HOW FAST DO YOU LOSE MUSCLE ?

I want to start with a real-life example of muscle loss. Matt H is a pro natural bodybuilder and client of world-renowned physique coach, Cliff Wilson. After being hospitalized with Crohn’s flare-up, Matt was forced to take a significant break from training.

He went from 200 lbs on the left, all the way down to 166 lbs on the right, at about the same body fat. This means he lost just about 35 pounds of pure muscle!

I am going to skip the basic stuff you have likely already heard: you should squat more frequently (squatting two to three times per week is usually the sweet spot), you should squat earlier in the workout when you are fresher, and make sure you are eating enough calories and protein. Although these are all particularly important tips, in this article, I want to focus on four strategies you may not have considered before.

Breaking Down the Cause of Muscle Loss

Your first strategy is to “prime your nervous system” for a big squat by using acclimating drills such as walkouts and pin squats. Although for some, the phrase “prime your nervous system” may sound somewhat spooky or jargony, it simply means preparing your brain and nervous system to get used to firing under heavy loads. This process is like shooting a weighted training ball for a few minutes, switching to a normal basketball and noticing how much lighter the ball feels than if you had just jumped right in with the standard size ball.

Walkouts: Load up to 95 to 105 percent of your one rep max, walk the weight out, brace as you normally would, and then walk it back in without squatting it. If you are new to walk outs, start with weight you have actually squat first, before working your way up to supra-maximal loads slightly above your current squat max. To cover yourself in the unlikely event of a fail, it is wise to set the safeties higher than usual and still use a spotter, if you have one.  If you hit these once or twice a month, before your planned squat work for the day, not only will it make those later sets feel even lighter, but it will also get you more confident and familiarize your upper back and stabilizers with what it feels like to support some heavy weight. 

A cool progression with this is to set the pins at about half squat depth, and then gradually lower the pin height over time until you get to parallel or just below. That steady progression should help you feel much more confident when it is time to go for a max; assuming, of course, you have still been doing regular squats in your program as well. 

If you are new to pin squats and doing them to parallel, I would recommend starting with something around 65-75 percent of your one rep max for four-six reps. If you set the pins higher, you can load much closer to your max. As you get used to the movement, you can progressively lower the pins from there.

 If your lack of confidence in your squat is holding you back, it will help to pick one of these priming drills and do it once every couple of weeks.

Before we dig into those questions, it’s important to first understand that muscle loss is a complex process – an ongoing tug of war between muscle protein synthesis and muscle protein breakdown, where gradually, the muscle protein breakdown side starts to win.

We can think of skeletal muscle as a big brick wall: muscle protein synthesis is the process of adding bricks to the wall, while muscle protein breakdown is the process of removing them. These two processes are always occurring, and regularly swap turns taking the lead as we alternate between a fed and a fasted state. When we’re in a fed state, we tend to be adding bricks to the wall (assuming we ate enough protein in that meal) and we tend to be removing bricks from the wall when we’re in a fasted state (~8 hours after the last meal was consumed).