There are many fitness minded individuals who view muscle building as the “weak sister” of exercise. Building endurance, or greater stamina, is generally viewed as the first (and, to some, the sole) requisite of health and fitness. Others might place flexibility in this premiere category, as without that plasticity of range, our gait is shortened, our posture is slouched, and our mobility impaired.

It is becoming more and more the scientific position, however, that muscle building is the most important factor in physical fitness and that, without it, the other two factors could not only not be improved, but would not even exist.

Every time you move, from raising an eyebrow to taking a step, it is muscular action that is responsible. It is muscle that moves the limbs (as in flexibility) and causes the heart (which is itself a muscle) to beat faster (as in endurance and cardiovascular efficiency). Tony Robbins, the internationally acclaimed peak performance coach, recently wrote in his introduction to my book Max Contraction Training: The Scientifically Proven Program For Building Muscle Mass In Minimum Time (Contemporary Books, Chicago) that:

You can make all kinds of changes to your emotions, your relationships, but if you’re physically unable to follow through on your decisions, its all for naught. Unfortunately, one thing that I have learned, after more than a quarter of a century working with 3 million people from 80 different countries, is that most people don’t truly realize how interconnected physical fitness – including strength training – is to fulfilling your potential at the highest level.

Let us, for the moment, divest the term “muscle” of its popular magazine and dumbbell lifting connotations. It remains the sine qua non of human effectiveness on whatever plain of existence you may choose to evaluate our species. Muscle has built all the roads, cities and machines in the world, written all the books, spoken all the words and, in fact, as Professor G. Stanley Hall wrote over 100 years ago:

Muscles have, in fact, done everything that man has accomplished with matter. If they are underdeveloped, or grow relaxed and flabby, the dreadful chasm between good intentions and their execution is liable to appear and widen. Character might be in a sense defined as a plexus of motor habits… The muscles are by weight about 43 percent of the average adult male human body. They expend a large portion of all the kinetic energy of the adult body … The cortical centers for the voluntary muscles extend over most of the lateral psychic zones of the brain, so that their culture (the culture of muscles) is brain building. In a sense they are the organs of digestions. They are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will.

Aware of the importance of muscle in human activity, virtually all of the better fitness centers provide strength or resistance training equipment for their clients, along with expert advice on how to best strengthen your body. But whether or not you choose to join a fitness center or prefer to train at home with a home gym set, it is vitally important to your total health and fitness that you engage in some form of muscle strengthening exercise. So many of us rust out rather than wear out owing to a purposeful neglect of our muscles. Even those who exercise (particularly on their own) often fall far short of their full human potential by neglect of proper muscle training. Many believe that they simply don’t have the time for such training. After all, strength training requires at least several hours a week and a major lifestyle change, right? Wrong. Scientific research (including my own over the past two decades) has revealed that muscle size and strength – and even an increase in cardiovascular conditioning and flexibility (the core of “total fitness”) can be accomplished with as little as two 10-minute training sessions per week. And the good news is that as you get stronger, even less training is required to continue to improve your level of strength fitness.

To call conduct three-fourths of life, with Matthew Arnold; to describe man as one-third intellect and two-thirds will, with Schopenhauer; to urge that man is what he does or that is the sum of his movements, with F.W. Robertson; that character is simply muscle-habit with Mandsley; that history is consciously –willed movements, with Bluntschli; or that we could form no conception of force or energy in the world but for our own muscular efforts; to hold that most thought involves change of muscle tension as more or less integral to it – gives us a new sense of the importance of muscular development and regimen.