Will I Lose all of my Muscle Gains Whilst the Gyms are Shut?

(if you find this post helpful, DM me on instagram @alicelyoung, I would love to know!)

In short, no.

You're probably reading this because coronavirus has lead to the closure of your local gym, and you are no longer able to lift heavy weights. You're worried that all the gains you've built up are going to disintegrate without being able to perform your usual weight lifting.

You're not alone. Honestly, when the gyms shut the first time round my first thought was 'crap, I can't lift heavy weights any more, am I going to lose all of my muscle?'. The good news is that muscle is bloody hard to lose. It's also bloody hard to gain, as I am sure you know, but once you have it, it's fairly easy to maintain. Muscle doesn't just disappear overnight.

Essentially, if you are using your muscles, you won't lose them. Muscle mass is high maintenance. It requires a lot of energy to maintain. Hence why people with more muscle mass have an increased BMR. Which is why if your body doesn't think you need as much muscle as you have, such as in detrained individuals who stop lifting, it will slowly get rid of it over time. The good news is it's not difficult to make your body think that all of the muscle you have is important. Obviously, heavy weight lifting is the best way to do this, but you can significantly reduce your training volume and still maintain your gains.

And there is science to back this up.

I found a study on PubMed that was published in a very reputable journal; Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise. They put 70 young and older individuals (39 were age 20-35 and 31 were 60-75 years old) through a 16-week weight training programme. For the next eight months the individuals were then split into three groups:

1) No training at all

2) Performed one third of the weekly sets performed during the programme

3) Performed one ninth of the weekly sets performed during the programme

And guess what. The younger individuals in groups 2 and 3 kept a good majority of their muscle mass that they built up during the initial training programme. Good news for us. But how does this translate over to our at home training:

TRAINING

First and foremost, if you haven't already, I would suggest investing in some form of equipment so that you can add more than just the weight of your body as resistance to your workouts. Look, I'm not saying spunk all of hour pay check on a squat rack and bench press. But maybe a set of dumbbells and some heavy resistance bands would be good.

From this study we can see that lowering training volume leads to a tiny amount of muscle loss. The study lowered volume by reducing the total number of sets completed each week. Seeing as volume = sets x reps x weight there's no reason why we can't lower training volume by decreasing the amount of weight lifted. You could even increase the total number of weekly sets, and reps within those sets, to try and make up for some of the volume lost in the weight lifted.

Try incorporating more difficult exercises into your routine that require less weight. Push ups, pull ups (if you have one of those over the door pull up bars - I have one, they're great!), Bulgarian split squats, pistol squats, nordic curls the list goes on...

NUTRITION

Keep your protein intake high. You should have a pretty stable protein intake over all of your bulking, cutting and maintenance phases, so make sure you're eating at least 0.75g of protein per lb of body weight. You don't want your body to turn to your muscle protein for energy and end up breaking it down.

Eat at your maintenance calories. If you're eating in a surplus and you aren't lifting heavy enough to build muscle then you'll just end up gaining fat. If you eat in a deficit, there's always the risk of losing muscle mass. Lifting heavy loads can help to preserve muscle, but chances are, if you're reading this post, you don't have access to heavy weight, so why increase that risk?

I hope this post showed you that all hope is not lost and that whilst you can't get to the gym, you won't lose all your muscle!