Misunderstanding Muscle Maintenance
Shortcut to the minimum effective dose for maintaining muscle hypertrophy and strength gains
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I find that people assume that exercise is an all or nothing game, in which uncompromising attendance and adherence to the rules is the only option for making gains; however, as I discussed in the Muscle Mania Part IX: Muscle Growth Made Easy post, the time and effort it costs for non-trivial increases in muscle and strength are surprisingly low. And, it gets better: in addition to the low weekly price of progress in the weight room, it appears that muscle and strength improvements stick around longer than expected during periods of detraining.
If you’ve ever trudged to the gym with a cold because you were worried about forfeiting muscle mass in exchange for a day off, stressed about getting to the barbell during vacation to maintain your previous months of hard work, or avoided a much desired de-load week because you didn’t want to sacrifice your weight room success, then you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the information below.
When it comes to maintaining muscle and strength while decreasing exercise volume, two questions arise:
What’s the minimal effective dose?
How long can we meaningfully maintain our progress?
In 2011, Bickel and colleagues addressed both of these issues with their publication Exercise dosing to retain resistance training adaptations in young and older adults, where they resistance trained younger (20-35 years old) and older (60-75 years old) subjects for 16 weeks then reduced their training volume for the following 32 weeks. (I) In a recent post, we covered impactful implications for elderly fractures drawn from the older subjects’ results, and we’ll take a look at the outcomes in the younger subjects here to explore the previously mentioned de-loading questions.
So, during Phase I, all of the subjects conducted 3 sets of leg extensions, leg press, and back squats on 3 days per week, summing up to 27 sets of quadriceps exercises per week. (I) Then, in Phase II, Group 1 eliminated all resistance training, Group 2 reduced volume to 1/9 of that from Phase I (1 set per exercise on one day per week), and Group 3 reduced training volume to 1/3 of that from Phase I (3 sets of each exercise on one day per week). (I) Check out Figure 1 below for a depiction of each group’s volumes for Phases I and II.
As expected, the younger subjects in each group showed significant increases in thigh lean mass (TLM) and 1-repetition-maximum leg extension (1RM LE) following Phase I – together averaging relative increases of 6.3% and 39.0% respectively. (I) After 2 months of zero resistance training, the Group 1 subjects’ average TLM was no longer statistically significantly different from their baseline measurements; however, after 8 months of complete detraining their 1RM LE was still 23.7% greater relative to their baseline testing. (I) Groups 2 and 3, on the other hand, maintained 6.5% and 5.4% relative increases in TLM compared to baseline after 8 months of decreased training volume; additionally, both groups continued increasing their strength, demonstrating 54.9% and 57.1% relative increases in 1RM LE compared to baseline at the conclusion of Phase II. (I) Check out Figures 2 and 3 below for a visual of these results.
So, what can we gather from this data? Generally speaking, once acquired, it appears that increases in muscle mass can be maintained with significantly less effort – 1/9 and 1/3 training volume – than it took for the original acquisition; furthermore, not only can as low as zero sets per week for 8 months maintain 1RM LE gains, but training volumes cut to 1/9 and 1/3 of original volumes can lead to further statistically significant increases in strength. (I)
Now, this data carries several limitations, the most impactful being that the subjects in this study had not resistance trained their legs for 5 years prior to the experiment, the results mentioned above came entirely from 20-35 year-olds, and the study only examined muscle mass and strength gains in the thighs. (I)
With that said, if we combine the findings from above with other data suggesting that relatively low training volumes – such as 1 set per muscle group per training session and less than 5 sets per muscle group per week – can induce significant hypertrophy in much of the general population, we can deduce that missing a day, week, or even several weeks of training due to illness, work, or leisure will very likely not expunge hard-earned gains. (I, II, III)
And why is that significant? Because consistency is likely the most important factor in building muscle and strength, and the aforementioned leeway to occasionally miss a training session; take a week or two away from the weight rack to prioritize family, work, or other aspects of health; or simply de-load and temporarily drop training volume promotes long-term attendance over the common, “all or nothing,” approach. The latter both raises the barrier for returning to training – i.e. “Ugghh I lost all of the gains I had, and now I’ll have to start all over” – and potentially causes harm in other aspects of health – i.e. taking weeks to recover from an upper-respiratory tract infection because we won’t take a day or two to rest. In this regard, I find that keeping it enjoyable and reducing friction is ideal – and, it turns out, we can do so with little detriment to our quads.