There’s no two ways around the fact that it is disheartening to lose some muscle mass. It takes real effort and hard work to build muscle and strength. Sometimes though, life gets in the way, and caused you to lose a little bit of muscle. It is natural to feel a little down when this happens.

 

As sad of a start to this article as that was, the point of this writing is to highlight the positives you can focus on. In the remainder of this article, we’ll talk about how easy it is to maintain muscle, how long it takes to actually lose muscle, and why it’s easier to rebuild muscle than it is to build it in the first place.

 

First off, how little can you train while maintaining strength?

For many people, it takes multiple, hard training sessions per week in a caloric surplus in order to add a few pounds of muscle. In a week where you are unable to put in the volume that you normally do, it is easy to feel like you are going to lose muscle as a result. Fortunately, this thinking is incorrect.

 

Barry et al. [1] reviewed 12 studies looking at how little you can train while maintaining your strength and muscle. They found that training 1x/week is sufficient to maintain muscle mass and strength as long as the training is intense enough. For more details, check out the article below:

 

Related: How little can you train while maintaining your strength & endurance?

 

How long does it take to ACTUALLY lose muscle?

So, we’ve covered how little training it takes to maintain the muscle that you’ve built. However, what if you had to cease training all together? How long would it take you to start losing muscle?

 

Fortunately, it takes a lot longer than you would think. Orange et al. [2] ran a study where they had subjects perform a strength training program, and then had them cease training for 12 weeks. They compared the results after the training program to after the detraining period. They found that there was not a significant difference between the start and the end of the 12-week detraining period. Therefore, even if you do lose a little muscle over the course of not training for 12 weeks, it likely is a minimal amount.

 

Although, if you’ve ever stopped training for a week or two straight, you’ve probably looked in the mirror and felt like you had less muscle. I know I’ve been there. If you’ve experienced this, you probably have this perception for a reason other than actual muscle loss.

 

Carbohydrates are primarily stored in skeletal muscle in the form of glycogen. Second to this, carbs are also stored in the liver in the form of glycogen. These glycogen stores are our muscles’ main source of fuel during exercise. When we are consistently exercising, our body’s make sure our muscles have a full stock of glycogen so that they are ready to perform. This makes our muscles look more “full” and appear bigger. When we go through a period of detraining, our bodies may elect to preferentially store carbs elsewhere. This can make our muscles seem smaller without actually losing any muscle. It’s also why one good workout and one high-carbohydrate day will instantly make your muscles look full again.

 

Say you actually did lose muscle, does it grow back faster?

Hopefully at this point I’ve convinced you that maintaining muscle is much easier than you’d think and that it takes a long time to actually lose muscle. However, perhaps something serious has kept away from training for a long time. For example, say you had an injury that required you to be immobile, such as a broken bone. In this case, will it take just as long to build muscle again as it did before?

 

Fortunately, the answer is that it is much easier to rebuild muscle than it is to build it in the first place. Historically, this has been thought to be the result of something called myonuclear domain theory [4]. The theory goes as follows:

 

As you may know, your muscles are made up of multiple muscle cells; which are often referred to as muscle fibers. Just like any other cell, muscle cells have a nucleus. However, a muscle cell’s nucleus can only provide information to a given area of the muscle. As your muscles grow, more nuclei must also be built.

In a period where you lose muscle, you lose the contractile units that produce contraction of a muscle. However, you do not lose the nuclei. As a result, all the information required to build the greater volume of muscle mass is still there. So, when you begin training again, your muscle will be able to grow much faster than it did before.

However, this theory that was once thought to be certain has just come under question. In August of this year (2022) a new meta-analysis has been published providing evidence of the loss of nuclei in a muscle cell with atrophy, which to my knowledge has not been observed before [3]. This is a big challenge to myonuclear domain theory, as it is dependent on the idea that the nuclei of muscle cells are permanent, which they appear to not be.

Even though the literature is not clear as to why it happens, it is well established that rebuilding muscle after a period of atrophy is easier and faster than building it in the first place. So, rest assured, if you have lost some muscle, it will come back quicker than you think.

 

Conclusion

In summary, I hope I was able to drive home three main points to you in this article. First, it is much easier to maintain muscle than you’d think. Second, it takes a lot longer time to actually lose muscle than you’d think. And lastly, if you actually do lose muscle, it is much easier to rebuild it than to build it in the first place.

 

Essentially, most of the hard work is done when you initially are building the muscle. Once you have it, it’s much more resilient than you’d think.

References

1. Maintaining Physical Performance: The Minimal Dose of Exercise Needed to Preserve Endurance and Strength Over Time

   • PubMed ID: 33629972

2. Short-Term Training and Detraining Effects of Supervised vs. Unsupervised Resistance Exercise in Aging Adults

   • PubMed ID: 29528961

3. Myonuclear permanence in skeletal muscle memory: a systematic review and meta-analysis of human and animal studies

   • PubMed ID: 35961635

4. The concept of skeletal muscle memory: Evidence from animal and human studies

   • PubMed ID: 32175681