Health benfits of muscle mass

Good post from Mark's Daily Apple on how many calories muscle mass really burns at rest, and more importantly, how important muscle mass is for helping control insulin sensitivity, faster recovery from injury and other benefits.

Now that you’ve (hopefully) ceded the “idle muscle burns fat” idea, we need to go further. Let’s stop thinking of exercise and weight loss in mechanistic terms. Let’s not think of “burning” calories by subjecting our bodies to punishment. Sure, you could grind away and, with enough volume and intensity, “burn” off calories through sheer force of will. If your only concern is that you maintain low body fat, you could eat a bad diet and run fifteen miles a day. I did, and I was skinny. It “works.” But isn’t it much more freeing to realize that 80% of your body comp will come through proper diet, meaning you don’t have to grind on the treadmill and you can instead explore the joy of movement for its own sake? Isn’t it more elegant to imagine the hormonal cascade that heavy lifting jumpstarts and which gently nudges one’s physiology toward leanness and away from adiposity?