Part 1: Moving Back to Maintenance

‘Metabolic Damage’ sounds scary right?

As we diet down something unavoidable happens, our human biology changes. Our metabolism adapts, it has to and it is something people often forget. This is because our bodies are smart, they want to protect against ‘starvation’, so we experience changes to bring our metabolism lower.

You might want to achieve low body fat levels but your body doesn’t care for vanity, it strives to survive and will do it’s best to prevent a loss in weight. You will experience more hunger, you will get lazy and have lower energy and reduce your energy expenditure, each will be more intense the larger your calorie deficit. The changes are expected, and it is understanding these that’s most important.

So lets take an example, me. I started my fat loss journey on over 3500 calories, my metabolism was high, I had loads of energy and my hormones were functioning well. The weight dropped off, but after a few weeks the weight loss stalled, my metabolism had adapted down. This meant the calorie intake I once lost fat on was now enough to maintain my weight, bummer. So I either needed to drop my calorie intake further or increase my expenditure, that’s if I wanted to drop more fat. So this process continued, once consuming over 3500 calories with no cardio and dropping fat, to now over 30 weeks later on under 2500 calories and doing 4 cardio sessions a week. My metabolism adapted, because my body doesn’t want me to lose any more weight.

In short; you provide your body less energy, it will burn less energy. It’s like when your computer gets to low battery and enters energy saver mode, we now function as a sub-optimal version of our former selves.

So now we understand that our bodies try their best to stop us losing fat, this is an inevitable safety mechanism we cannot avoid. We must just be aware of it, and by not rushing things we can slow it’s adaption. In part two we will learn about ‘refeeds’ or ‘cheat meals’, these little beauties can help reverse metabolic adaption, for a short while anyway.

Coming Back to Training After a Layoff

I recently received the following message from a friend:

‘I have been ill for 2 weeks with glandular fever. I haven’t been in the gym for 10 days and have lost my appetite and 8lbs to go with it.

How should I go about getting back into my stride? Obviously mentally I am raring to go, although disheartened because I’ve lost muscle and strength with it. Any guidance is appreciated, as you know a 2nd perspective always helps’

I have and I am sure everyone has suffered from ill health in the past. And although there are different degree’s of bad health, I do believe the process of building yourself back up is very similar. The premise of my site and what I feel makes me unique is that I have been able to recover (or revive if you will), from serious ill health and come out stronger.

Here I am going to give you some guidance, using my own experiences in combination with what the science says.

Your Immune System and Exercise

Exercise causes a major physiological change in our immune system. It can have both positive and negative effects. Studies have found a ‘J Curve’ relationship between exercise and illness, while moderate amounts enhance our ability to fight disease, excessive amounts may impair our immune function. Essentially exercises causes an increase in several stress hormones, and these cause a down regulation of various aspects of our immune functionality.

Now how does this relate to someone getting back into training after a period of being unwell? The degree of how unfit/recovered you are, will influence how fast you will approach the high exercise workload and be at risk.

In practical terms this means you need to approach training slower than you normally would, do not go all guns blazing, or you are likely to become unwell again. Obviously, the degree of your ill health will determine how fast you can add exercise. For example, prior to my accident I was running and weight training daily, when I first got out of hospital just walking at a slow pace for 20 minutes was incredibly hard. However, for the case in hand they can probably get back to their original training regime in a month, slowly adding volume and intensity each week.

Key here is listening to your body and not your head. I can attest to this, my mind wanted to be back doing what I was before, but my body wanted to be in bed. Pushing yourself too far too early will put yourself into the high risk zone on the J curve. Be patient.

Becoming Detrained

Training evokes a skeletal muscle adaption by which the trained muscles increase their tolerance to exercise. The opposite to this is the principle of training reversibility, or detraining, in which  we see a partial or complete reversal of training-induced adaptions. Our skeletal muscle tissue has high plasticity and so can adapt to variable  demands, by changing its functional characteristics and structural composition.

I found 5 studies which reported muscular strength returns to control levels over several weeks of detraining via a reversal of the neuromuscular and hormonal adaptions that occurred during the training phase. However, these studies were done on subjects who were previously sedentary, and therefore do not work well as evidence for the trained population.

However, there is a study that examined 12 strength-trained males who on average exercised 3.41 times per week for 91.1 minutes, performing 2-5 sets of 1-12 repetitions at an intensity of 70-100%. The average stats of the participants; 24.4 years old at 88.6kg and 181.1cm tall with a body fat of 11.5%. None of the subjects had used anabolic steroids or other ergogenic aids 6 months prior to the study.

The athletes reported to a lab for 3 days of testing, where their vertical jump, knee extension strength, 1RM free weight bench press, and 1RM squat were assessed. Following these tests the subjects took a period of 14 days away from training, maintaining a normal diet and daily activity. Following the 14 days the athletes took part in another 3 days of testing, as before. The results were largely in contrast to studies done on previously untrained individuals.

No significant pre- to post-detraining differences occurred in body mass and estimated body fat. Performance in their free weight bench press and squat decreased by an average of only 2kg. Furthermore, there were no significant changes in knee extension strength or force production and again no significant differences were seen in jumping height after a period of detraining.

Interestingly there was an average of 0.3% to 0.8% reduction in strength per week with training cessation. In addition there was a significant decrease in the Type 2 muscle fibers, this is thought to occur as these fibers do not get utilised outside formal training. Also strength training has been seen to convert muscle fiber type from slow to fast, however during the short period of detraining the reverse was not found to occur.

However, it has been seen that in long term detraining, such as one athlete who took 7 months off, all muscle fibers atrophy. Thus, we can delineate that the training cessation on muscle fiber distribution appear to be dependent on the duration of the inactivity period. 

Here I want to state, that short periods of time off the gym are actually very beneficial. During these periods you would still preferably be active, therefore blunting the strength and muscle losses. Deloads/tapers would require a whole blog post of their own, but essentially they allow you to recover and ‘super compensate’ which leads to muscular gains and prevents over-training. Short-term detraining has therefore been seen to augment tissue remodelling and repair, stress hormones down regulate and anabolic hormones up regulate.

So as we can see, short term periods of detraining are therefore not an issue. You may feel like a fat slob, but time off is actually beneficial. The implication being that the longer you are off from training and the more sedentary you are, the less beneficial and more detrimental the impacts become.

If we use me as an example, I was detrained for over a month, and during that time I was bed ridden and this further augmented the negative consequences. Therefore, I suffered from muscle atrophy losing 2 stone and my muscular strength was pretty much back to pre-training levels. However, for the individual in question who has been off for less than two weeks and can be active to some degree, they are unlikely to have suffered much muscle atrophy, and they can hope to regain their previous strength fairly quickly.

Summary

• There is a ‘J curve’ relationship with exercise and immune function. Therefore, exercise can help your health but if you take it too far it can be detrimental. If you are already in a un-well state, the quicker exercise will negatively impact your immune function.
• In trained subjects the impact of detraining for short periods of time has non significant impacts on muscle size or performance.
• Recently trained individuals do however see a reduction in performance and muscle size, often to pre-training levels.
• Short breaks where volume and or intensity are reduced can actually have positive impacts on our muscle size and performance. These are generally called deloads or tapers and last approximately one week.
• The longer the person is unable to train and the more inactive that person, the worse the impact on muscle size and performance.

So be sure to listen to your body, be patient and take things slow. If you have not been seriously unwell, and have only had a short period of time off the gym, don’t fret, you’ll be back to your usual self in no time. However, if you have been unable to train at full capacity for periods reaching over a month, you have to realise you are not what you used to be. In that case train smart, and focus on recovery, building up your training volume and intensity very slowly over a period of months.

I wish everyone the very best in their pursuit to recovery from their ill-health, by reading this I know you are better set in reaching your training goals.

Resources

1. Costill, D. L. Detraining: loss of muscular strength and power. Sports Med. Digest 10:4, 1988. 
2. Coyle, E. F. Detraining and retention of training-induced adapta- tions. In: Resource Manual for Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription, S. N. Blair, et al. (Eds.). Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1988, pp. 83–89. 
3. Gleeson, M. Immune function in sport and exercise. Journal of Applied Physiology. Vol. 103. no. 2. 693-699. 2007.
4. Gordon, T., and M. C. Pattullo. Plasticity of muscle fiber and motor unit types. Exerc. Sports Sci. Rev. 21:331–362, 1993. 
5. Hoppeler H. Exercise-induced ultrastructural changes in skeletal muscle. Int. J. Sports Med. 7:187–204, 1986. 
6. Hortobagyi, T. et al. The effects of detraining on power athletes. Med. Sci. Sports Exerc., Vol 25, No.8 pp. 929-935, 1993.
7. Mujika, I. Padilla, S. Muscular characteristics of detraining in humans. med. Sci. Sports Exerc., Vol. 33, No. 8, pp.1297-1303. 2001.
8. Nieman DC. Exercise, infection and immunity. Int J Sports Med 15: S131–S141, 1994.
9. Neufer, P. D. The effect of detraining and reduced training on the physiological adaptions to aerobic exercise training. Sports Med. 8:302-321, 1989.
10. Shaver, L. G. Cross transfer effects of conditioning and deconditioing on muscular strength. Ergonomics 18:9-16, 1975.