be an upper limit where it actually starts compromising your physical health.

Now, of course, if you've gained the muscle from non-exercise venues, like what we saw in our NHANES database in our recent paper,