The Only Way To Know You’re Building Muscle Doing Very Little Exercise (Age Makes A Difference)

The Only Way To Know You’re Building Muscle Doing Very Little Exercise (Age Makes A Difference)

There are many reasons one might end up doing the absolute minimum amount of exercise. You could be busy at work. Or right now, we’re in the middle of summer with the kids out of school, and it’s the peak of vacation season, taking time away from our ability to train.

Or maybe you just don’t want to spend any more time than absolutely necessary getting fit.

How little exercise we can do and still build muscle will depend on our genetics, age and how long we’ve been working out.

These variables affect our ability to progress. How do we know we're getting any results from the minimum amount of training?

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Well, A 2011 study illustrates how different variables affect our progress when we’ve reduced our training volume.

The study focuses on hypertrophy or muscle growth and strength. Looking at how different volumes affect us and at what point we start losing our gains because we’re not training enough.

They split the test subjects into two age groups, one of younger people between the ages of 20 to 35 and another group between the ages of 60 to 75.

These were healthy untrained men that were put on a 16-week progressive lower body resistance training program.

It wasn’t a balance lower body workout either. It was totally quad-focused, doing leg extensions, leg presses and squats. 3 sets of each exercise, 3 times a week. For a total of 27 weekly sets.

They did between 8 to 12 reps and increased the weight on an exercise once they could do at least 12 perfect repetitions on 2 of the 3 sets.

After 16 weeks, they all got stronger and built muscle.

The next phase saw them broken into 3 groups, one that quit training altogether. A second group that only trained one day a week and did 9 total sets.

Finally, a third group did only 3 sets once a week.

No surprise, the group that stopped training altogether lost their gains. However, they lost their strength gains much slower than their muscle mass.

The young group that only did 3 sets one day per week did pretty good with no strength losses and maintained muscle mass for 16 weeks before they started to see a decline.

The older groups also maintained strength but lost more muscle mass than the young ones.

Based on this study, if you’re between 20 to 35, you should be able to maintain your gains for 3 or 4 months with only 3 sets per body part per week.

You don’t have to do this all in one day. You could split it up over the week. If you trained 3 times a week, you’d only have to do one set for each body part each workout.

So what we’re the results for the 9 sets a week group? The younger group aced this one with increases in strength and muscle growth.

The older group showed a clear separation between strength and hypertrophy, continuing to gain strength but losing muscle size.

I’m interested in hearing your options on this. Can you really get stronger while losing muscle size? Does that make any sense to you?

I still have 4 years to go before I’m in the older group, but I’m 21 years older than the most senior guy in the young group.

I’m currently doing full-body workouts 3 times a week. With my total sets per body part being in that 9 to 12 range. And I’m building muscle despite being closer to the age group losing size around the same set range.

And how do I know this? Well, there is only one way, and that’s by tracking our progress and logging the number of repetitions and weights we’re using to track strength gains.

For hypertrophy, the best way is with a measuring tape, scale, and progress photos.

If your waist is getting bigger, but there is no change in your arms, chest, shoulders and quads, you need to cut back on the food and increase the training intensity.

https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/2011/07000/Exercise_Dosing_to_Retain_Resistance_Training.7.aspx