Debunked Fitness Myth: Muscle and Fat Tissue Correlation
The Myth: After not exercising for an extended period of time, your muscles will turn into fat.
This is one of the top myths that I hear from other people when trying to give advice on fitness. In theory the phrase is true, but most people take it as that the tissues change from muscle tissue to adipose tissue. This can be debunked because muscle and adipose cells are two distinct types of tissues in the body. To go into further detail about this, we can first look at the different types of muscle tissue.
We have three types of muscle tissues that are categorized as smooth muscles, skeletal muscles, and cardiac muscles. The easiest we can start with is cardiac muscle. This muscle is found in the heart, thus is why it’s called cardiac muscle. This muscle is a type of smooth muscle that works involuntary so you don’t have to think about activating that muscle to keep a constant heartbeat. The difference between cardiac and smooth muscle since they are both involuntary muscles, is cardiac muscle is serrated like skeletal muscle. Now onto smooth muscles, again these are involuntary muscles so you don’t have to think about firing them. These muscles can be found in the walls of your organs, so like your lungs, intestines, stomach, etc. these muscles are not serrated which is why it is called “smooth” muscle. Now the most popular muscle that is known is skeletal muscle. This is serrated muscle that is voluntary. So this would include your biceps, triceps, lats, pecs, the list goes on and on.
Now with adipose tissue, or more commonly known as fat, there are two types. The first is white adipose tissue, or fat, is connective tissue composed of adipocytes. That tissue’s job in the body is to store energy in the form of fat and to cushion and insulate the body. So white fat is for storing nutrients in the body.
Brown adipose tissue is mainly found in infants and decreases the older you get. The reason its found in infants is because at that stage they don’t know how to shiver or keep their body warm so the burning of the brown adipose tissue keeps their body warm. But, brown adipose tissue is actually good for you to have in your body! To start, brown pigment comes from the iron that is integrated in the cells, and the location of the fat is in the front and back of the neck as well as the upper back. It’s function in the body is to burn calories to provide body heat and it’s the iron that gives it this heat fueling property. It’s considered good fat because the tissue burns, rather than store calories.
So, some tips to help turn some of your white fat into brown fat would obviously be exercising. Another suggestion would to get enough high-quality sleep. The reason for that is that having a proper amount of melatonin production will influence the production of brown fat. And just like what I mentioned with infants in how they use it to keep their body warm, exposing yourself to colder conditions regularly or working out in a cold environment will help increase the production brown fat.
So circling back to what really happens when you stop lifting. When a person stops exercising, the muscles will start to decrease in size because the amount of muscle mass isn’t needed anymore like it used to be. Since they become less active, less ATP (energy) is used which means less brown tissue will be burned. With less brown tissue being burned, the buildup of white adipose tissue (fat) in the body increases because it is not being converted and burned off like it would in the gym, so this would increase the buildup of white adipose tissue in the body. So that is why I consider it partially true and partially false. Yes, gain fat and lose muscle, but they do not convert.
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