General question is, do muscles shrink in the absence of weight training but calorie intake at maintenance level???
Like if I’ve built up a considerable amount of muscle then got injured and unable to do much of workout, i’ll obviously get weaker but if I keep calorie intake to maintenance levels or near…will my muscles shrink? or how much??
Thanks
Definitely they shrink. I’ll send you a PM. But they come back fast-maybe even better because during detraining, the percentage of slow twitch muscle fibers decreases in actual fiber count-they revert to IIx (IIb) a little more complicated than that but its true-nervous system aside, the raw contractile capabilities of a muscle relative to mass are greatest after severe detraining.
Short version:
If you stop training and eat the same, you will lose muscle and probably gain body fat. This is why the myth of muscle turning to fat is still around. That can not happen. Muscle can’t turn to fat. However, there are enough people in the world clueless enough to think that they can still eat like crazy even though they aren’t doing anything with the extra calories.
I know that I eat alot of food. I also have the common sense to understand that I wouldn’t want to eat the same amount of food if I wasn’t training.
Dinodino I’ll keep you posted about how it goes with me as I have just suffered a major injury that prevents me from doing any lifing or cardio for atleast 3 months. I even have to keep bending and movement to a very minimum. Being in the middle of massive eating and a very intense training plan so I have some serious nutritional planning to do. In doing so, and I think you will find the same, my maintance cal level will be greatly different that what it might be if I were doing training. If I just assumed that my training maintance level were where I should be at during injury I would be setting myself up for fat gain. So I am suggesting you recalculate your cal requirements without training expenditures.
To expand on what Mertdawg said…he is completely right.
Weight training does a really odd thing…it actually increases the amount of Type IIA muscle fibers at the expense of Type IIX (which were called IIB until recently). I believe this one of the large premises behind Chad’s 10x3 programs since by training with a heavy load you obtain a higher muscle fiber recruitment (there are certain “critical points” at which the each type of fiber gets activated…all the type I’s ahve to be activated first…then the type IIA get activated…then the type IIx). Remember that these fibers also fatigue very easily due to very low levels of mitochondria (basically they operate on Phosphocreatine stores). So not working out actually will increase the concentration of these fibers…and if you keep using them when you get back to training…well you never know.