A question of strength
Maintaining muscle mass during fat loss
Q: What is the best training program for muscle maintenance while dieting? Should you try to maintain strength while keeping volume low or should you focus on hypertrophy to pump up the individual muscles?
A: First of all, muscle loss during a diet won't be a real risk as long as you don't get below 9% body fat.
The point is that if you train hard enough and eat enough protein, there is no need to worry about muscle loss until you are lean or close to that body fat percentage.
You may have the impression that you are losing muscle because you feel and look less muscular. You tend to lose water, intramuscular triglycerides, glycogen, etc. during a diet. And unfortunately, you won't look that much better when you're really lean. So you'll feel thinner without looking significantly more muscular. The main reason you might be losing muscle while training hard is the overproduction of cortisol. Cortisol is known as the stress hormone because it is released during periods of stress. Training is stress. And so is inadequate food intake. A chronic and excessive increase in cortisol levels is the main reason for a loss of muscle mass, as this scenario directly stimulates a breakdown of muscle tissue. It also slows down muscle repair and rebuilding of muscle tissue after exercise by inhibiting the function of the immune system (which is involved in muscle growth) and limiting the amount of muscle mass you gain by increasing myostatin levels. (Myostatin is a protein that controls how much muscle mass your body can build, with more myostatin meaning less muscle). The function of cortisol during a training session is to mobilize energy so that sufficient energy is available to the muscles. The higher your training volume per training session, the more cortisol your body will produce, which is the reason why in steroid-free exercisers, increasing training volume while reducing calorie intake during a diet can lead to muscle loss. "But bodybuilding gurus recommend that you do a ton of volume to burn fat." Well, if you are using steroids then this will work as steroids will protect you from the muscle wasting effects of cortisol. However, if you are a steroid-free exerciser, then using your workouts to burn more calories is one of the best ways to lose muscle. I am not against high repetition ranges for fat loss. Sets that are 40 to 70 seconds long can be effective when it comes to preventing muscle loss while dieting. These lighter sets don't cause as much muscle damage and are easier to recover from. This is also the duration of the set where there is the greatest release of lactic acid, which itself is anabolic - it can help to maintain existing muscle mass. Using some lactate training in combination with some heavier training is the best combination for maintaining muscle mass, as both types of training provide different stimuli that will make it easier to maintain or even build muscle. The key is to keep the overall volume low and the overall frequency high: Q: What is the most common reason for a standing barbell shoulder press plateau and how can it be broken? A: The most obvious reason is that this exercise is under-trained compared to bench presses and other pressing exercises. You should be able to use 60% of your maximum weight on the bench press on the standing shoulder press - both with good form and no bending. If you bench press the minimum macho weight of 140 kilos, this means that you should be able to press at least 85 kilos overhead in good form when shoulder pressing. Someone who is considered strong in the shoulder press must be able to press at least their bodyweight. Few people can do this, however, because this old standard was defined when the shoulder press - not the bench press - was still the primary upper body exercise. And what did people do when the standing shoulder press was still the primary upper body exercise? They did what most guys do today with the bench press: they trained it more often and harder than other exercises. So if you want to improve your shoulder press performance, my first recommendation is to train this exercise more often. Here is a basic tutorial: Most people are not technically efficient when it comes to pressing a weight up over their head. And as a result, they are not good at showing their full strength in this exercise. If you really want to be good at this exercise, you should train it three times a week. One of the workouts should focus solely on shoulder presses and would consist of heavy shoulder presses and supporting exercises for the shoulder press. The other two workouts should consist of technical training for the press followed by your regular training. It is important that you reduce your bench press for a period of time if you are trying to increase your shoulder press performance. A. Standing shoulder press Then carry out your regular training A. Standing shoulder press B. Support exercises for shoulder presses Here you choose a basic exercise to strengthen the weak point in your shoulder press. Use this table to help you choose the right exercise: Weak point Cause Possible support exercises Start from the collarbone Front shoulder muscles and/or upper pectoral head Incline bench press with an angle of 60 to 75 degrees Nose level External shoulder rotators Cuban presses or seated transfer and press with dumbbells Forehead height Lateral or posterior shoulder muscles Bradford Presses or Arnold Presses Highest point of the movement Long head of triceps, shoulder instability or lack of mobility Partial repetitions shoulder presses over the upper third of the range of motion, push presses or shoulder presses standing with hanging bands technique. Change the support exercise every 4 weeks. Train in a repetition range of 4 to 6 repetitions. Try to increase the weight, but not at the expense of form. C. Vertical pull exercise At this point you will perform a vertical pull exercise with a repetition range of 6 to 8 reps, focusing on full range of motion, complete control and the mind-muscle connection. Perform 3 to 5 sets. D. An isolation exercise for a lagging muscle group (see table) A. Military Press Then perform your regular training session Q: If you can increase the weight on an exercise but stop feeling the target muscle working with increased weight, is it better to stay at the same weight and feel the mind-muscle connection? My goal is hypertrophy. A: This is an excellent question and the answer depends on the exercise and the purpose of the exercise. If hypertrophy is your goal, maintaining a good mind-muscle connection with the target muscle is more important than for someone who is training for strength and for whom the primary goal is to move a weight from A to B. Even in the case of someone training for strength, not feeling the right muscle can be a sign that other muscles are compensating and not the right muscles are doing the work. If I'm training someone whose goal is to increase strength, I'll be a little more generous in the main exercise of the session when it comes to allowing the exerciser to feel a little less, BUT if they feel the weight more in the joints than in the muscles, then I'll reduce the weight. With support exercises, I don't increase the weight if the feeling is lost because the purpose of support exercises is to eliminate weak points. A loss of feeling in the target muscle is usually a sign of compensation, which means that the exercise is not optimally addressing the weak point I am trying to eliminate. If you're training to build muscle mass, then it's even more important to feel the target muscle. A study by Dr. Brad Schoenfeld and Dr. Bret Contreras recently showed that the hypertrophy response is stronger when the mind-muscle connection is better (1). However, I would like to mention one caveat. Dr. Nick Winkelmann, the Head of the Sports Performance & Science team at the Irish Rugby Football Union has shown that when it comes to performance and complex movements, external cues and focus are better than internal cues and focus. This means that when performing a multi-joint exercise (bench press, Olympic weightlifting exercises, standing shoulder press, pull-ups, etc.) it is better to have an external focus. External focus means that you put your body in relation to your environment to make the whole body do the right thing. For isolation exercises and machine exercises, you should have an internal focus - concentrate on squeezing the target muscle hard. For multi-joint exercises with free weights, on the other hand, you should have an external focus. With squats, bench presses or Romanian deadlifts, you will feel the exercise correctly if you concentrate on optimal movement mechanics - i.e. perfect technique. If you can no longer feel the big exercises properly (you start to feel the exercise in your joints and become unstable), then the weight is too heavy for your level of technical perfection. Feeling an isolation exercise or machine exercise is not the same as feeling a multi-joint exercise with free weights. Feeling an isolation exercise is all about maximizing the mind-muscle connection with a single muscle. A multi-joint exercise is all about distributing the load across the muscles involved in the best possible way. You may not feel the same direct tension in one muscle, but the exercise should just feel good. Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/question-of-strength-51, https://www.t-nation.com/training/question-of-strength-52 By Christian ThibaudeauThe cortisol factor
The two key roles of cortisol are as follows:
Repetition ranges and fat loss
Breaking through a plateau in the shoulder press
Day 1 - Technique
Day 2 - heavy
Day 3 - Technique
Mind-muscle connection vs. more weight
Training for strength
Training for muscle mass
Here are some examples:
In Romanian deadlifts:
For power cleans:
When bench pressing:
For squats:
Summary
Reference: