How long for muscle mass to decrease when not working out?

Factual Questions
1

I know that muscles atrophy if not used, but I’m wondering if anyone has really quantified how long it takes for muscle mass to decrease when a workout regimen is stopped.

I’m observing something really counterintuitive… 4 years ago I was lifting a lot in an attempt to lose fat. My arms, chest, and back got really big, but I lost little if any fat (the appetite increase worke against me). So I quit lifting entirely.

Fast forward 4 years… I’m successfully on a regimen of calorie reduction and have lost 30 pounds. And what I see is pretty surprising… my upper body musculature is still very developed, though I haven’t worked out since 2008 and I don’t get any upper body exercise other than mowing the lawn. A hydrostatic fat test confirms this strange observation, telling me I’ve only 10 pounds remaining to lose. This would still put me about 20 pounds above my college weight (pre-fat-gain, pre-muscle-gain). This jibes with the theory that somehow, without really doing anything, I’ve managed to hold onto 20 pounds of muscle mass gained through resistance training for 4 years.

So are my observations correct? Is muscle mass loss really a lot slower than fitness gurus would have us believe? (Mind you, I’m under no illusions that the strength is still there, though I haven’t tried to find out).

2

Having been a natural bodybuilder for over 20 years, going through various cycles of bulking up, and cutting, as well as coaching many trainees I can tell you there are few simple answers to questions about body composition changes (in spite of what many self-styled ‘gurus’ will tell you). Yours is no different.

As I’m sure you are not surprised to learn, the first thing I will say in answer to your question is ‘it depends on many factors’. Off the top of my head here are a few; nutrition, rest, hormone levels, age, genetic propensity to gain and retain muscle, stress, lifestyle, and how long you trained before you stopped etc etc.

Of course many of these are multi-factorial and not mutually exclusive. For example your genetic makup is likely to affect your hormone levels and your ability to rest/recuperate.

For these reasons studying muscle loss (and gain) is a bit of a pseudo-science. As a research scientist myself I have studied much of the literature regarding strength training etc, and find a disturbing amount of it to be poorly conducted due simply to the multi-factorial nature of gaining/retaining muscle. How does one really control for all these variables and conclude that the findings of the study are related to the ‘apparent’ variable under consideration?

I would say that on a personal level you are very unusual. I’ve never heard of anyone retaining muscle for such a long period post cessation of training, and it makes me suspicious that perhaps your history of muscle building is more complex than first meets the eye. Meaning, that perhaps even you are unaware of the factors that led you to believe you have ‘built’ up a good physique. No criticism of you personally, but experience tells me that balanced judgment and bodybuilding are not happy bedfellows!

To give a more general, and yet anecdotal answer to your question, my experience and that of most of the people I have trained with is that in general people will probably lose about 10% of any gained strength (and muscle) per month of inactivity. So by about a year after you stop training you will somewhere close to where you began.

Of course all this can be messed up by any of the variables I mentioned earlier. Specifically, if you stopped training and started taking the right combination of supplements, drugs and food, then you would lose your muscle much more slowly.

Did you gain muscle very easily in the first place? Meaning, that you put on muscle and increased strength faster than most other trainees. My guess would be you are one of the ‘genetic elite’ that so many of us inferior beings look up to. 95% of people struggle to attain and maintain muscle, with a small number putting on muscle relatively easily. For people like you the general rules do not apply. You lucky devil!

Get back in the gym and make the most of it. Chicks dig muscle.

3

embleerrah,

The expert consensus statements often claim that the typical individual can maintain muscle mass with once weekly training as long it is of the same intensity. Does your experience agree with this?

4

Emphatically yes, few of us are capable of evaluating our own appearance and habits critically. But all I can really say is I did put in some gym time, built up some muscle, and then totally ceased working out, well, actually it was only 3 years ago. And I can’t guarantee that what I’m seeing is exactly what it was the day I stopped. I was covered with fat that day, so I never really saw the shape of the muscles. I just know I was big 3 years ago, and now I still seeing a lot more residual size than I feel I have any right to expect, considering I’ve spent most of that time behind a desk.

Well, I did get into distance running shortly after that, and my legs built up, but I’d think that would have eaten up even more of the upper body.

Oh well, maybe I’m just deceived by having less fat than I’ve had in 20 years. Anything can look good if you take 30 pounds of fat off it!

5

This is a separate question from the OP. I don’t have much experience with this as I have only experimented with between 2 and 5 days per week training.

For clarity, are you saying that an individual could train say three days per week and put on (let’s say) 20 lbs of muscle in a year or two, and then reduce training to once per week and hope to maintain the gains?

In that case I’d disagree with the idea that this could maintain mass, although, again it would depend on many variables. The most important being how your muscle building was progressing at the point you reduced frequency. If you had reached a ‘plateau’ and no matter what you did you were gaining no more mass, then it is unlikely that reducing training frequency could maintain your gains (as your current frequency was simply maintaining). One exception to this is if you were overtraining before your reduction, in which case a reduction in frequency could well maintain your mass (or ironically even increase it). If on the other hand your were in a growth phase of your training when you reduced frequency (ie you were regularly putting on muscle), then a reduction in frequency may well just maintain what you had. Although there are of course caveats to this too.

Bodybuilding is a very interesting sub-culture. There is much folklore that is repeated without an injection of rationality. For example, for years it was commonly believed that one could only absorb 20-30g or protein per meal, and that any more simply passed straight through. This was widely held, and much repeated by individuals and the media. The all-conquering supplement companies jumped onto this and sold many products to help absorb you more protein per meal (with the usual endorsements by massive bodybuilders). But of course this just turned out to be nonsense. And this is just one example of many.

In fact there are few hard and fast rules in bodybuilding, and as with life in general, treat all information with a healthy dose of skepticism and rational enquiry and in the long run you’ll likely save yourself a lot of time and money.

6

Can you clarify this? Is the protein absorbing supplements bunk or the whole idea that one can only absorb 20-30g protein per meal? I’ve always heard the later was true, but I would be happy to know if wasn’t.

7

The policy statements are usually not aimed at maxxed elite bodybuilders but at the general population up to more typical athletes. Generally these would be people who had made strength and mass gains over their past baseline but who certainly were not anywhere near a point where no amount of extra work would result in extra gains. People who would meet your growth phase description.

8

Oh, on this. Both. Gym rat myths often had their origin somewhere though. This one likely comes from a bunch of real research that shows that a modest amount of protein (or mixed amino acids) consumed either fairly immediately before, during, or fairly soon after (some studies showing one better, some the other) resistance training will lead to greater strength gains than the same amount later. The amount needed though is not huge and more does not appear to accomplish greater gains. This link actually gives a fairly decent summary:

It’s pretty easy to imagine how those studies that showed that 20 g of protein in recovery phase was just as good for muscle synthesis as 40 g would get twisted into the body cannot absorb more and how that myth would be capitalized on by some who would sell snake oil that they claimed would get the body to absorb more.

9

Sorry for the multi-post but if anyone wants a state of the art article on the science of nutritional effects on adaptation to exercise this one is as good as it gets. I like the explaining of why muscles cannot respond to more than that 20 g of protein as “muscle-full” or “bag-full” - that is that the muscle can physically hold so much. And the attempting to parse out the different sorts of adaptations to different exercise and the lack of understanding about molecular adaptations to real world mixed activities.

10

Depends on the person. The line I always got when I was lifting is when you are beyond your ‘genetic maximum’ the muscle starts to come off when you stop maintaining it. I have no idea how anyone determines something like that, but some peopel can bulk up and keep most if it w/o effort while some lose a lot of it within a year.

11

Since the OP is answered and these sidetracks are all interesting and informative… what about the chestnut that you have to ingest carbohydrate with protein for the protein to be maximally effective? I assume the thinking is when blood sugar is low, protein will be metabolized to glucose via gluconeogenesis, but is that true?

12

From the article just linked:

MPS=muscle protein synthesis.
MPB=muscle protein breakdown.
EAA=essential amino acids.

That said the carbohydrate in the recovery phase is required to replenish and optimize muscle glycogen stores which prepare the muscles for optimal performance during the next exercise bout (optimal performance each bout of course driving more gains).

13

Thanks for that. Interesting that just the EAA is said to be the bottleneck, not the total amino acids.

As I’m reading this, you don’t need a rich shot of carbohyrate immediately after the workout? You can spread it over the entire 1-2 day recovery period before the next workout?

14

You’re right, myths always have a grain of truth somewhere in them, but your references are too late for this one. I’ve heard the 20-30g myth since the late 80s/early 90s.

If I’m honest I have no reference to cite as disproof, but we are at least coming round to a situation where more people have questioned this:

http://buildingmuscleworldwide.com/mbb/how-much-protein-absorbed-at-one-time

Now this could be more folklore, but for me, when anecdotal accounts are consistent with physiology/biology, I’m more inclined to believe it. A ‘scientific’ study confirming or denying it would require more effort to validate. Don’t just believe something because it has been published in a scientific journal!!

I favour the idea that your body is likely to constantly absorb as much as possible but regulate assimilation of nutrients in line with demand. What is more likely than lack of uptake, is that the nutrients are absorbed, but if not required, either excreted or metabolised to a more useful form (like carbohydrates converted to fats). This makes far more sense as a) we have all these metabolic pathways whose job it is to do exactly that b) for millenia we existed in an environment where food was scarce, so we have likely evolved to maximise absorption. So the original notion (limited uptake) is counterintuitive on many levels.

On the other hand there has to be a finite amount of any nutrient that can be absorbed during a single digestive transit. So if you have a very high protein intake, it is possible that your gut bacteria may metabolise it before you do, giving the infamous bodybuilders’ gas. How you test this is another question entirely?

For what it’s worth, my current thinking is that if you concentrate on eating around 5 meals per day consisting of ‘real’ food (whole food with as little processing as possible), with a moderate protein intake, and eating a wide variety of foods year round you will be in a good position ‘nutritionally’. Even if you are training very hard.

I like to think about this another way. Lets say you gain 20lbs of lean muscle mass in a year (a very good performance). Let’s assume muscle is about 22% protein so this equates to about 2000g protein. Over the course of a year you will be incorporating only about 5.5g per day of protein as new muscle. Now of course I am not saying you only need to eat 5.5g more then ‘normal’ to make these gains, but it does call into question the notion that you need to consume hundreds of grams per day.

15

From what I can gather the studies fairly consistently show faster recovery rate if you give some carbs pretty much right away and then continue to have some carbs along the way afterwards. How much and exactly when is intensely studied but for those of us who are not at the very elite levels small healthy snacks along the way all day, in general what embleerrah advises, will do just fine.

embleerrah, one small caveat - there is some interesting work lately showing that the more … ehem … mature individual benefits more than does the younger one from ingesting protein in a window pretty soon after exercise.

16

What are your strength levels like? Maybe you just can see the muscle easier now that it is not covered with fat.

17

This is a deceptively obvious possibility. Anytime I have gone on a pre-contest diet for a bodybuilding competition and have shed bodyfat, I always get comments as to how much ‘bigger’ I look; when I actually weigh less than before and my strength levels are the same (if not just a tad lower).

18

If a non-bodybuilder may chime in with a tangentially related anecdote: I found that when I lost 50 pounds (from 250 to 200) I was 2 sizes smaller than when I was 200 pounds on the way up. That is, as I slowly gained weight, 200 pounds saw me in a women’s size 22. When I lost weight to 200 pounds, I fit into my old size 18 clothes. (Women’s sizes skip two numbers for every “size” - so a 22 is two sizes up from an 18.) A measuring tape confirmed - my measurements were smaller when I lost weight to 200 pounds than when I was gaining weight at 200 pounds.

My only explanation is that my body gained/maintained muscle to support those extra pounds, and I managed to lose more fat than muscle during my weight loss. So while I wasn’t “working out”, I built some amount of muscle just dragging around my fat ass, and maintained it while I lost the fat!

I’ve slowly put the weight back on; at the beginning of the month I was up to 238, but this time only a size 20. I’m down to 224.6 today,and my size 20’s are getting loose! I’ll let you know when I hit 200 again what size I’m in. :slight_smile: