Lifting weights to build muscle can help your body store more sugar and improve blood sugar control over time, leading to lower fasting blood sugar and better insulin sensitivity.

If you're an experienced lifter trying to get stronger, building more muscle—like by sometimes pushing your sets to the max—can help boost your strength over time.

Even though lifting weights makes your body release growth hormone and testosterone, studies show that these short-term hormone surges don’t actually make your muscles grow bigger over time.

When you exercise, your muscles make more of a protein called GLUT4 that helps pull sugar from your blood. This is the strongest known way to increase this protein, and it helps your body use sugar better and store more energy in your muscles, whether you're healthy or have a disease.

The total amount of work done (weight × reps × sets) seems to matter for muscle growth — more work generally leads to more muscle, even if the weights are light.

When you move your muscles through their full stretch and contraction during exercise—like fully lowering and raising a dumbbell—you build more muscle than if you only move partway, because the muscle gets stretched under load, which seems to trigger better growth.