I’ve frequently read here that the best way to preserve muscle while dieting (calorie restriction) is to continue lifting heavy. This is under the belief that your body will realize it needs that muscle around so it protects it. That doesn’t seem right to me.
To me, if you’re breaking down and damaging muscle by lifting, with less nutrients to repair it back to normal (or better), you would LOSE muscle and strength by lifting while dieting.
But since I have a lot of confidence in the T-nation group, I thought I’d open this up for discussion. Can anyone tell me what I’m missing or otherwise why lifting while dieting is the best way to retain muscle?
If you don’t lift, you don’t tell your body you need all those muscles. If your body doesn’t know it needs all those muscles, why would it work hard to keep them?
According to Thibaudeau, If you do tons and tons of reps you use up the glycogen in your muscles. If you are dieting and don’t replenish the glycogen stores your muscles can get all torn down and lost. Check out “The Best Damn Workout” article here on TNation.
The few articles I’ve read on here, suggest to lift weights that are heavy enough to keep you in the 1-5 rep and set range, ditch pump work, and keep cardio either low intensity, or HIIT type of stuff for short periods.
The fact of the matter is that when on a weight loss diet your going to loose muscle… for some reason people on line seem to gloss over that fact. The notion that the body will break down muscle protein as a energy source is foreign concept. Especially if your not doing anything to maintain the need for muscle tissue which has already been stated .
Diet is how much raw material/energy your body can work with. Lifting is the stimulus that tells your body what it should try and do with these.
Takes more resources to build muscle but even in a deficit there may be sufficient raw materials to maintain muscle to some degree as there’s less of an energy requirement to maintain v build.
Continuing to lift/work is the stimulus for the body to funnel as much of its limited resources as it is able, after meeting energy demands in maintaining body systems, into holding onto as much muscle as possible because stimulus-recovery-adaption/survival and shit (tho in most cases people do lose a bit of muscle/strength)
Muscle is metabolically demanding so it’s a pretty attractive option for tissue loss in a caloric deficit from a survival perspective. So no/reduced stimulus and dieting = muscle loss. Not lifting is probably the one of the worst things you could do for maintaining gains in a deficit save cutting off an arm or something.
