How making use of muscle maintenance principles can actually lead to better long-term progress
On the surface, it might seem strange how the idea that training your muscles with a training load only sufficient to maintain them (rather than to grow them) could be more beneficial for your physique development. At least, I always had this perspective. More time maintaining = less time for gaining, and since gaining muscle is the number 1 objective, why would you want to do anything else? However, with the reasoning I present — a mixture of science and some theorising — I will aim to outline how I arrived at the conclusion that maintaining can lead to better gains.
The crux of the whole discussion rests on the following premise:
“Maintaining muscle is disproportionately easier than gaining new muscle”
That is, the training load required to prevent muscle loss is much, much lower than that required to gain new muscle. Where you would have to train at a high intensity with a decent amount of volume to eek out a tiny bit of muscle, you require only a fraction of this to maintain the muscle you already have.
Firstly, in the absence of training of any kind, we wouldn’t expect muscle loss under normal conditions (sufficient protein, normal caloric intake, normal sleep and stress, etc.) for about 2–3 weeks. But after this point you can’t expect that muscle to stick around without some type of stimulus. Luckily, however, this stimulus can actually be pretty low. Iversen et al. provide some evidence for what this would be in there article “No Time to Lift? Designing Time-Efficient Training Programs for Strength and Hypertrophy: A Narrative Review” [1]. They present various examples of studies that include reducing training volumes by various degrees, yet the trainees maintain and, in some cases, continue to gain muscle. The studies in the article see maintenance of gains with as little as 1/3 the original volume, and the authors suggest that around 3–4 sets a week for a given exercise for the maintenance of strength (though they do not mention hypertrophy). This is quite encouraging, in my opinion. If you’d been training your biceps with 9 sets a week and had seen good progress, you could bring that down to only 3 sets a week without expecting any muscle loss.
Mike Israetel, James Hoffman and Jared Feather also emphasize that training for maintenance is much lower than for growth [2]. The volume landmarks are a concept that Israetel developed that have been influential in the fitness community in recent years, and part of these volume landmarks the concept of maintenance volume: “the amount of sets required to maintain muscular size”. Their suggestion is somewhere in the range of 6 sets/week/muscle. This can be contrasted with estimated 12 sets/week/muscle to get for most individuals to get any growth at all. It should be noted, though, that this is a ballpark figure and there is variation between muscles and people. For example, over the last year I’ve noticed excellent calf gains with only 4 sets a week! It should also be stated that intensity has a role to play; lifting at a high intensity reduces the number of sets required to grow or maintain. However, the point remains that maintaining takes much less effort than gaining.
Adam Tzur of The Science of Fitness has a great article on the topic of detraining/maintaining, which I highly recommend if you’re after more details [3]. He, too, mentions that 1/3 of training volume leads to maintenance of muscle mass, although even speculates it could be as low as 1/9! It should be noted that most of this research is not performed in advanced trainees, and since beginners notoriously grow their muscles with more ease than advanced lifters, this is relevant to know. However, this does not per se mean that advanced lifters would require a higher training volume to maintain their muscle — it may even be the opposite — it is just that scientific literature in this area is lacking. One thing that is certain though, is that advanced trainees have muscle memory to fall back on, a concept relevant to the current discussion that will be expanded upon later.
But why are we focusing on maintaining anyway?
Hopefully you’re on board with me now with the concept that maintaining muscle is disproportionately easier than gaining, but now we want to know the practical applications of this. Well, first is that it’s nice to know for purposes where training will be affected, such as times of high stress (exam periods or busy periods of work), traveling, injury, or whatever else life throws at you. It means finding a way to do something — even some bodyweight exercises or 5 minutes of pull-ups — can save you from muscle that otherwise would be lost. It doesn’t always have to be all-or-nothing; in this case, maybe even just 20% of your usual effort can be the difference between losing muscle or not.
However, this is not the application of this principle that I’d like to focus on here. Instead, a huge practical application that I take from this is that it means we can use it to make better gains in the muscles that we do want to grow. Here I will outline my reasoning for this. After training, the muscles must repair themselves from the onslaught of damage they just received from you throwing your dumbbells around. This is a very energy intensive process. If the body has plenty of energy around, it will do this more efficiently. Circumstances such as lots of food, low stress, good sleep, rest, etc. all promote better recovery of the muscles. This either causes more hypertrophy or facilitates quicker recovery, meaning you can train the muscles again sooner, which leads to more hypertrophy. Either way, having more energy reserves available to direct to the muscles is a good thing if you want to grow. Conversely, lower energy intake (such as during a diet), stress, poor sleep, etc. have the opposite effect. In these scenarios, the body views muscle repair and growth as a luxury, and therefore diverts its energy to other processes instead that it deems more essential for survival.
It follows, then, that we want to maximise the circumstances where muscle growth occurs and minimise the opposite. Here’s where things get relevant for us: one of the factors that impacts your capacity to grow muscle is the total amount of volume you’re actually doing. Whilst a certain amount of training volume is required to maintain, and more volume is required to grow, more volume also means you have more to recover from. This, in turn, reduces your energy reserves available to spend on muscle recovery. An example will clarify this somewhat confusing point. Imagine I’m training all the muscles in my body, as most trainees do. My body has to direct energy to all of these muscles to repair them. If, however, I only train my chest and no other muscles in the body, I’m not spending all that extra energy on repairing other muscles. Naturally, then, I have more energy reserves to direct towards repairing the muscles of my chest. And indeed I would expect to see better gains in my chest this way. Without the body spending all that other energy on all those other muscles, it has more to direct to the chest. Even if this doesn’t cause superior growth in of itself, I’d take a good guess that the extra recovery capacity allows you to perform more sets for your chest, which in turn would be expected to lead to better growth since higher training volumes tend to produce superior gains [4–6].
Obviously if your goal is to develop a complete physique, training only one muscle group is not going to take you very close to that goal. However, we can combine the just-described principle with the lessons we learnt about muscle maintenance earlier to come to a very nice conclusion. If we place some muscles on maintenance whilst training other muscles for growth, one can expect to see better gains in the muscles we want to grow versus if we simply tried to grow all the muscles in the body at the same time. Furthermore, this superior growth would not come at the cost of muscle loss elsewhere since we know it’s easy to maintain that muscle.
But one could argue that, in the long term, gains would be the same, you just see them at different times. For example, if we run the following schedule:
instead of:
one might say we would just see the same gains at different times. However, I don’t think this would be the case. Take a look at the graph below to see in theory why I think this:
Reducing our bicep training to maintenance frees up proportionally more energy reserves to spare to the calves. All that blue that has now reduced fro the bicep is available to go to the calves instead — and since that is more than half of that of the bicep, is is proportionally more than it would be had we also been training the bicep. This should equate to better capacity for the calves to recover from training and therefore grow. Since we know the biceps won’t lose anything doing this, we don’t have to worry about losing any of biceps doing this. They will definitely look smaller, because they won’t be permanently pumped up like they normally are due to regular intense training, but they won’t actually lose any size that can’t be instantly recovered in the short term.
Even if we did lose some size due to a volume misjudgement or something like that, we know that muscle is far easier to regain than to gain new due to the presence of satellite cells in the muscle. These are muscle specific stem cells that stick around in trained muscles even if the muscle itself atrophies and allows rapid regaining of muscle through enhanced protein synthesis. This is forms the basis of the concept of muscle memory. What might take months to grow new muscle can be achieved in weeks when regaining old muscle. So, even if every bodybuilder’s biggest fear did occur, it’s really not worth worrying about.
The above example with the bicep and the calf might not seem too profound, but if we scale this up the whole body things change. Imagine a situation where an individual had an incredible back and legs but was less exciting in the arms department. If we were to place the enormous muscle groups of the legs and the back on maintenance, think how much that would free up to allow some exceptional growth of the arms — without question, the gains would be extraordinary.
It’s a simple concept with potentially powerful application. The more you train and the more your body is trying to grow various muscles, the less resources it has to designate to growing those very muscles. Reducing the pressure on the body to grow everywhere at once liberates more resources for the muscles that need it most. Let’s look at the practical applications of this concept.
Practical Applications
Ultimately, this concept can be used to give you more control over how you want to sculpt your body. If for you personally, having a more muscles in the back fulfils your ideal body shape, then you would likely benefit from maintaining your chest and legs for a while to allow better growth in the back. After a couple of mesocycles, you could return to growing the full body, knowing that your legs and chest won’t have changed much, but your back is significantly bigger than it would have been had you just simply tried to focus on growing it whilst also growing everything at once.
Though as I see it, the best application is to build on your weaknesses. We have all strong and weak points determined genetically, by our training environment, our ability to execute exercises, and other various reasons. What can sometimes happen is we get a little attached to our strong points as they become more engrained into our identity. As such, we pay more attention to them (whether subconsciously or otherwise) and end up developing them even further, neglecting our weak points and maybe succumbing to the idea that they will always be weak.
If your ambition is to develop a well-balanced physique or if you’re a bodybuilder, it will always pay off more to avoid letting yourself fall into this trap. This is a great way to do this. I see many bodybuilders on my Instagram with glaring weaknesses whilst also having certain very strong muscle groups. Making use of this principle would be an excellent way for them to change this whilst not affecting their placings.
Sure, it’s nice to have outstanding body parts that you’re “known” for. But it is much more advantageous as a bodybuilder to have a well-balanced physique that flows and does not have weaknesses. It is not easy to do this to yourself. Most bodybuilders will tell you “EVERYTHING!” when you ask them “which muscle do you want bigger?”. This is where it is a good idea to have a good coach or a third person perspective to make you realise where you really need to work on and prevent you from simply creating these situations where you’re training so much trying to grow everything at once that your growth is actually sub-optimal.
As hard as it sometimes can be, it is wise to be critical with your physique about what is already good and what could do with more work, and then make sure your training reflects that. If you are “lucky” enough to have some overpowering body parts, then make sure you react to this by using these principles to allow yourself to cultivate a more balanced physique.
References
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-021-01490-1
[2] https://renaissanceperiodization.com/training-volume-landmarks-muscle-growth/
[3] https://sci-fit.net/detraining/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950543/
[5] https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/VolumeHypertrophy.html
