Dr. Andy Galpin

then that's not great.

So an example here would be if you've just gained a bunch of body fat, and because of that, some muscle came along for the ride.

That would be what we consider to be muscle that I got accrued from non-exercise habits.

This is not going to be advantageous to your health.

But if it is accrued from exercise, there doesn't seem to be any evidence at all that suggests this is negative.

There are some papers out there that I think have made mistakes in identifying that after a certain point, an increase in muscle mass is actually negative.

And again, having analyzed some of those things myself in our recent paper, I think we found clear evidence that that is not the case.

There are other practical considerations.

If you've exercised excessively, you've done it poorly, or other things that have led to injury, of course, all those things are true.

What I'm trying to argue is the simple fact of having additional muscle mass itself is not detrimental to health in any way.

It can be associated with other things that are bad for you that lead to injury and other metabolic problems.

But the excessive amount of muscle mass on its surface

is only going to aid in both your health and performance.

We're going to make a number of these charts available to you in the show notes.

But again, please acknowledge that they do vary a little bit from study to study.

So depending on which population was in a particular paper or how it was analyzed, the values might be a little bit different, but you're going to get you pretty close nonetheless.

I want to give you a couple of numbers just to get you started though.

Now these work on percentiles.

What this means is when I say one percentile, that means the lowest amount of muscle mass, 99 percentile is the highest.

Obviously, as we've been describing, you don't want to be low in muscle, whether you're an athlete or someone just interested in overall wellness and health and longevity.