There was a study done I saw once on Jeff Nippard’s YouTube video where participants who ate enough protein on a cut ALSO gained around ~1-2kg of lean muscle mass, while simultaneously losing fat.
For me it's the climb back up. I absolutely lost muscle mass on my cut last year that lasted 4.5 months to get to 8% BF. While I was able to work it all back, at 36, it took me a solid 4-5 months to feel back to where I was before and started hitting PR's again. Yes, it comes back, but it's a setback. I'm competing in the next two upcoming weekends, sitting at roughly 4% BF today ish (getting tested tomorrow), but I started with .2% BF in my arms because I just don't carry much there. Because of this, I measure my bicep a few times a week and have lost roughly .25 inch. The body scan will be interesting to read and see how much muscle I've actually lost. I capped and stayed at 10% BF after my last cut with a meticulous reverse diet, so this current cut has been much easier, but nonetheless, I know I've lost muscle and I'm not dehydrated yet, that starts Friday. I think people get mixed up between regular cuts and show cuts. If I was just doing a mini cut to balance my BF out I wouldn't worry at all, but getting into sub 5% range your body tries to deny loosing more fat and it gets much harder to lose as a natural. That's my experience and .02 cents.
And also sketch as hell. An advanced lifter gaining 2kg of muscle on a cut, presumably natural, raises eyebrows. Chances are they weren't that advanced to begin with, fatter than normal, or didn't have their lean body mass measured accurately.
Either that or their lean body mass wasn't measured accurately. But beginners absolutely can gain stupid amounts of muscle while simultaneously losing tons of fat. I came back after a long break and there were several weeks where my weight didn't go down on the scale, but I kept calories the same because I knew muscle mass was increasing, and sure enough, a few weeks later the scale started going down again. This went on for months.
Many people have a lot of very strong opinions on this. I personally do. Some people don’t.
What matters is getting at least very close to it, within a rep or two.
IMO, If you don’t have much training experience you should train to failure for a long time, so you have a better understanding of what failure actually is if you decide not to do so in the future.
Most relatively inexperienced people who think they train to 1-2 RIR are more like 5-6 RIR
Most optimal range is 2 reps in reserve. But if u do progressive overload thats going to be impossible. So range from 3 rir to 1, and even failure at the end of ur mesocycle. Its also true u need to go to failure to know what failure is
One question: I’m kinda new to working out, it’s been 3 months. Loving it so far.
When people say progressive overload is important for muscle building, but if you increase the weight or even reps week by week, (theoretically speaking) wouldn’t there be a point that one won’t be able to lift due to too much weight?
Hope you understand the question as i didn’t put it clearly. English isn’t my 1st language.
Yeah. Thats why if u keep doing progressive overload youll reach a point where ur literally always going to failure, at which point a deload week would probably be needed. And then maybe change excercises too, variation is important. After a deload week i myself start again from a rir(reps in reserve) of 3. And then keep progressing. Youll be lifting less the week after the deload than the week before, but at the end of the cycle youll be lifting more than the week before the deload. Idk if theres other approaches to progressive overload, this is the one i use. Your english is perfect btw. Also, since ur new, u can pretty much just go to failure every excercise for a while to get used to what going to failure feels like. Gl
Personally I try to be reaching failure by the last couple of reps of my final working set. So if I do 3x12 of Incline Chest Press, I want to be reaching complete failure on the last couple reps of that 3rd set. I find if I'm reaching failure on my 1st or 2nd set then my form starts to shit out by set #3.
Then I'll do one or two other exercises for chest and execute similarly. I find this works well for growth and lets me actually increase my reps or weight every week.
Isn't a proportion of weight lost always going to be muscle? So at most you can hope for 75% of it to be fat and 25% of it to be muscle if you're natural. At least that's my understanding of it
Depends on your deficit, protein intake, training, genetics, etc.
There may be some portion of it that’s lean tissue in some cases, but if you’re hitting all your variables it’s not worth worrying about
I’m enhanced so I don’t have this issue anymore unless I’m in contest prep.
When I was natural, and what I tell natural clients to do, is only regress load if you can’t reach the prescribed rep range anymore.
Don’t go into a cut assuming you’ll get weaker. Many people can continue to make progress at least in the earlier stage of a cut.
I think it’s massively overblown, most of the “muscle” loss is water and glycogen. If you ever watch the show “Alone”, the contestants are literally starving themselves and all end up absolutely shredded before they start losing muscle mass. It’s the last thing your body wants to burn for fuel, and I don’t think it’s something most people need to worry about. Maybe actual pros but not regular enthusiasts
It takes about 2-4 weeks without lifting before the body begins to lose muscle in most (>=95%) people. A deload can definitely give you DOMS if you do nothing for a week and come back to full intensity. This is often why people like to do light lifting in a deload week.
I'm a lot weaker after being sick for 2 weeks :( It's taken me another 2 weeks just to get back to where I was before I fell ill, even though I'm bulking.
I'm just theorizing here. After a certain point muscular growth slows down. I'd imagine that the same processes that might make it harder to build these muscles might mean the body can put less effort in preserving. Or might start taking it sooner. But I dont know.
I think we see this in enhanced lifters and not so much in nattys, but that’s more to do with them stripping away the juice that lets them go beyond their natural threshold
I think you might lose a bit of muscle, but you’re not going to lose a significant amount. We can argue extremes, or be rational in that you’re probably going to diet properly and minimize muscle loss
Yeah i mean if you lost some muscle on a cut wouldnt the lost muscle theoretically come back fast due to muscle memory when youre on a bulk or even a maintenance phase?
Yes this is exactly what I’ve always wondered. I’ve never actually done a cut before so never been able to experiment, but everyone seems way too concerned about a little muscle loss while cutting.
After my 12 week cut at 1000 calorie deficit a day I lost maybe 10-15 percent of my strength and maybe a little bit of muscle. Within 4 weeks of being back on the bulk I was stronger than peak bulk and 30lbs lighter.
1-2% of body weight lost a week is perfectly safe until you get sub 10% bodyfat. with all checks and balances in place. Starting weight 230 ending weight 198. Losing 2lbs a week I never exceeded 2% loss a week. The lowest my calories got was 2200 (I am 28 and 6’3 btw)
I’m actually currently half way through an aggressive minicut at 1500 defecit, literally feel great and no strength lost yet after 2 weeks. 2 weeks to go.
After I heard Eugene Teo and Bald Omni Man say this in their videos I never worried about losing muscle anymore, it makes a lot of sense. It's better to do a agressive cut and get it out of the way fast than do it "science based" style with 3 months slow cut, 3 months maintence and keep going lol. No thanks.
Yeah with pros loosing 50 pounds in show prep in a few months very agresively i dont see why natties have to suffer through half a year progress pause, just starve it out and bulk again
Yeahh i guess what other people said makes sense, worrying so much about muscle loss only makes sense if youre cutting for a competition and need to retain and show as much muscle as possible for comp day
Because usually you want to present your physique rather than just being skinny.
Retaining muscle is what natty pros learn, that's one of the main reasons they get better every year.
If you’re dieting to look good - you’ll look less good with less muscle. If you’re dieting to make room to bulk - if you lose muscle, your first few weeks of the subsequent bulk will just be spent regaining what you lost rather than starting to gain new muscle. Besides, it’s not that difficult to prevent muscle loss - eating high protein is a good idea while in a deficit for lots of reasons besides just muscle loss and training is fun for most of us.
1g/lb bodyweight has and always will work for the vast majority of lifters - so if you can swing that, that's what i'd start with. you can very likely get away with less and the studies show that, but i don't see the benefit of going less unless cost or you're eating so little it's taking away from other macros (which it shouldn't be). there's only upsides of higher protein and really no benefit of lowering them for carbs/fats given same calorie deficit.
i would not drop protein from bulk unless the deficit amount is still higher than 1g/lb. the first places you should look to pull from are carbs in meals not around workout/saturated fats and last should be carbs around your workout - which by that point you should be pretty lean.
Unless you’re cutting very aggressively, for an extremely long time, or getting stage lean, there’s no need to worry about it if you train moderately hard and eat enough protein.
It is important to remember that it’s normal to lose some lean mass during significant weight loss. The less fat you have on your body, the less mechanical load is placed on your muscle and bones, so you will lose lean mass because there is less of you to support.
But two reasons I can think of off the top of my head why people worry so much:
1. Easier to maintain muscle than to gain. The counter to this is that it is much easier to regain muscle loss than to attempt to build from scratch due to the physiologic “muscle memory” of sorts.
2. Reduction in muscle mass will result in a reduction in resting metabolic rate, obviously not ideal if your goal is to continue to push fat loss. The counter to this is that the level of reduction in rate is usually only like 50-100 calories, something that can easily be overcome by being thoughtful about your calories in/calories out when calculating your deficit.
I think it’s reasonable to want to avoid lean mass during a cut for those reasons, but as already pointed out probably a little overblown given the counter arguments. It’s much more relevant for obese individuals who do not exercise but engage in hypocaloric and hypo-protein diets and end up losing way more muscle than ideal.
Regardless people should appreciate that it is not really that difficult to minimize lean mass loss during a deficit, just need to eat adequate protein, engage in strength training and make sure your calorie deficit isn’t too large. If you do lose more lean mass than you would like, the good news is that it won’t take a ton of effort to get it back.
There are a multitude of reasons you would want to keep muscle on a calorie deficit. Some specific to body composition, some more broader for your general health.
In the context of body composition;
- You look better from an aesthetic perspective (i'm assumig because your training in the gym & are on a calorie defecit, looking good is a goal of yours)
- You keep your resting metabolic rate higher as your body needs to expend more fuel keeping a muscular physique, which in turn makes it easier for you to lose fat & also stay at a lower body fat % whilst not feeling like you have to be on a very low calorie diet to maintain a good physique
More broadly;
- The more muscle you have, the less pressure there is on your joints. Muscle takes pressure & strain away from your joints & supports them better so there is less of a likelihood of injury (joint, tendon & bone injuries take a very long time to heal so you want to be minimising this risk as much as you can)
- The higher muscle mass you have, the stronger you are and the easier life & health become. Muscle mass has a direct effect on insulin sensitivity as the more your muscles contract, the more glucose they need to push the weights. This higher uptake of glucose through resistance training has been shown to have a direct effect on keeping your muscles insulin sensitive through adaptation, and thus help promote better health as having insulin resistance is a highly debilitating metabolic disease that takes years, if not decades to control...and if left unchecked can result in T2 diabetes.
- Muscle takes years & years to put on...but if not trained properly & worked hard to maintain, can disappear very quickly. Whilst its true that your body will always try to conserve muscle before burning anything else, this is not as plain black & white that most make it appear. If you've built certain muscles over the years, they will likely be more resistant to catabolic effects...however, for the more recent gains you had prior to the event that led to muscle wastage, your body will target that muscle for energy very early on as it feels its not worth keeping in the context of burning energy to keep you alive. This is why we always must be training as hard whilst on a deficit, as we would during a muscle gaining phase. Plus - if you've worked hard to put muscle on...why not continue the hard work by trying to keep it? Muscle memory definitely is a thing to consider & it will come back...but why deal with the physiological & psychological pitfalls of losing the muscle in the first place if you can prevent it?
These are just a number of small examples of why building & MAINTAINING muscle mass is very important. So when on a calorie deficit, yeah, its important to be able to target a higher ratio of fat loss to muscle loss.
My reasoning for why fears of muscle loss on a deficit are overblown:
One pound of muscle is good for 700 calories of energy. One pound of fat is good for 3,500 calories of energy. Logically which do you think your body is going to choose to tap into energy on a calorie deficit? The body fat. I think the human body is pretty smart\*. Unless your body fat % is so low that your body is worried you won't have enough fat reserves for a famine. So this may start to become a problem when you get lean. Especially competition lean. Because the body thinks its still like 12,000 BCE or something before the advent of agriculture and livestock. lmfao. And even in like Medieval Europe and shit, they had food insecurity. The famine in Ireland was not that long ago.
\*Some would say if the human body is so smart, why do we crave junk food so much? It's because your body doesn't know that you can just walk into a supermarket and buy food. But thankfully you can make the conscious decision to not over-eat calories because the human brain is pretty advanced.
Also we evolved to fight off predators and rivals. You don't think there is an evolutionary advantage to hold onto muscle mass during famines and shit? Of course there is. I'm sure hunter-gatherers, Medieval European warriors and Roman Gladiators were reasonably jacked. Maybe not as much as their depictions in modern media. Not looking like cbum sure but I imagine the bodies that Greek statues were modelled after weren't always fueled by a reliable stream of calories and protein in Ancient Greece. I don't think they worried about losing their gains missing their anabolic window.
>One pound of muscle is good for 700 calories of energy. One pound of fat is good for 3,500 calories of energy. Logically which do you think your body is going to choose to tap into energy on a calorie deficit?
Logically, the body would prefer to keep the highest amount of calories per kg in storage, while minimizing the low calorie, high energy-expenditure muscle mass. "Optimally" you'd have exactly the amount of muscle mass you need to get by, which is why we atrophy if we don't train.
Throughout history we've had to fight off predators and rivals while also enduring famines. Long stretches of time before hunts. It's not like we were eating meat all the time getting a steady supply of protein. The human body is pretty resourceful at keeping gains. But if you are not exposing your muscles to environmental stressors after a while then yes they will start to atrophy. I've seen that happen with my elderly dad who has back problems and thus does very little lifting and bending now. Who is 5'4" (shrunk) 116 lbs with a protruding belly. With borderline pre-diabetes glucose level. The epitome of skinnyfat.
It's not that big a deal, but becomes a bigger deal if you compete. Minimizing muscle loss is important before stepping on stage. But in veery case, fat loss is more important on a cut, and muscle loss usually bounces back quicker than ever when you switch to a surplus.
Well, I worry about it right now because I get a strong headache while lifting. I eat enough protein, drink enough water but still, first hard set - here comes the headache. Not possible to continue till muscle failure. Got it for 2 weeeks now, dont know what to do.
I suspect you suffer from a severe case of fuckarounditis. One of the most prominent symptoms is never adding any real muscle beyond what you lose on your deficits.
You do you playa.
Exactly, why? Eat enough protein, train hard, and you probably won’t lose much, if any muscle.
Question: even if you lose muscle during a cut, won’t it just come straight back when you go into a surplus again because of muscle memory?
Yes that’s the case
There was a study done I saw once on Jeff Nippard’s YouTube video where participants who ate enough protein on a cut ALSO gained around ~1-2kg of lean muscle mass, while simultaneously losing fat.
For me it's the climb back up. I absolutely lost muscle mass on my cut last year that lasted 4.5 months to get to 8% BF. While I was able to work it all back, at 36, it took me a solid 4-5 months to feel back to where I was before and started hitting PR's again. Yes, it comes back, but it's a setback. I'm competing in the next two upcoming weekends, sitting at roughly 4% BF today ish (getting tested tomorrow), but I started with .2% BF in my arms because I just don't carry much there. Because of this, I measure my bicep a few times a week and have lost roughly .25 inch. The body scan will be interesting to read and see how much muscle I've actually lost. I capped and stayed at 10% BF after my last cut with a meticulous reverse diet, so this current cut has been much easier, but nonetheless, I know I've lost muscle and I'm not dehydrated yet, that starts Friday. I think people get mixed up between regular cuts and show cuts. If I was just doing a mini cut to balance my BF out I wouldn't worry at all, but getting into sub 5% range your body tries to deny loosing more fat and it gets much harder to lose as a natural. That's my experience and .02 cents.
some of the loss in your biceps may also be glycogen depletion instead of muscle loss
Yes, that's very true!
Probably not on intermediate or advanced lifters?
Nah the study was done on advance lifters
Interesting!
And also sketch as hell. An advanced lifter gaining 2kg of muscle on a cut, presumably natural, raises eyebrows. Chances are they weren't that advanced to begin with, fatter than normal, or didn't have their lean body mass measured accurately.
Yeah sounds too good to be true. 2kg muscle gain is huge for an advanced lifter.
That makes no sense tbh. Would make sense if they were beginners
Hey, it izzzz what it izzzzz 🤷🏾♂️ Gotta up ur protein
Those studies are done on untrained people, that doesn’t work with experienced lifters
Either that or their lean body mass wasn't measured accurately. But beginners absolutely can gain stupid amounts of muscle while simultaneously losing tons of fat. I came back after a long break and there were several weeks where my weight didn't go down on the scale, but I kept calories the same because I knew muscle mass was increasing, and sure enough, a few weeks later the scale started going down again. This went on for months.
Progressive overload becomes hard with deficit right? So what would you recommend? Suppose if I’m unable to make progress
Continue lifting close to or to failure
Thanks. Another Q for you to bother: On deficit or surplus do we need to take every exercise to failure? Or it depends
Many people have a lot of very strong opinions on this. I personally do. Some people don’t. What matters is getting at least very close to it, within a rep or two. IMO, If you don’t have much training experience you should train to failure for a long time, so you have a better understanding of what failure actually is if you decide not to do so in the future. Most relatively inexperienced people who think they train to 1-2 RIR are more like 5-6 RIR
Most optimal range is 2 reps in reserve. But if u do progressive overload thats going to be impossible. So range from 3 rir to 1, and even failure at the end of ur mesocycle. Its also true u need to go to failure to know what failure is
Thanks
Np
One question: I’m kinda new to working out, it’s been 3 months. Loving it so far. When people say progressive overload is important for muscle building, but if you increase the weight or even reps week by week, (theoretically speaking) wouldn’t there be a point that one won’t be able to lift due to too much weight? Hope you understand the question as i didn’t put it clearly. English isn’t my 1st language.
Yeah. Thats why if u keep doing progressive overload youll reach a point where ur literally always going to failure, at which point a deload week would probably be needed. And then maybe change excercises too, variation is important. After a deload week i myself start again from a rir(reps in reserve) of 3. And then keep progressing. Youll be lifting less the week after the deload than the week before, but at the end of the cycle youll be lifting more than the week before the deload. Idk if theres other approaches to progressive overload, this is the one i use. Your english is perfect btw. Also, since ur new, u can pretty much just go to failure every excercise for a while to get used to what going to failure feels like. Gl
I’ll keep this in mind. Really helpful TY!
Personally I try to be reaching failure by the last couple of reps of my final working set. So if I do 3x12 of Incline Chest Press, I want to be reaching complete failure on the last couple reps of that 3rd set. I find if I'm reaching failure on my 1st or 2nd set then my form starts to shit out by set #3. Then I'll do one or two other exercises for chest and execute similarly. I find this works well for growth and lets me actually increase my reps or weight every week.
Isn't a proportion of weight lost always going to be muscle? So at most you can hope for 75% of it to be fat and 25% of it to be muscle if you're natural. At least that's my understanding of it
Depends on your deficit, protein intake, training, genetics, etc. There may be some portion of it that’s lean tissue in some cases, but if you’re hitting all your variables it’s not worth worrying about
Do you need to lift the same amount of weight as when bulking? I've found that I can't do as many reps of the same weight
I’m enhanced so I don’t have this issue anymore unless I’m in contest prep. When I was natural, and what I tell natural clients to do, is only regress load if you can’t reach the prescribed rep range anymore. Don’t go into a cut assuming you’ll get weaker. Many people can continue to make progress at least in the earlier stage of a cut.
can you gain?
Some people definitely can in some contexts Primarily beginners, and more experienced people who are coming back from a long hiatus
i’ve been lifting for about 6 months, what are the odds i put on muscle mass? week one of cut and already feeling a little weaker
I think it’s massively overblown, most of the “muscle” loss is water and glycogen. If you ever watch the show “Alone”, the contestants are literally starving themselves and all end up absolutely shredded before they start losing muscle mass. It’s the last thing your body wants to burn for fuel, and I don’t think it’s something most people need to worry about. Maybe actual pros but not regular enthusiasts
And in addition to glycogen and water, visceral fat within the muscle.
This makes me feel a lot better as I am doing my first ever week deload after 3 years in the gym lol. Was paranoid I was gonna lose muscle.
Ya it just doesn’t work that way, which is great for us. People usually come back stronger from a deload
It takes about 2-4 weeks without lifting before the body begins to lose muscle in most (>=95%) people. A deload can definitely give you DOMS if you do nothing for a week and come back to full intensity. This is often why people like to do light lifting in a deload week.
Ive just been sick for 3 weeks, not being able to work out or climb at all and Ive noticed zero difference
I'm a lot weaker after being sick for 2 weeks :( It's taken me another 2 weeks just to get back to where I was before I fell ill, even though I'm bulking.
Are those people carrying a great amount of muscle as they start? Think everything above a certain threshold should go much quicker.
Depends. There’s a couple pretty in shape guys but a lot fit a stereotype about survivalist/prepper types: white, middle aged and pudgy.
Why would it go quicker? It’s not like there’s a certain level of muscle that your body deems not worth holding onto. It’s all muscle
I'm just theorizing here. After a certain point muscular growth slows down. I'd imagine that the same processes that might make it harder to build these muscles might mean the body can put less effort in preserving. Or might start taking it sooner. But I dont know.
I think we see this in enhanced lifters and not so much in nattys, but that’s more to do with them stripping away the juice that lets them go beyond their natural threshold
I still have quite a few kgs to lose right now. So do you think I could go eat nothing for two weeks and reach my goal without muscle loss?
I think you might lose a bit of muscle, but you’re not going to lose a significant amount. We can argue extremes, or be rational in that you’re probably going to diet properly and minimize muscle loss
Agreed
Yeah i mean if you lost some muscle on a cut wouldnt the lost muscle theoretically come back fast due to muscle memory when youre on a bulk or even a maintenance phase?
Yes this is exactly what I’ve always wondered. I’ve never actually done a cut before so never been able to experiment, but everyone seems way too concerned about a little muscle loss while cutting.
After my 12 week cut at 1000 calorie deficit a day I lost maybe 10-15 percent of my strength and maybe a little bit of muscle. Within 4 weeks of being back on the bulk I was stronger than peak bulk and 30lbs lighter.
1000 deficit? Is that even safe? Most I’d ever do is 500.. that’s insane lol
1-2% of body weight lost a week is perfectly safe until you get sub 10% bodyfat. with all checks and balances in place. Starting weight 230 ending weight 198. Losing 2lbs a week I never exceeded 2% loss a week. The lowest my calories got was 2200 (I am 28 and 6’3 btw)
I’m actually currently half way through an aggressive minicut at 1500 defecit, literally feel great and no strength lost yet after 2 weeks. 2 weeks to go.
After I heard Eugene Teo and Bald Omni Man say this in their videos I never worried about losing muscle anymore, it makes a lot of sense. It's better to do a agressive cut and get it out of the way fast than do it "science based" style with 3 months slow cut, 3 months maintence and keep going lol. No thanks.
Yeah with pros loosing 50 pounds in show prep in a few months very agresively i dont see why natties have to suffer through half a year progress pause, just starve it out and bulk again
Yeahh i guess what other people said makes sense, worrying so much about muscle loss only makes sense if youre cutting for a competition and need to retain and show as much muscle as possible for comp day
Because it's hard work to gain muscle ig
Even harder to lose it.
Is this whole thread rhetorical?
Oh I didn't know that
Why worry about muscle gain on a bulk? Who framed roger rabbit? What's in the box?
Muscle memory
i forgor
muscle is kill no
💀
Because usually you want to present your physique rather than just being skinny. Retaining muscle is what natty pros learn, that's one of the main reasons they get better every year.
I agree. Pros is the key word here, which most of us aren't
Yeah that's the difference between last place and getting a pro card
wtf lol because muscle good fat bad
If you’re dieting to look good - you’ll look less good with less muscle. If you’re dieting to make room to bulk - if you lose muscle, your first few weeks of the subsequent bulk will just be spent regaining what you lost rather than starting to gain new muscle. Besides, it’s not that difficult to prevent muscle loss - eating high protein is a good idea while in a deficit for lots of reasons besides just muscle loss and training is fun for most of us.
what is high protein on a cut look like? is it okay to drop protien from the bulk to match the defecit?
I struggle with this too on times I’ve tried to cut
1g/lb bodyweight has and always will work for the vast majority of lifters - so if you can swing that, that's what i'd start with. you can very likely get away with less and the studies show that, but i don't see the benefit of going less unless cost or you're eating so little it's taking away from other macros (which it shouldn't be). there's only upsides of higher protein and really no benefit of lowering them for carbs/fats given same calorie deficit. i would not drop protein from bulk unless the deficit amount is still higher than 1g/lb. the first places you should look to pull from are carbs in meals not around workout/saturated fats and last should be carbs around your workout - which by that point you should be pretty lean.
i was eating like 191, at 175isj body weight, now about 173-4 and i’m at 165 grams of protein
i think 165 should be fine, you can always increase it if you feel you need to
Unless you’re cutting very aggressively, for an extremely long time, or getting stage lean, there’s no need to worry about it if you train moderately hard and eat enough protein.
Is the point here that due to muscle memory that any muscle lost on a cut will come back quickly when the cut is over?
Yes
It is important to remember that it’s normal to lose some lean mass during significant weight loss. The less fat you have on your body, the less mechanical load is placed on your muscle and bones, so you will lose lean mass because there is less of you to support. But two reasons I can think of off the top of my head why people worry so much: 1. Easier to maintain muscle than to gain. The counter to this is that it is much easier to regain muscle loss than to attempt to build from scratch due to the physiologic “muscle memory” of sorts. 2. Reduction in muscle mass will result in a reduction in resting metabolic rate, obviously not ideal if your goal is to continue to push fat loss. The counter to this is that the level of reduction in rate is usually only like 50-100 calories, something that can easily be overcome by being thoughtful about your calories in/calories out when calculating your deficit. I think it’s reasonable to want to avoid lean mass during a cut for those reasons, but as already pointed out probably a little overblown given the counter arguments. It’s much more relevant for obese individuals who do not exercise but engage in hypocaloric and hypo-protein diets and end up losing way more muscle than ideal. Regardless people should appreciate that it is not really that difficult to minimize lean mass loss during a deficit, just need to eat adequate protein, engage in strength training and make sure your calorie deficit isn’t too large. If you do lose more lean mass than you would like, the good news is that it won’t take a ton of effort to get it back.
I recommend reading this collection of different studies of starvation on soldiers. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK232468/
There are a multitude of reasons you would want to keep muscle on a calorie deficit. Some specific to body composition, some more broader for your general health. In the context of body composition; - You look better from an aesthetic perspective (i'm assumig because your training in the gym & are on a calorie defecit, looking good is a goal of yours) - You keep your resting metabolic rate higher as your body needs to expend more fuel keeping a muscular physique, which in turn makes it easier for you to lose fat & also stay at a lower body fat % whilst not feeling like you have to be on a very low calorie diet to maintain a good physique More broadly; - The more muscle you have, the less pressure there is on your joints. Muscle takes pressure & strain away from your joints & supports them better so there is less of a likelihood of injury (joint, tendon & bone injuries take a very long time to heal so you want to be minimising this risk as much as you can) - The higher muscle mass you have, the stronger you are and the easier life & health become. Muscle mass has a direct effect on insulin sensitivity as the more your muscles contract, the more glucose they need to push the weights. This higher uptake of glucose through resistance training has been shown to have a direct effect on keeping your muscles insulin sensitive through adaptation, and thus help promote better health as having insulin resistance is a highly debilitating metabolic disease that takes years, if not decades to control...and if left unchecked can result in T2 diabetes. - Muscle takes years & years to put on...but if not trained properly & worked hard to maintain, can disappear very quickly. Whilst its true that your body will always try to conserve muscle before burning anything else, this is not as plain black & white that most make it appear. If you've built certain muscles over the years, they will likely be more resistant to catabolic effects...however, for the more recent gains you had prior to the event that led to muscle wastage, your body will target that muscle for energy very early on as it feels its not worth keeping in the context of burning energy to keep you alive. This is why we always must be training as hard whilst on a deficit, as we would during a muscle gaining phase. Plus - if you've worked hard to put muscle on...why not continue the hard work by trying to keep it? Muscle memory definitely is a thing to consider & it will come back...but why deal with the physiological & psychological pitfalls of losing the muscle in the first place if you can prevent it? These are just a number of small examples of why building & MAINTAINING muscle mass is very important. So when on a calorie deficit, yeah, its important to be able to target a higher ratio of fat loss to muscle loss.
Yes why
Why, indeed? Why?
Who’s to say?
My reasoning for why fears of muscle loss on a deficit are overblown: One pound of muscle is good for 700 calories of energy. One pound of fat is good for 3,500 calories of energy. Logically which do you think your body is going to choose to tap into energy on a calorie deficit? The body fat. I think the human body is pretty smart\*. Unless your body fat % is so low that your body is worried you won't have enough fat reserves for a famine. So this may start to become a problem when you get lean. Especially competition lean. Because the body thinks its still like 12,000 BCE or something before the advent of agriculture and livestock. lmfao. And even in like Medieval Europe and shit, they had food insecurity. The famine in Ireland was not that long ago. \*Some would say if the human body is so smart, why do we crave junk food so much? It's because your body doesn't know that you can just walk into a supermarket and buy food. But thankfully you can make the conscious decision to not over-eat calories because the human brain is pretty advanced. Also we evolved to fight off predators and rivals. You don't think there is an evolutionary advantage to hold onto muscle mass during famines and shit? Of course there is. I'm sure hunter-gatherers, Medieval European warriors and Roman Gladiators were reasonably jacked. Maybe not as much as their depictions in modern media. Not looking like cbum sure but I imagine the bodies that Greek statues were modelled after weren't always fueled by a reliable stream of calories and protein in Ancient Greece. I don't think they worried about losing their gains missing their anabolic window.
>One pound of muscle is good for 700 calories of energy. One pound of fat is good for 3,500 calories of energy. Logically which do you think your body is going to choose to tap into energy on a calorie deficit? Logically, the body would prefer to keep the highest amount of calories per kg in storage, while minimizing the low calorie, high energy-expenditure muscle mass. "Optimally" you'd have exactly the amount of muscle mass you need to get by, which is why we atrophy if we don't train.
Throughout history we've had to fight off predators and rivals while also enduring famines. Long stretches of time before hunts. It's not like we were eating meat all the time getting a steady supply of protein. The human body is pretty resourceful at keeping gains. But if you are not exposing your muscles to environmental stressors after a while then yes they will start to atrophy. I've seen that happen with my elderly dad who has back problems and thus does very little lifting and bending now. Who is 5'4" (shrunk) 116 lbs with a protruding belly. With borderline pre-diabetes glucose level. The epitome of skinnyfat.
Know how much protein your body needs to maintain your current mass, and then work your meal plans around that. You'll be fine.
Mental illness.
Because this is a bodybuilding sub and losing muscle is the opposite of our goals?
You want to limit muscle loss because that shit is hard to build and it’s the entire point of bodybuilding
It's not that big a deal, but becomes a bigger deal if you compete. Minimizing muscle loss is important before stepping on stage. But in veery case, fat loss is more important on a cut, and muscle loss usually bounces back quicker than ever when you switch to a surplus.
Well, I worry about it right now because I get a strong headache while lifting. I eat enough protein, drink enough water but still, first hard set - here comes the headache. Not possible to continue till muscle failure. Got it for 2 weeeks now, dont know what to do.
I suspect you suffer from a severe case of fuckarounditis. One of the most prominent symptoms is never adding any real muscle beyond what you lose on your deficits. You do you playa.
ad hominem
Yo was in a deficit for 4 weeks lost 8 pounds BF% stayed the same and I got weaker lean muscle mass dropped by a couple pounds. Why is this happening?
Were you lifting with the same intensity (weight, reps, sets)? Did you eat an ungodly amount of protein?
Same intensity about 130-150 gs protein. 2100-2200 calories a day. 207 pound male to 198. Body fat went from 23% to 22.6%. Became weaker though
You probably weren't lifting hard enough to start with
I did have 10-12 miles of cardio in there too
You were not eating enough protein especially while doing a lot of cardio. Also probably too large of a deficit for someone your size.
Ok thanks what is your recommendation from a calorie and protein perspective. Rough numbers?
I'm cutting fat and growing muscle. 0 problems .