The term “lean muscle mass” gets thrown around quite a bit in the fitness industry. Google the phrase and you’ll see it’s everywhere. I can’t remember whether Jeff or I noticed it first, but the term is redundant. It’s one of those things that we point and laugh at when we see it, because it’s become a catch phrase.
You see, muscle falls under the lean tissue umbrella along with things like bone and organs, so there isn’t any need to qualify muscle as lean. It’s inherent in the word muscle itself. Of course there is the fact that fat can accumulate in muscle, but the term lean muscle mass is not being used in opposition to this occurrence. Saying “lean muscle mass” or “lean muscle” is like saying “Hey, I went to this online website.”
About a week ago I was reading through our book, getting reacquainted with some of the verbiage we used, and there it was. On page 142 in the Myths section… “lean muscle mass.” My jaw dropped. Once the irony of the situation sunk in, I had to laugh. I don’t know how this even got in our book in the first place, let along made it past all the proof-reading we’ve done.
I have one possible explanation. During the writing of SPEED, I would insert things into my texts to make us laugh when we re-read it. Sometimes these took the form of complete sentences or paragraphs, and sometimes they were just little phrases that would stick out and give us a chuckle. I guess writing the book was getting stressful and I thought these would help break the tension. I may have originally used this phrase with this in mind thinking Jeff would catch it and we’d have a laugh, and somehow it slipped through to printing.
Of course, there’s another explanation. It’s Jeff’s fault 🙂