The Saturday Standard — Vol. 20

Saturday, September 19, 2026

As always, coffee first, fellas — and let's clear up some confusion on the amount of muscle you have being more important than the amount of muscle being used.

The Research

Muscle is a storage tank, but it is also metabolically active

We usually think about muscle in terms of how much of it we have. More muscle, more strength, better metabolic health. Less muscle, worse in all the same categories. If something is going wrong, the obvious fix is simply to build more muscle.

There is some truth to this, but it's missing a big piece.

Muscle behaves differently depending on what has been asked of it recently — and that happens without the amount of muscle changing at all.

The original research that defined this.

Six healthy young men did one hour of dynamic knee extensions with one leg. The other leg just sat there doing a whole lot of nothing.

Four hours later, researchers infused insulin and glucose into the bloodstream and held both steady, then measured how much glucose each thigh pulled out of that same blood supply.

The goal was to see how much glucose each muscle would take in.

The exercised thigh took up far more glucose than the rested thigh, regardless of the insulin concentration tested.

(Richter EA, Mikines KJ, Galbo H, Kiens B. J Appl Physiol. 1989 Feb;66(2):876-885. PMID: 2496078)

Put simply, nothing about the man changed. Nothing about his muscle mass changed — you don't grow bigger muscles in four hours. The only difference was that one leg had recently been used. The muscle didn't get bigger. It got better at its job.

Recent evidence shines a brighter light on this.

In 2017, further research using the same one-legged design found that after a single bout, the exercised leg took up roughly 50% more glucose than the rested one, driven by a coordinated increase in microvascular perfusion — more blood actually reaching the muscle — alongside changes in the signaling that moves glucose across the cell membrane.

(Sjøberg KA, et al. Diabetes. 2017 Jun;66(6):1501-1510. doi:10.2337/db16-1327)

So two things had to improve at once: delivery of the glucose, and the muscle's ability to pull it in and dispose of it. Exercise improved both of those, in mere hours.

The finding you should walk away with.

Much of the insulin-sensitizing benefit of exercise comes from your most recent sessions — not from accumulated training or from your "fitness" as a stored asset.

And that benefit is relatively short lived, to the tune of 24 to 48 hours.

(Newsom SA, et al. Diabetes Care. 2013 Sep;36(9):2516-2522)

The takeaway here is that you don't "bank" metabolic health in your muscle and draw on it later. You "rent" it, and the payment is due every day or two.

Let me be clear, this does not make muscle mass worthless.

Plenty of research shows us that those with greater muscle mass have better metabolic health.

Bredella et al. looked at 132 healthy adults carrying extra weight. The men with the most muscle for their size handled insulin about twice as well as the men with the least — and that held up even after accounting for how much fat they were carrying, including the fat stored around the organs and inside the muscle itself.

(Bredella MA, et al. Int J Obes. 2020;44(9):1851-1858. PMID: 32404950)

So, more muscle, better metabolic health. That is completely real, as muscle is a sponge.

But the factor we are missing is how much that muscle is being USED.

Two men with the same DEXA scan stats can have vastly different metabolic profiles if one is sedentary and the other trains.

What you should know.

Keep lifting. Resistance training makes you stronger, protects muscle while you're losing fat, improves blood sugar control, and preserves your function into old age. None of that is in question.

But stop treating hypertrophy as the price of admission for metabolic benefit. You are not waiting on a bigger muscle to start collecting. The muscle on your frame right now will handle glucose dramatically better tomorrow simply because you used it today.

Which means consistency beats intensity, and frequency beats both. A man who trains four days a week at 70% is metabolically better off than a man who annihilates himself every Saturday then sits still for six days.

Ideally, you should be resistance training 2-3 days a week with most sets being taken to near failure. This will both:

• Build muscle
• Make your current muscle metabolically better

Win-win.

Worth Remembering

I wrote this as my mind was imagining all that I wish I had. Home, cars, professional success, more clients, more this, more of that. I put so much value on the things I don't have.

Meanwhile, a little 16-month-old waddles over to me and says, "up, up, up." I grab her, and she snuggles into my chest.

Do not be so obsessed with what you don't have that you forget what you do have, my brother.

Try This Week

Grab a piece of paper.

Write down, in no particular order, everything you are grateful for.

Your coffee mug. Your wife's patience with your foolishness. Your home. Your son's fart jokes. Your daughter's infectious smile. Your friends. The roof over your head. The kindness you have been shown. The difficulties you have survived.

And if you are not thankful for your golf clubs because your irons are not cooperating... well, get some new ones. Tell your wife I said it was okay.

From the Bookshelf

The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger

Holden Caulfield spends an entire novel cataloguing what is wrong with the world. Everyone is a phony. Everything is depressing. Nothing measures up.

When I read this in high school, I thought he was onto something. People are disappointing, and I hadn't measured up. Reading it as an adult, I realize it is more of a warning.

Because the whole tragedy of the book is that Holden is surrounded by things worth loving and cannot see any of them. His little sister adores him. People try to help him, repeatedly. And he is too busy taking inventory of what's missing to notice any of it.

The one moment he is genuinely happy — the only one in essentially the entire book — is at the very end. He is sitting on a bench, getting soaked by the rain, watching his little sister Phoebe go around on the carousel in her blue coat. He stays out in it. He gets drenched and doesn't care. And he says he felt so happy he was near tears, and that he doesn't know why.

Nothing has been fixed. His problems are all exactly where he left them. He just finally stopped cataloguing long enough to watch his kid sister be happy.

Which is more or less the whole point of this week's issue.

Closing Thought

There is a great sketch called The Four Yorkshiremen, where four gentlemen go back and forth about what they lacked. I encourage you to watch it for a good old-fashioned laugh.

The entire sketch is built around each of them sitting around a table, enjoying cigars, finely dressed, with an expensive bottle of wine, reminiscing on their plights as children.

In the honor of one-upmanship, they each go further down the rabbit hole of what they lacked, and the absurdity grows with each comment.

In a funny way, I want this to be a reminder that even without the absurdity of that back and forth, you can appreciate that we generally have more than we deserve.

All of you reading this are using your thousand-dollar smartphone, drinking coffee in your home, on a Saturday morning.

Luxury if I've ever seen it.

Be grateful today, lads.

Have a great weekend.