PERCEIVED MUSCLE LOSS WHEN DIETING

PERCEIVED MUSCLE LOSS WHEN DIETING – There’s a decent chance you’ll lose strength on some lifts when dieting. When you do, you may assume you’re losing muscle. In reality, this strength loss is related to something different than muscle loss – decreased passive stability.

Muscles can create stability in a joint, but you can also make a joint more stable by increasing pressure around it. When your muscles are full of water/glycogen, there’s more pressure around the related joints, so stability is increased without voluntary effort. Extracellular water retention and fat increase pressure around a joint too, making it more stable.

But when you lose some of that while dieting, some joints can become less stable. When the body senses a key joint is unstable, it won’t allow you to use all of your strength potential. It limits force production; it doesn’t feel safe. The shoulder joint will be the most affected, mostly in pressing. So the bench, military press, and related lifts are the most likely to go down. You could maintain your strength, or even increase it on isolation exercises for triceps/pecs/delts and still have a drop in your bench! Why? Isolation exercises don’t require the same stability. And since there’s less loading on the joint, the body doesn’t need to inhibit performance.

Squat variations are the second most likely to be affected. Pulling exercises are the least likely to be affected among the multi-joint movements. That’s why I like to do pressing in the Smith machine starting at the halfway point of the diet. Because it’s stable, the body will allow you to use a higher percentage of your force potential than in the free-weight bench. Same with hack squat machine.

The big picture: If your big pressing movements and squat are going down a bit, but other exercises are staying up or even getting stronger, you’re not losing muscle. You’re just losing stability.