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Maria Arellano Simpson has been on and off restrictive diets since she was 9 years old. “As a young adult growing up in the 2000s, cardio was the focus, and I spent hours doing it to try and get smaller,” says Arellano Simpson, now 44. She logged hours on the stair-stepper and miles on the pavement. It worked, to some degree, providing her a small calorie deficit but no additional muscle or strength. Then, when she had her daughter 12 years ago, she quickly put on 100 pounds, was diagnosed as prediabetic, developed a fatty liver, and registered a body fat percentage in the 50s.
Fast-forward to last year and her wake-up call, which came in the form of two sick relatives. “I felt like I owed it to my kids to have the best possible health, and I didn’t want them to have to take care of me when I get older,” she says. She began her quest to preserve both her wellness and lifespan. And that, in turn, led her straight to the concept of musclespan—though she didn’t realize it.
Newly in perimenopause, Arellano Simpson was researching how to stay healthy during the transition, so she was aware of the benefits of strength training and muscle in general. Then the social media algorithm started serving her content highlighting muscle and longevity.
One day, while scrolling TikTok, she came across a strong and athletic trainer from the fitness app Ladder who was celebrating muscle and strength. “I remember thinking, I want to be able to move and lift like that,” she recalls. Another post that caught her attention was from a female bodybuilder in her 80s. “She was lifting weights, running, just full of life,” Arellano Simpson says. That’s when “chasing muscle instead of thinness” became her new objective. “All the tools fell into my lap at the right time,” she says.
For Arellano Simpson, who runs a photography studio in Houston, focusing on muscle shifted her mentality from “I need to lose weight” to “I need to put on as much muscle as possible.” Losing 100 pounds was daunting. Gaining muscle and eating well (and enough)? “A quest worth pursuing,” she says.
After nine months of focusing on muscle, she reversed her fatty liver and prediabetes. Her quality of life drastically improved too: She plays with her daughters at the park and climbs flights of stairs with ease, and her chronic back and knee pain are nearly nonexistent. “Muscle gives you freedom,” she says. “I know people need to hear about this.”
What Musclespan Means
You’ve probably heard the terms lifespan and healthspan. The former signifies how long you live, while the latter refers to how long you’re in good health. “But musclespan is the way in which we support strength and healthy aging,” says physician and Women’s Health advisor Gabrielle Lyon, DO, who coined the term and has spent years studying how protein and muscle impact aging, performance, and disease prevention. “It’s about living as long as you can with healthy skeletal muscle.” (Skeletal muscle is the muscle attached to bones, as opposed to cardiac muscle and smooth muscle, located around organs. The more you know!)
As a perioperative medicine physician at Stanford Medicine, Sarita Khemani, MD, often sees patients who are admitted to the hospital after a hip fracture or brain bleed due to a fall that may have been caused, in part, by weak muscles. Having muscle “in reserve” (meaning you built it up earlier in life) that can act as your armor helps you better handle the inevitable injury, surgery, or illness, says Dr. Khemani. That preparation becomes even more important as we age and face unexpected curveballs. “It’s not if, but when, illness strikes, because it happens to all of us,” Dr. Lyon says. “If you are prepared with both strength and mass, then you are much more likely to be able to overcome life’s challenges.” That is musclespan in a nutshell.
So, no matter your fitness goals, if you’re interested in extending the healthy and vibrant years ahead, this is an approach that can benefit you. “The data supports that you’re never too old—and also never too young—to improve muscle health,” Dr. Lyon says.
James Macari
The Science to Back It
Dr. Lyon argues that musclespan not only trumps healthspan but also dictates both healthspan and lifespan. “Muscle is the key because it is a metabolic and endocrine organ,” she says, citing recent research that links low skeletal muscle mass to an increased risk of all-cause mortality. It’s not just an aesthetic or functional enabler; muscle health is also related to insulin sensitivity, metabolic health, and the ability to withstand illness or injury, Dr. Lyon says.
In fact, emerging science around myokines—hormone-like compounds released by contracting skeletal muscle fibers—shows they play a powerful role in regulating inflammation, protecting against chronic disease, and promoting longevity. “Of course, longevity is multifactorial,” Dr. Lyon notes. (Cardiovascular fitness, body composition, and other markers also matter.) “But muscle health, strength, and mass have emerged as some of the most robust predictors of healthy aging.”
While it’s common for people to measure everything from their blood pressure and cholesterol to daily steps, very few measure and track their strength or muscle mass. And muscle isn’t often thought of as an organ in and of itself that deserves as much care as its higher-profile counterparts. “We focus on other organs, like the heart and brain, which are very important. But muscle is a critical organ, especially when it comes to longevity,” adds Dr. Khemani. In short, tracking musclespan the way you do other mainstream health markers is a smart move—and easier than you might think (see “How to Measure Your Musclespan” coming up).
Why Muscle Tells You More
How is it that muscle is so protective? Those myokines may be the reason exercise decreases the risk of chronic disease, including cancer, cardiovascular illness, and neurodegeneration, according to a review in Endocrine Reviews. “These powerful messengers allow muscle to ‘talk’ to other organs, including the brain, adipose tissue, liver, and immune system, helping regulate vital processes like blood sugar control, metabolism, mood, and brain health,” Dr. Khemani explains. “Because of this, muscle is deeply connected to metabolic health, cognitive function, longevity, and disease resilience.”
If peak musclespan is at one end of the spectrum, sarcopenia—a disease characterized by a decline in muscle mass and function—is at the other. It’s often thought of as a disease of aging, but it actually affects more than 10 percent of adults in their 20s and 30s, per a recent review in Metabolism.
All of this is to say: “Maintaining muscle isn’t optional,” Dr. Khemani says. “Healthy muscle is one of the most powerful predictors of how long and how well one will live.”
How to Apply It to Life
A well-known truth: “The more active you are, the more you prime your body for muscle,” Dr. Lyon says. This means avoiding sedentary stretches outside of your regularly scheduled exercise programming. “One reason muscle becomes unhealthy is there’s no flux,” she explains. “It’s like a pond that becomes a swamp because nothing is moving.” In an ideal world, you’d get up and move at least every 30 minutes or so, says Heather Milton, exercise physiologist supervisor at NYU Langone’s Sports Performance Center.
Activity may prime the body for muscle, but resistance training builds it. “There’s no replacement for resistance training because [it changes the] muscle fibers,” Dr. Lyon says. As you age, this becomes especially important, since fast-twitch muscle fibers—the ones responsible for strength and explosive movement—naturally shrink. “They decrease in size and number, so you see people go from being buff to being skinny and sarcopenic,” she says. “You have to make sure you’re maintaining fast-twitch fibers through strength and power training.” She personally combines strength and power work in one session by integrating moves that require power—like medicine ball slams—into her strength workouts.
Strength training twice a week is the recommended minimum, says Deborah Gomez Kwolek, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the founding lead of the Mass General Women’s Health and Sex and Gender Medicine Program. You can start small, using dumbbells at home, and work your way up to three or four sessions a week. Arellano Simpson is a good case study: She began with 15-minute strength training workouts on the Ladder app. Now she does two lower-body workouts and two upper-body workouts through the app every week.
No matter how often you train, you want to target all major muscle groups—chest, back, legs, shoulders, arms, and core—and lift enough weight to put sufficient stress on the muscles so that they have to adapt. “Choose a weight that, by the last repetition, you could probably do only about one or two more times before failure, or before your form breaks,” Milton says. She suggests training primarily in a hypertrophy (or muscle growth) rep range, which is three to six sets of 8 to 12 repetitions of an exercise. Perhaps most important: Continually challenge yourself in new ways through progressive stimulus—increasing the intensity, volume, and/or complexity over time.
And you can’t skip taking a protein-first approach to nutrition. Dr. Lyon recommends that women consume 0.7 to 1 gram of protein per pound of target body weight, but no less than 100 grams per day; the older and more active you are, the more you need. Once protein needs are met, she adds, most metabolically healthy people can then divvy up the rest of their daily calories between carbs and fats as they like.
Okay, you may feel as if you have a lot of homework now! But the flip side of allll of these tasks is recovery. It’s critical to nail the right work-to-rest ratio so your muscles have enough time to recover, adapt, and become healthier, Milton says. “If you are doing higher-intensity exercise or lifting for the same muscle groups every day, your system doesn’t have a chance to repair that tissue,” she says. Strength training causes microscopic tears to the muscles, which require at least 48 hours to repair and come back stronger. That’s why sleep is imperative: “When we sleep, the hormones that create those adaptations are at their peak,” Milton says.
Musclespan isn’t built in a day—but with strategic training, enough protein, and real rest, you can create a body with built-in armor. As Dr. Khemani puts it: If you want to stay active, independent, and mentally sharp, “muscle is necessary.”
How to Measure Your Musclespan
If you can do more than one of these tests, you’ll paint a holistic picture of your muscle health.
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Train three functional movement patterns. “I believe everyone should be able to do a push-up, a pull-up, and a good bodyweight squat,” Dr. Lyon says. Push-ups in particular are a barometer of musclespan over time, says Milton. She points to a study that found that men who could do 40 push-ups had a lower risk of morbidity and death than those who could do only 10. (Women would likely see similar benefits with fewer reps, though a comparable study hasn’t been done yet, Milton says.) Dr. Lyon recommends performing a self-assessment using these three moves—how many can you do with good form?—aiming for 10 push-ups, 1 unassisted pull-up, and 25-plus squats as a benchmark.
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Test your grip strength. In addition to being a “fundamental metric” when it comes to muscle function and overall physical capacity, grip strength was proposed as a “new vital sign of health” in a recent review in the Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition. “Grip strength is an easy test that can be done on most populations without injury risk, and it has strong correlations to overall function and strength,” Milton says. You can find grip strength testers—called dynamometers—on Amazon.
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Know your VO2 max. This metric tells you how much oxygen you use during exercise. “In the clinical world, we use aerobic capacity to measure your risk for early morbidity and mortality,” says Milton. It’s measured while you’re engaged in cardio, but muscle mass is one of the main components determining your number. “Muscle is the tissue with the mitochondria that utilize oxygen to produce ATP—which is the molecule needed for contraction,” she explains. Ensuring your VO2 max falls within a healthy range for your age and gender (look for charts online) can also provide insight into your overall muscle health. You can get a VO2 max test at a lab (give it a Google for locations near you) or use a wearable, like an Apple Watch or Oura Ring, for a general idea.
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Have blood work done. Remember how muscle helps regulate metabolism? Well, looking at the blood markers related to metabolic syndrome—like triglycerides, insulin, and glucose—can be a clue to your muscular health. “All of those are indicators of metabolic syndrome, which is [in actuality] unhealthy skeletal muscle,” Dr. Lyon says. She recommends having blood work performed quarterly to check your numbers. While most of the tests can be ordered by a primary care provider during a routine physical, insulin isn’t always included, she notes, so ask for a fasting insulin test specifically.
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Consider a scan. A DEXA scan is a type of X-ray exam that uses a small amount of radiation to look at your bone density. While valuable as an additional resource, it’s often expensive and less accessible, making it more like a beneficial bonus if your budget allows.
Ready to level up your grip strength—and upper-body power? Check out the WH+ Ultimate Pull-Up Plan PDF, a six-week strength training program that helps you build serious grip strength, one hang, row, and pull-up at a time.
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