If your New Years’ Resolution was to start building up some muscle, you’ve likely been hearing a lot about lean body mass. But do you actually know what trainers even mean by that?
For a lot of people new to fitness, these terms may go right over your head. Many people confuse lean body mass with having lean muscle. However, that is not the case as lean muscle doesn’t even exist.
To help you determine your fitness goals, it’s important to understand what all these terms mean. Read on to learn the difference between lean body mass and muscle mass.
What Is Lean Body Mass?
Lean body mass refers to everything in your body that isn’t fat. This includes your bones, organs, ligaments, tendons, muscles, and water.
One reason this term is so often mixed in with muscle mass, which refers to the number of muscles in your body, is that the loss or gain of skeletal muscle mass is the primary cause of changes in lean body mass. The other components of lean body mass don’t change so easily.
Having a high lean body mass has many benefits to your health. A high muscle mass percentage helps in fighting obesity, aids in disease recovery, reduces the risk of injury, and keeps your bones healthy.
Building muscle and lean body mass isn’t just about looking like a Greek god. It’s about keeping yourself strong and healthy.
How to Measure Lean Body Mass
Because lean body mass is so important to overall health, many eagerly seek out ways to measure their lean body mass. These measurements specifically focus on comparing muscle mass percentages to body fat percentages.
Online body mass calculators are popular fitness tools that many seek out to measure their body fat percentages. However, many of these calculators only take weight, height, age, and sex into account without paying any attention to body fat percentages. As a result, the data from these calculators tend to be way off.
If you want a more accurate calculation, look into getting a body scan. These scans are able to track everything that goes into a lean body mass measurement including water, fat tissue, muscle tissue, etc. This new technology can give you a much more accurate measurement than free online calculators can.
Click to learn more about body scans.
More Information on Fitness
Now you know a little bit more about lean body mass and how it differs from muscle mass. At the same time, you know how the two are still highly related, as muscle mass is the biggest factor that impacts lean body mass measurement. Look into ways to get accurate readings of your lean body mass, and allow that to be a factor that drives your fitness goals this year and in the years to come.
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