Tip: Does Getting Ripped Make You a Weakling?

Can You Maintain Strength While Cutting? Many things can contribute to strength. As such, you can lose strength for many reasons while dieting down. The two main reasons you lose strength when trying to get lean are: 1. You’re losing muscle. This is the most obvious one. But it should never happen unless you get down to lower than a real 8 percent body fat. If you keep training hard (but smart), have a high protein intake (1.25 to 1.5 grams per pound of body weight) and an acceptable deficit (not losing more than two pounds per week) you won’t lose muscle. 2. You’re losing tightness. This is the most common reason for losing strength. Normally what happens is that you get weaker on the big basic lifts (bench, overhead press, and squat) but your strength on isolation exercises for the muscles involved will be the same or even higher. By losing muscle glycogen, intramuscular fat, water, and fat, your strength leverage becomes worse and the joints are less “compressed.” If you accumulate a lot of glycogen, water, and fat inside the muscle and water/fat outside the muscle, you’re creating pressure around the joint which stabilizes it. This passive stabilization makes you stronger. When you lose it, the body feels less “safe” and force production is more easily inhibited as a protective mechanism. Let’s Address the Muscle-Loss Thing The reason why people lose muscle while dieting is NOT the caloric restriction. To maintain or even increase muscle, your body needs protein and enough calories to fuel the repair processes. “Yeah, but Thib, if I’m in a caloric deficit I don’t have enough calories to fuel the repair process!” Really? When you’re in a deficit you still walk, move around, and train, right? Of course! But you’re in a deficit… by definition you are not taking in enough energy to fuel all of that. How can you still function? Well, by using stored energy for fuel. And the same can be done to fuel the muscle repair and growth process. Even in a deficit, if protein intake is sufficient you should be able to repair and even grow some muscle by relying on stored energy and the ingested protein. I’m not saying you can build as much muscle on a deficit. When you eat less – especially when you go lower in carbs – you get a lower level of mTOR and IGF-1, which can make it harder to build muscle. But you should still easily be able to maintain what you have. So why then are people losing muscle while dieting down if it’s not because of the caloric deficit? Because they’re afraid of losing muscle. That fear leads to the fulfillment of that fear. So let’s say a dude decides to get shredded. He cuts calories and maybe starts doing cardio. But he heard that he’ll lose muscle when trying to get lean. At first, he feels smaller in his clothes and doesn’t look shredded yet. It’s even harder to get a pump (because of lowered carbs and sodium). So in his mind, it must be because he’s “losing muscle.” So what does he do? He trains with more volume and intensity. He goes to failure more often, uses a ton of set-extending techniques like drop sets, rest/pause, and supersets for 90-120 minutes sessions using short rest intervals. The higher volume and intensity both dramatically increase cortisol levels. Cortisol is already elevated more when you diet down (since it’s involved in energy mobilization). And this chronic output of cortisol greatly increases the risk of losing muscle since cortisol breaks down muscle tissue. You also create a lot more muscle damage. Under normal circumstances this would be fine since you need the damage to grow. But if you create so much damage that you can’t repair it all before protein synthesis comes back down (24-36 hours after your workout) you might lose muscle! When you’re dieting down, you shouldn’t try to use your lifting workout to burn more calories (by increasing volume), nor should you panic and jack up the volume. If anything, when you’re dieting your capacity to tolerate volume and adapt is lower. You need to do less, not more. Just make sure you push hard on those sets. The Loss of “Tightness” or Joint Stability This is likely the main cause of strength loss while dieting down, especially in the initial phase of dieting. The more stable a joint involved in a lift is, the stronger you’ll be. If the joint is more stable there’s less of a strength leak. Also, if the body feels “unsafe” it won’t allow you to use all of your strength potential. When you’re on a fat loss regimen you lose… Subcutaneous fat Intramuscular fat Muscle glycogen Intramuscular water Extracellular water When you lose intramuscular fat, muscle glycogen, and intramuscular water you “deflate” your muscles. As a result, these muscles aren’t pushing as much on the joints. The bigger the muscles are, the more “packed” the joint is, even passively. This makes the joint more stable. When that happens, you’ll lose strength on the multi-joint movements, mostly the pressing movements – the shoulder is an
Origin: Tip: Does Getting Ripped Make You a Weakling?