The definitive guide to preventing muscle loss
Believe me, I know what you're going through right now. You feel miserable because you can't go to the gym.
Aside from losing your stress relief valve, you're probably experiencing a strange kind of body dysmorphia that's not too different from what people who suffer from anorexia experience and constantly worry about being too fat - except that you're constantly worrying about being too thin or physically underdeveloped.
Accordingly, your inability to go to the gym has probably put you in one of the following three camps:
- Even though you know it's completely impossible to turn muscle into fat, you're firmly convinced it's happening.
- You think you're losing muscle every minute. You feel like Captain America, but you're going through the transformation in the other direction. Muscular Steve Rogers gets into the pod and minutes later, skinny little Steve Rogers gets out of the pod and is assigned to the typing pool.
- You're bi - bi-paranoid - and depending on the time of day, you either think you look as scrawny as one of the teenagers from almost every British Netflix comedy series, or as lardy as one of those twins who ride mini motorcycles and whose fat ass nearly grinds on the ground every time you turn a corner.
I'm here to tell you that there's nothing wrong with you - it's mostly your mind playing tricks on you. Of course you're going to lose some muscle - even if you do some smart and challenging workouts at home. However, there are a few smart nutritional strategies you can adopt to keep your muscles while preventing you from getting fat.
But first, let's confront your fears.
How much will you lose?
We know pretty well that "mechanical unloading" - a technical term for sitting idly on your butt - results in a reduction in the number of satellite cells and that the size of your muscles depends to a not insignificant extent on the number and size of these satellite cells.
Apart from this, not much is known scientifically about the rate at which healthy exercisers lose muscle when they are unable to perform regular resistance training. The only directly related research I could find looked at the effects of a paltry two-week break from training.
The exercisers in this study who continued to consume their usual amount of protein lost absolutely nothing in terms of strength and muscle mass - which was not true for those who didn't maintain their protein habits. That's great, but unfortunately not much is known about a time-out lasting longer than two weeks.
However, there is plenty of research on the loss of strength and muscle mass that comes with complete immobilization, such as can occur after serious accidents.
In cases such as these, there appears to be an initial 14-day cushion during which bedridden patients are able to maintain most of their strength and muscle mass, but after this phase both tend to decline rapidly.
On average, these patients lose about 0.5% of their lean body mass and 1.5% of their strength per day (after the aforementioned 14-day phase), but as mentioned earlier, these are bedridden patients and not healthy exercisers who for some reason do not have access to a gym.
Fortunately, we have at least plenty of anecdotal experimental experience reports that tell us that the loss of strength and muscle mass from a relatively long period of time off, with some exercise still involved, is not nearly as bad.
For example, there is the story of a Canadian Olympic weightlifting champion who was unable to train for 5 years due to his career and family commitments, and who managed to regain 90% of his former strength within 2 to 3 months despite this extremely long training hiatus.
The average exerciser will probably lose between 3 and 5 kilos of muscle mass during a three-month training break. We're talking about a three-month period during which you live like a non-training person, doing no real physical work apart from taking out the trash once a week.
Of course, you'll lose significantly less strength and muscle mass if you do any kind of regular exercise - even if it's less ideal and involves household objects like crates of drinks, a bowling ball or busts of Beethoven or Mozart.
Of course, losing any amount of muscle mass can be emotionally distressing, but this is where some of the studies on loss of strength and muscle mass in bedridden subjects come in - they at least provide us with some nutritional strategies that can help minimize the loss of strength and muscle mass in healthy but gym-less people.
Here are these strategies in descending order from least important to most important.
8 - Regulate your energy intake
Yes, this goes without saying - but probably not for the reasons you'd think.
Of course, you know that not exercising makes you more prone to getting fat, but excessive energy (calorie) intake during periods of inactivity does something else - it's associated with higher systemic markers of systemic inflammation known as C-reactive proteins, which impair body-wide protein turnover.
A positive energy balance during periods of inactivity is associated with higher levels of muscle atrophy, although this may seem counter-intuitive. For the sake of your waistline and your muscles, you should therefore optimize your energy intake. Eating enough calories will help maintain your muscle mass. Eating too many calories, on the other hand, will help break down those muscles and also make you fat.
If you're gaining weight, you're obviously eating too much junk food and other treats and your muscles will pay the price.
7 - Spread your protein intake evenly
When we exercise, most of us spread our protein intake evenly over three meals (and of course the many extra snacks we eat between those meals.
However, when we don't go to the gym, we tend to revert to our old "civilian" habits, which include shifting the largest amount of our daily protein intake towards the evening meal. This is a mistake. An even distribution of protein intake throughout the day has been shown to promote a 25% higher protein synthesis response compared to an irregular pattern.
So if you eat 30 grams of protein at dinner, you should also try to eat 30 grams of protein at breakfast and 30 grams at lunch.
6 - Extinguish the flame
If you're not exercising, it's likely that you're stressed. Combine this with any poor eating habits you may have picked up during your inactive phase and it's likely that your body will have elevated levels of inflammation. Sustained systemic inflammation is not a good thing in general, but it has also been shown that inflammation is the primary negative regulator of skeletal muscle protein synthesis during periods of muscle wasting.
To keep inflammation under control, you should eat anti-inflammatory foods such as oily fish, olive oil, green leafy vegetables or nuts such as almonds and walnuts. If you can afford the supplement route, you can also take fish oil capsules and/or curcumin.
5 - Use antioxidants
Oxidative stress is linked to inflammation, but it's not the only cause. Other things can also cause this type of stress - things like too little physical activity, environmental stress, too little sleep, a less-than-optimal diet, etc.
Regardless of the cause, there is increasing evidence that oxidative stress is directly linked to skeletal muscle atrophy.
When the number of reactive oxygen species in the muscles increases, this leads to DNA fragmentation and protein oxidation, all of which leads to apoptosis - another word for muscle cell death. Under the microscope, the whole thing would look a lot like the Starship Enterprise after being riddled with holes by the phasers of a Klingon spaceship.
One remedy for high levels of oxidative stress is an intake of antioxidants, which is thought to be a useful approach to reducing the muscle breakdown associated with muscle wasting diseases.
For this reason, you should eat selected fruits, berries, vegetables and plant foods in general and if you are not getting at least four servings of these per day, you should consider using supplements that contain antioxidants in concentrated form.
4 - Use creatine
We all know what creatine does for exercisers who actually train with weights, but there is also scientific evidence that creatine also helps to maintain muscle mass during periods of inactivity.
Johnston et al found that exercisers who were given creatine and had one arm immobilized for two weeks maintained their upper arm muscles better than a second group who were only given a placebo. Creatine also reduced the reduction in elbow flexion strength (-4.1% vs. 21.5%) and the reduction in elbow flexion strength (-3.8% vs. -18.3%).
Again, these studies involved limb immobilization, so we can only extrapolate from these results. One conclusion would be that if you were using creatine before your training break, you should consider using it during your training break as well.
Creatine has many healthy properties. Among them, it at least increased the amount of fluid in the muscle cells, which at least gives you the appearance of someone who hasn't missed any training sessions.
3 - Keep your testosterone levels high
Stress reduces testosterone levels, which also applies to inactivity. And when testosterone levels drop, so does protein synthesis.
Although we do not want to tempt anyone to use banned performance-enhancing substances and have good reasons for rejecting the use of these compounds, it should be mentioned for the sake of completeness that an increase in testosterone levels can help to counteract muscle loss. Numerous studies support this, although most of these studies did not look at athletes who had to take a break from training, but focused on patients suffering from serious illnesses that included muscle atrophy as a side effect.
As a healthier alternative, it may also be helpful to ensure that testosterone levels remain in the normal range or are even slightly elevated. To achieve this, you could consider using legally available testosterone booster supplements.
2 - Take leucine between meals
This branched-chain amino acid has been shown in several studies to maintain muscle mass, strength and endurance in bedridden patients. Leucine is known as a "nutrient signal" because it reduces muscle protein breakdown while stimulating muscle protein synthesis. It does this by stimulating the mTOR pathway and other signaling pathways. These pathways are known to become resistant to leucine in the case of chronic inflammation or oxidative stress, both scenarios that are common when immobilized or disused.
A few grams of leucine can be enough to provide an anabolic boost between meals when the body is lacking protein. Taking it in combination with all other essential amino acids in the form of an EAA supplement can further help reduce muscle breakdown.
1 - Ensure adequate protein intake every day
One of the problems of not using muscle is that it induces anabolic resistance, which reduces the protein synthesis response to protein consumption. This makes it all the more important that you keep your protein intake in the adequate range, if not high.
If you were consuming 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day before your training break, you should also consume at least 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day - or more - during your training break. You can consume this amount of protein in the form of whole foods, but this can put you at risk of exceeding your daily calorie consumption - and we have already looked at the negative effects of this.
A good alternative is to use a protein supplement that provides you with large amounts of protein without excess calories.
This time will also pass.
You've probably noticed that most of the nutritional strategies mentioned above for preventing muscle loss during a training break are the same as those you should use if you train hard and often.
This shouldn't be too surprising. At the end of the day, muscles are still muscles. They just need a little more of everything when you train.
But even if you lose some muscle mass during your training abstinence, keep in mind that when you are able to train again, you will be rested, regenerated and ready to train hard. You will quickly rebuild what you have lost due to muscle memory - a phenomenon that is now scientifically proven.
In the meantime, you can think about what you want to do when you can go back to the gym. In a way, it's a way to start over. Personally, I've said to myself at several points over the years "If I had to start over and knew what I know today, I'd do a lot of things differently."
I'm sure you've said this to yourself at some point. If this is the case, then you now have the chance to start again and do things properly. Do without stupid programs and exercises. Follow a plan. Train more deadlifts and less curls. Do the right thing when it comes to your diet.
Have a plan!
References:
- Arny Ferrando, et al. "EAA supplementation to increase nitrogen intake improves muscle function during bed rest in the elderly," Clinical Nutrition, Volume 29, Issue 1, February 2010, pages 18-23.
- Elfego Galvan, Emily Arentson-Lantz, Séverine Lamon, and Douglas Paddon-Jones "Protecting Skeletal Muscle with Protein and Amino Acid during Periods of Disuse," Nutrients. 2016 Jul; 8(7): 404.
- Hugues Magne, et al, "Nutritional strategies to counteract muscle atrophy caused by disuse and to improve recovery," Nutrition Research Reviews, Volume 26, Issue 2, December 2013, pp. 149-165.
- Adam Johnston, et al. "Effect of Creatine Supplementation During Cast-Induced Immobilization on the Preservation of Muscle Mass, Strength, and Endurance," The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 23 (1), 116-120, Jan 2009.
- Mettler S, Mitchell N, Tipton KD, "Increased protein intake reduces lean body mass loss during weight loss in athletes." Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2010 Feb;42(2):326-37.
- Phillips, SM, Glover, EI & Rennie, MJ, "Alterations of protein turnover underlying disuse atrophy in human skeletal muscle" J Appl Physiol 107, 2009, 645-654.
Source: https://www.t-nation.com/supplements/prevent-muscle-loss-the-definitive-guide
From TC Luoma