Welcome to the Get Fit Guys quick and dirty tips to get moving and shape up.

My name is Brock Armstrong and I'm the Get Fit Guy.

Before we dig in to today's topic, here's a little body composition primer for you.

The term muscle mass refers to the total amount of soft muscle tissue in the body. Then your

body mass is made up of two components, body fat and lean body mass. Now most of you know what

body fat is and if you don't, you can check out one of my podcasts about it and I'll put put a link in the show notes over at getfitguy.quickanddirtitips.com. But the second component,

lean body mass, includes muscle mass, as well as your bones and your body fluid, which is

mostly water. Now, muscle mass, or your muscles, are the part of your body that help you move,

balance, and stand, and even sit with good posture. They also aid your organs in a number

of biological functions. The three main types of muscles found in the body are smooth muscle,

your internal organs, cardiac muscle, your heart,

and skeletal muscle, the stuff that I tend to write about and talk about in this podcast. Now you put all

of these together and you have the body's muscle mass. Although in most conversations on this topic,

muscle mass usually focuses on skeletal muscle.

Perhaps this is out of vanity, or perhaps it's because we can exert the most control over those

muscles. I mean, you decide. If you've been told that you have low muscle mass, well, that

simply means that you have a lower than average amount of muscle

compared to people of the same age and the same gender as you. And if you've been told

that you have high muscle mass, well, yeah, you guessed it, you have more muscle than people

your age and gender. And we'll look into those averages a little bit later.

When you're given this information, it's usually in conjunction with your body composition

during a Dexas scan or maybe even an MRI. Your body composition is usually a ratio of your muscle

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