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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
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Here’s what you need to know… All progression models have their limits. These advanced strategies will allow you to keep getting stronger. End every single workout with a few sets of your worst lift. Use contrast series lifting. Do a series of 3 sets of an exercise using different speed dynamics with moderate weight, light weight, and then heavy weight. Perform isometric holds. Pick up the barbell, bring it to the weakest position, and hold it there for 12 seconds. Use next-day isolation work. Do isolation work for the weakest muscle involved in your main lift from the preceding day. Do the lift you want to improve the most twice in your workout. Doing 4 sets of an exercise twice during a session will lead to greater strength gains than doing 8 sets in a row. The Double Progression Model The stronger you get on the big, basic barbell lifts, the more muscle you’ll grow. Period. And one of the best ways to do that is to use the double progression model. First you select a rep range. Let’s say 5 reps per set. Then you select a number of sets to perform, 5 for example. You want to do all 5 work sets using the same weight and your goal is to complete all 5 sets using your target rep range. When you can complete all your sets with the same weight at the targeted number of reps, you’re allowed to increase the weight at your next session. Not being able to get all your sets done with the upper limit of the range – for example getting 5, 5, 5, 4, 3 reps – is fine, but it means you don’t get to increase the weight at your next session. However, double progression has its limits, just like any other progression model. At some point you’ll need to use advanced strategies to keep getting stronger. Here are six of my favorite. 1 – End Every Workout With Your Worst Lift If your bench press is your worst lift and the one you want to improve the most, add 3-4 sets at the end of every workout you do (on top of your regular bench press work). The reason for this is that the neural adaptations tend to be greater for the last thing you do in a workout. That’s why I like to end the session with a few high quality sets of a key lift or physical quality. When your goal is to bring up one specific lift, especially if it’s been stuck for a while, this should be your go-to strategy. The minimal load to stimulate rapid strength gains is 80%, so that’s the weight you should be using for your daily, end-of-the-workout sets. Use this strategy for at least four weeks. Pick one lift you want to focus on and perform 3 to 4 sets at 80% of your maximum. The number of reps will vary depending on what you did during the rest of the session. If you did a heavy pressing session, you might only get 2 or 3 good reps with 80%. If you did squats or deads, your upper body will be fresh enough to allow you to get 5 or 6 reps. The key thing is staying at 80% for all of your work sets. Ideally you would not reach failure on any of the sets. This technique works by improving neural efficiency for the target lift. You’ll improve intra- and inter-muscular coordination, which will allow you to rapidly gain strength in that movement. Rapid strength gains should be sustainable for 4-6 weeks. By the way, since you’ll hit the focus lift every day, you’re bound to have some residual fatigue and you might not feel stronger right away. The gains in strength on the target lift will show up about 10-14 days after you stop doing this strategy. You’ll get a big performance gain seemingly out of nowhere! Note that this also works well for improved muscle growth. One of my figure girls made very rapid gains in glute and leg muscularity by finishing every workout with four sets of front squats for four weeks. 2 – Contrast Series Lifting I adapted this method from a technique used in track and field, both with sprints and throws. It consists of doing a series of 3 sets (with a normal rest interval between sets) of a movement using different speed dynamics. For example, when working with a bobsleigh Olympian, we did one 60m resisted sprint (speed parachute), one overspeed 60m sprint (towed sprint with overspeed device), and one normal 60m sprint. We did the same thing with shot putters – throwing an overweight implement, followed by an underweight implement, and finally a normal one. In both instances you would have a slower movement, a faster than normal movement, and a normal one. This leads to greater gains in power. You can use this the same approach with basic strength lifts: Set 1: Moderate weight (70-80%) using a very slow eccentric tempo (about 5 seconds on the negative) and a 2-3 second pause at the bottom of the eccentric while still under load (e.g., not completely in the hole in a squat, not touching the chest on a bench, or the floor on a deadlift). The concentric or lifting part is then performed normally. Do 2-3 reps. Rest 2 minutes Set 2: Light weight (60-70%) done explosively. Control the lowering portion but explode from the bottom, trying
Origin: 6 Ways to Keep Getting Stronger