I was on a 3 week vacation where I had zero workouts. I also had a food poisoning and could not hold anything in. When I came back I noticed that my arms and shoulders simply melted away. The loss is so significant and I already had a few people point it out.
My question is does muscle lost come back quicker than a muscle that was never there in the first place? I have heard of cell memory for fat cells. Is there anything similar for muscle cells?
It's going to vary for everyone. Normally 3 weeks off wouldn't make much difference but the food poisoning certainly would. Get back at it. Start with lighter weights, and it will probably come back quite quickly. Yes there is muscle memory.
I can not answer the cell question but yor muscle loss will aboslotuley recover quicker than the time it took to gain it the first time.
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I can not answer the cell question but yor muscle loss will aboslotuley recover quicker than the time it took to gain it the first time.
I had read somewhere a while back that it was a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of weeks off to time to get it back. So I would say you would get it back in a week if you resumed the same training.
As far as losing muscle, we don't "lose" muscle. What we got is what we got. Muscle fibers can get atrophied from not using them, and they get thinner in size and less able to contract. Strength comes from the ability to fully contract your muscle fibers and to coordinate their contraction all at the same instant. It takes practice to do this, i.e. working out. Size comes from the diameter of the muscle fiber. You increase this by pumping more fluid into the muscle so over time it can accomodate more fluid. And from the muscle fibers rebuilding themselves after being broken down by exercise. Muscle tone is a state of your muscles fibers in a state of partial contraction at rest. Like flexing without thinking..
Anyway, you don't really lose muscle or grow new muscle. It is basically what shape the muscle fiber that you have are in.
Not sure about your question on muscle memory, but if your muscle fibers are used to contracting in a certain ROM or plane of motion from the types of exercises you're doing, they may not functional as well when subjected to a different ROM or plane of motion. That has always been the rub with machines vs. free weights. With machines you are constricted to a certain plane and range of motion, and not necessarily strengthening the deep stabilizer muscles.
I took about 4 months off for various reasons from mid-January to mid-May, and even though I still ate pretty well I lost a fair amount of strength and size. After about 4-6 weeks I felt I was close to where I was in size and strength. I was surprised how soon it all came back. I would say after 3 weeks, even though you had food poisoning, you should be feeling back to where you were in no time.
In all likelyhood, you didn't lose actual muscle tissue. You lost fluid.
Hypertrophy comes in two forms: contractile and sarcoplasmic, or fluid hypertrophy.
The vast majority of size gains made by people who weight train are the result of fluid hypertrophy. This is what enables bodybuilders to pack more mass onto their frames than any other athletes. Their muscles are walking storage tanks for glycogen and water. Anybody who has ever run an oral cycle and come off it abruptly can attest to how much of your "muscle" gains come from fluid hypertrophy.
The good news about fluid hypertrophy is that you can gain it back as quickly as you lost it. A proper, bodybuilding style training routine incorporating the principles of isolation and exhaustion can put half an inch to 1 full inch on anybody's arm after a single workout. I do that myself all the time.
Contractile fiber hypertrophy is a process which takes years and years. Most adults probably couldn't add 1 inch of solid muscle mass in 5 years of solid training. At least, not without tren or test injections.
Fluid is everything when it comes to size. That's why pro bodybuilders train for "the pump". They are not idiots. If you want size, nothing will get you there faster than localized glycogen depletion followed by super compensation. In other words, isolation exercises performed to failure, followed by post-workout carb intake.
I A proper, bodybuilding style training routine incorporating the principles of isolation and exhaustion can put half an inch to 1 full inch on anybody's arm after a single workout. I do that myself all the time.
Allerious, in the past 3-4 years ive gone from 165-170lbs or so to around 210lbs, and im hardly fat, mostly from routines such Scrawny to Brawny, NROL, and various other Full Body routines, hardly ever going to failure, and hardly any isolation exercises. Are you saying I would see better results if i did DB flyes and curls to failure all the time?
As far as losing muscle, we don't "lose" muscle. What we got is what we got.
I must disagree. We can lose muscle. We're not talking about the physical law that we "cannot create or destroy matter," instead the muscle is converted to something else for another purpose. The term is catabolism - opposite of anabolism. It can happen in the case of illness where the body breaks down muscle tissue in order to feed itself. I watched a friend melt away for 6 weeks from the West Nile virus before he finally recovered. So in the case of food poisoning, seems to me the body could go into a catabolic state.
Fluid is everything when it comes to size. That's why pro bodybuilders train for "the pump". They are not idiots. If you want size, nothing will get you there faster than localized glycogen depletion followed by super compensation. In other words, isolation exercises performed to failure, followed by post-workout carb intake.
No way in hell for a natural trainer (or even a juicer) this is true.
Yes. It's not just the temporary workout "pump" that I'm talking about.
You get noticeable engorgement and vascularity in the muscles for up to a week after. It affects your overall appearance. Bodybuilders are very familiar with this phenomenon. Fitness models also use this effect to rapidly transform their physiques before photo shoots. Anybody who is relatively lean should be able to test it on themselves.
You really do need to completely exhaust the muscles, though. We're talking about brutal dropsets. It can only be done with isolation movements because by the time you crank out your last rep, you'll be in huge pain and barely able to move. If you underneath a heavy bar, you'd drop the weight on yourself.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AS
Allerious, in the past 3-4 years ive gone from 165-170lbs or so to around 210lbs, and im hardly fat, mostly from routines such Scrawny to Brawny, NROL, and various other Full Body routines, hardly ever going to failure, and hardly any isolation exercises. Are you saying I would see better results if i did DB flyes and curls to failure all the time?
I don't think you're fat. I do think that fluid hypertrophy played a significant part in your gains, unless you made them when you were a teenager. As far as your training goes, you added weight because you were in a caloric surplus. I think you would look more like a bodybuilder if you started doing isolation movements on a regular basis. How do you look now? There is a difference between being simply "beefy/muscular" and having the trademark appearance of a physique athlete. Things like a V-taper, X-Frame, quad sweep, rounded delts, full upper chest. Compound lifting tends to magnify whatever "flaws" (or strengths) you have in your physique because it forces you to rely on your dominant muscles all the time. If you're triceps dominant and you bench all the time, your pecs will lag behind in development and it will show after a while.
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Originally Posted by Frank.S
No way in hell for a natural trainer (or even a juicer) this is true.
Do you think that gains in contractile tissue come faster than those from extra and intra cellular fluid?
I had a biology teacher in high school who was into bodybuilding. One of the things I remember him saying was that the maximum amount of real muscle (contractile) tissue you could put on in one year was 3-5 lbs, and that even putting on one pound in a year would be an accomplishment for most people.
Think about it. The amount of muscle you have is basically up to genetics. Weight training can increase the cross-sectional diameter of the muscle you have, but growing new muscle altogether is a very difficult process. Hypertrophy occurs far more often than hyperplasia. And fluid hypertrophy far more often than contractile.
Last edited by Allerious : 07-24-2008 at 05:05 PM.
I must disagree. We can lose muscle. We're not talking about the physical law that we "cannot create or destroy matter," instead the muscle is converted to something else for another purpose. The term is catabolism - opposite of anabolism. It can happen in the case of illness where the body breaks down muscle tissue in order to feed itself. I watched a friend melt away for 6 weeks from the West Nile virus before he finally recovered. So in the case of food poisoning, seems to me the body could go into a catabolic state.
He's referring to the muscle cells (fibers) that make up skeletal muscle tissue. They don't really disappear, and new ones are not normally produced. However, the amount of actin and myosin protein filaments (the workhorses for contraction) inside those cells can increase (hypertrophy) or decrease (atrophy). The amount of muscle cells doesn't change, but their individual sizes increase or decrease depending on how filled up they are with protein filaments, fluids, glycogen, etc.
It's kind of like the concept that we have a set number of fat cells that either fill up with stored fats on the inside (and we get porky), or those stored fats get catabolized as energy sources, the cells "deflate," and we look skinny or jacked up low body fat, etc.
In the absence of disease, physical trauma (as in, having a chunk of muscle forcibly removed) and sarcopenia in old age, we don't typically lose or add muscle fibers, no.
There's still a remote possibility that myofiber addition is possible, as we haven't been able to entirely rule it out and there are some "extreme cases" out there (in the population of drug-using bodybuilders) that, if anyone exhibits it, would show this process.
The unfortunate problem for the hyperplasia advocates is not in the muscle fibers and their stem cells -- which, on paper, could easily form new mature fibers -- but the nervous system. The animals in which we see fiber splitting/new fibers forming all have very different fiber arrangements and neural innervation properties than human muscles.
What allows new fibers to be "wired in" to the nervous system simply isn't present in human muscle tissue, and we've not really observed anything that would make it feasible. Even if we could form new fibers, there's no way (we know of) for them to be connected to the NS.
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I had a biology teacher in high school who was into bodybuilding. One of the things I remember him saying was that the maximum amount of real muscle (contractile) tissue you could put on in one year was 3-5 lbs, and that even putting on one pound in a year would be an accomplishment for most people.
He must be right! He was a biology teacher after all who was interested in Bodybuilding! I don't expect a math teacher who has some interest in applied mathematics to engineer a computer. I wouldn't use him as a source.
I was on a 3 week vacation where I had zero workouts. I also had a food poisoning and could not hold anything in. When I came back I noticed that my arms and shoulders simply melted away. The loss is so significant and I already had a few people point it out.
My question is does muscle lost come back quicker than a muscle that was never there in the first place? I have heard of cell memory for fat cells. Is there anything similar for muscle cells?
Thanks in advance for your input.
You lost size probably more due to the food poisoning than anything else. When I had knee surgery last year I couldn't workout much for a few weeks, but made a point to keep eating as much as I could. I didn't lose any size and within a week or 2 back in the gym I was stronger and bigger than ever.
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about the biology teacher, that should be pretty easy to prove wrong. Just gain 20kg over some time, take a bf test, figure out how much was not fat, then we know how much glycogen 1kg of muscle can contain (or about), then you just subtract that and when you get a number that blows 1kg/year out of the water you have yourself some evidence.
Not quite sure what you mean.. you don't agree with my example?
or are you saying that the bigger you get the less muscle you will be able to put on in a given time frame? I get that, but the guy didn't state if the gain was for an experienced or novice lifter.
about the biology teacher, that should be pretty easy to prove wrong. Just gain 20kg over some time, take a bf test, figure out how much was not fat, then we know how much glycogen 1kg of muscle can contain (or about), then you just subtract that and when you get a number that blows 1kg/year out of the water you have yourself some evidence.
That doesn't tell you how much of the weight was water vs. contractile fiber.
How quick do muscles grow back.
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