If you are loving what you're learning in the podcast and you want to start applying it to your

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visit portal.evilfitness.com. I'm Dr. Shannon Ritchie. I'm a doctor of physical therapy, fitness trainer, and founder

of Ethelof Fitness. In the Dr. Shannon show, you'll learn applicable tools to improve your

health based on science. Welcome to the show.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back. So in the beginning of this year, really at the end of last year, I dropped an episode called Building Five Pounds of Muscle in 2025.

And so many of you have set that goal for this year, which I think is absolutely incredible.

If you haven't listened to that episode, make sure to listen to that episode because the information in this episode will build upon that episode.

But what I want to do is each quarter of this year, with the exception of when I'm on

maternity leave, so maybe we won't do one in Q3,

update you with how things are going for me, how things are going for the members, and what

questions that you have or things that you're struggling with. So first of all, if you're not

already on board with building muscle, I really, really want to get you there because building

muscle has incredible

benefits for our metabolic health, for our functionality, for the physical appearance of what we look

like. When we talk about metabolic health, you might have heard that muscle is your biggest

glucose sink. Basically,

what that means is as you build more muscle mass, you have more available glycogen sites.

So the food that you eat gets converted into glucose and then converted into glycogen and stored

in the muscle. So when you have more muscle mass, you are able to store more glycogen in the muscle.

The glucose in your bloodstream is lower. Therefore, your insulin sensitivity improves.

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