It’ll Be Okay, Meatheads — Maintaining Muscle During The Pandemic
For meatheads and newbies alike, here is my best advice for maintaining or even possibly scaling your own muscle mass during these times
This article was originally published on my personal Medium account.
It’s important to preface this with a disclaimer. I’d like to signal that, for many, losing out on some time at the gym is the least of their worries. Many are living in fear of losing their livelihood, their place of living, or, worst of all, their lives, whether it be at the hands of the virus or its rippling effect of despair on global socioeconomic intricacies. If the greatest worry for you right now is whether or not you may be able to pick up a barbell in the next few months, I’d say you have it pretty good.
In any case, I can understand why staying as fit, able, and athletic as possible during these tumultuous times may be of significance to you. After all, some early research even appears to indicate that testosterone may be correlated with mitigating the effects of the virus. Either way, lean mass preservation and building play a large role in overall health, and higher lean mass has been generally linked to a lower risk for all-cause mortality.
For avid-meatheads and lifting newbs alike, here is my best advice for maintaining or even possibly scaling your own muscle mass on an upward trajectory during these uncertain times.
TLDR;
Manage Volume — Depending on what equipment you have access to, you may need to manage your training volume a bit differently than you are used to, either with higher intensity for shorter, less frequent sessions or more absolute volume for lighter weights.
Make Equipment — If you don’t have access to your usual equipment, jerry rigging your own with some common hardware can go a long way.
Be Mindful Of Your Nutrition — If you can’t train at all, the worst thing you can do is put yourself in a caloric surplus. Try to maintain some activity and monitor your nutrition.
Balancing Frequency, Volume, and Intensity
A quick primer for the uninvolved: these variables equate to a fundamental balance that underpins every strength training program, even if you haven’t consciously realized it.
Frequency — how often you target a muscle group, domain of exercises, or even a single exercise on a periodic basis.
Volume — the number of reps and sets of an exercise or group of exercises performed on a periodic basis.
Intensity — the load, especially relative to a single- or multi-rep maximum.
For much more information on this subject matter and more, I recommend giving Dr. Eric Helms’s video on the topic a look if you have time for it:
As one would imagine, these variables are not independent, but highly interlinked with one another. Balancing these variables to produce an effective program that allows you to complete sessions from week-to-week while progressing and mitigating injury is a cornerstone of strength-training programming. In other words, you need an intensity that allows you to produce the most hypertrophy and progression possible (generally in the ballpark of 70–90% for most), while allowing you to prescribe ample volume across a selection of different (but consistent) exercises, performed at a frequency that allows you to effectively manage fatigue and time.
Less is More
If all of this sounds reasonable or familiar, then my next point should make perfect sense, and that is to make do with the situation and manage your volume a bit differently than if you had full access to your usual equipment. If you are able to access equipment rarely or on a less frequent basis or your sessions are shortened by restrictions, it doesn’t take much stimuli (even one workout per week may be adequate, according to these studies) to maintain most or all of your muscle mass. Higher intensity paired with lower volumes than what you are used to will be enough for most people to maintain their muscle. Even one major compound movement per region will be enough to satisfy your skeletal muscle’s needs.
However, I recognize that the people in the previously described category represent a minority. Most of us do not have access to our regular equipment in any capacity at the moment. With that in mind, some lighter equipment (even and especially makeshift weights, which I address below) can still go a long way. The inverse logic applies here; lower intensity, higher volume sessions and exercises are enough, and for many, are even more than enough, as a meta-analysis conducted by renowned researcher Brad Schoenfeld illustrates that hypertrophy can be achieved across a wide spectrum of rep ranges. Even if either of these aforementioned suggested training styles don’t align with your typical, optimized, or highly goal-oriented training styles, consider them as opportunities to explore alternative stimuli. Maybe you have been training a certain way for several months or even years; this could be a good moment in time to capitalize on experimentation in your training program, which may even help you overcome a wall or plateau once you eventually return to training regularly.
Make Your Own Equipment, If Need Be
As gyms around the world have shut their doors to their patrons, it’s no secret that demand has skyrocketed for home gym equipment. Many independent sellers (read: scalpers) have listed equipment for exorbitantly high prices, several factors above their usual listing price. Inventory from all of the big manufacturers, like Rogue and Titan have had their shelves cleared by desperate lifters.
If you have managed to grab some equipment early on, great. More than likely, though, you lacked either the space, the foresight, or the financial means to make it happen, and now you might be wondering about what to do. While fitspo influencers tout somewhat ridiculous looking bodyweight exercises, you can definitely take it a little further than hundreds of strange looking push-ups and planks if you are creative enough.
I was able to reap a lot out of a couple of buckets of Quikrete and a dip belt. Formulating Quikrete into concrete is quite easy (just add water), and the dip belt is highly versatile in that it enables you to perform a multitude of exercises: dips, belt squats, pull-ups, and chin-ups, to name a few notable examples. Makeshift dumbbells could be had by doing as I did and filling some buckets of various sizes with sediment, sand, and/or concrete. For the stronger people out there, a 5-gallon bucket of concrete can weigh between 80 and 100 pounds if filled near its max capacity. Programming around some compound movements that don’t require a barbell, such as weighted push-ups, lunges, and anything else you can think of can get you quite far while you wait to get your hands on a barbell.
Whatever You Do, Try Not To Get Fat
Even if, for whatever reason, you cannot get in any sort of lifting or resistance activity, avoid the compulsion to eat more and move less. Even if you were eating in a caloric surplus before all of this, it’ll be far more difficult to undo the damage incurred by gaining copious body fat now than it will be to restore your strength and lean mass down the line. Regaining muscle and strength is generally a non-issue, as you are already well-adapted and rich with myonuclei; it’s not as though all of your work thus far will be magically undone.
Working against an escalating body fat is another story. Your daily expenditure (TDEE) will likely be reduced significantly in tandem with your reduced activity, so persisting your previous dietary habits (assuming they were at maintenance levels or above) to a tee means that your previous intake is now well above your maintenance limit, to the point in which it has become unhealthy. By the time you return to the gym, you would have gained copious amounts of fat depending on how far out the lockdown persists, and would be spending months reversing that damage before you can return to making progress again. Hypertrophy is known to be slower, stagnant, or even reversed in an extended caloric deficit, so generally speaking, the less time you have to spend reducing excess body fat, the better.
Even making an effort to do things as simple as going on walks around the block and tracking your nutrition carefully is, again, better than inaction. As stressful and difficult as times may be, it’s important to remember to persist, not to give into pressure, and come out the other side strong.
Whatever you decide to do, don’t let your mind be clouded by the flurry of pessimism and negativity corroding the minds of millions every day. No matter how you frame it, there’s no questioning that this scenario has caused pain, be it through illness or through its rippling effect on normalcy. I nor anyone else can reassure you with any absolute certainty about the future. I understand that, for many, including myself, training was a form of escapism; a way to retract oneself from the misgivings of every day reality; a meditative experience. And although it may seem awful to lose that getaway in such bizarre and potentially turbulent times, always remember to weigh and affirm your fortunes, pick up the pieces, and the question will not be “if”, but “when”.