Consistency and intensity are so important to stop losing your muscle mass, that I am going to dedicate the whole chapter to it. If you are serious about keeping healthy muscle mass, you will become consistent in your resistance training and you will be doing it intensively. Which means, you will deserve to lift heavy weights by being consistent.
Consistency
Consistency in weight lifting means that, you have a certain plan and you stick with it no matter what. It is very important for your health to preserve muscle mass. So why wouldn’t you be consistent? There are actually many reasons for not keeping up with your promises, like for example boredom and general laziness. But this time, it’s different. You now know, that you cannot afford to loose more muscle mass. And you need to reverse this trend.
Pick your days for strength training
The simplest way to become consistent at weight training if you are a beginner or even advanced lifter is to pick two particular days in a week and set the time to do your resistance training. You only need 1 hour on these days to finish a great workout.
What days are the best? The best set up for your resistance training days are 2 nonconsecutive days in the week. Bu they need to be separated by 2 days between and not more than 3 days between them. The reason for that is that, your worked out muscles need some recovery time for rebuilding itself after intensive muscle building workout. And 2 to 3 rest days are great length to accomplish this, especially when you get to a very intensive phase after slow beginning. But it’s a great habit from the start to have.
At the same time, you don’t want to keep too long time between your workouts. The muscle starts getting weaker fast. If you don’t apply another workout after 3 days, your muscles start to atrophy. You will get sore after keeping longer periods than 3 days between your workouts. That means your brake between strength training sessions was too long.
Why only two days of strength training?
This two days per week workout system requires two days of weight training because the weight training sessions are designed to work all the major muscle groups in the body in one session. We all have a busy life’s and quite honestly, if you don’t want to become a professional body builder, this is the most effective way to maintain your healthy muscle mass with least amount of time.
Who has time to go to the gym one day and work only one or two muscle groups per day and than come next day to work another muscle group and than another? While this technique has it’s place in more advanced muscle building, you don’t need to do it to preserve muscle mass and initiate some muscle growth at the same time. 2 times per week is enough! If you can prove to yourself that you can keep coming these 2 days per week for a year consistently, than feel free to start experimenting with more strength training sessions per week.
For example: Mondays and Thursdays – there are 2 days between Monday and Thursday and 3 days between Thursday and Monday.
Other great workout days examples are:
Tuesdays and Fridays
Wednesdays and Saturdays
Sundays and Wednesdays
Pick your days and stick with them!
What time is the best time?
There is not a rule about time and when to do your strength training, muscle building workout session. Some experts believe, that we are the strongest and with most energy at around midday, between 1 and 3 PM. But this doesn’t really matter.
If you can get your muscle mass loss preventing workout done anytime during your set days that are on your plan, you will do great. And most of us are working and are busy during these times anyway. If you can get it done early in the morning before work, great! If you only have time later in the evening that’s fine too. If you can get it done during working hours, even better. Just remember, time when you do it is not as important as actually really getting it done.
What to do with the rest of your days?
What to do with the remaining 5 days in the week? Aren’t you suppose to exercise every day? Yes, you are. For the most part. You use these days doing cardiovascular exercise and preferably having some fun with it. Play games like tennis, soccer, surf, swim or just walk or jog outside or use one of the stationary cardio equipment to do your cardiovascular exercise.
Yes moving everyday is not only great for you body, it is great for your mind too. I cannot live without doing something physical, preferably fun physical like surfing, playing tennis, windsurfing, playing hockey, skating, rollerblading activity everyday. Use your other days when not doing weight training for cardiovascular exercise. Be creative and have some fun with it!
Being sore means no consistency
You most likely experienced soreness before. You lifted some weights 2 days before and than you were sore for the rest of the week. Is it good or bad? Neither of these. The reason you get sore is because you were not consistent with your weight training. When you lift here and there, whenever you feel like it, you will get sore. It’s not bad for you, by you won’t preserve muscle mass loss this way either. For that, you need to be consistent.
Muscle soreness is a pain from microscopic muscle tears that happen when you suddenly lift too much, or your muscle is not used to this kind of work. Like I said, it’s not dangerous, but it is a good sign of inconsistency in weight training.
Little contrary to what I just said is getting sore just a little bit. Not the kind of soreness you can’t walk for the whole week. If you get sore just a little bit for a little while after a strength training workout, you pushed yourself just right. You increased the weight slightly, or you changed the exercise you did before for particular muscle. This kind of soreness is ok. Just don’t be surprised, when you don’t get sore at all after a while when you get very consistent. I almost never get sore, because I never miss my weight training sessions. And so shouldn’t you. To stop loss of your muscle mass, you need to get very consistent with you strength training. There is no way around it.
Intensity
Intensity is another key factor to stop loosing your muscle mass. It is the main muscle growth factor. In order for muscle to grow, it needs to get damaged. These damage is good, because it sends the impulse to the brain and from brain back to the muscle, that it’s time to grow. It’s time to preserve and build new muscle mass. Because another overload is coming soon.
Intensity is a form of protection in the muscles if done right. It will make muscles to grow and become stronger and flexible after lifting intensive heavy weights. So they are ready and won’t get hurt later. By applying enough of intensity – weight, you overload the muscle without braking it. But there is a limit of how much load you can use to put these muscle growing impulse to your muscles without injuring it.
How much intensity?
Intensity in case of resistance strength training is the amount of weight you lift. So how heavy is not too heavy and not too light at the same time?
I have a few simple rules in my weight training you can apply to lift heavy enough weight. Here they are:
Rule 1: Start firs set of 20 repetitions with a weigh that is challenging, but you can complete all 20R (Repetitions) in this set with about 70% effort. This weight will be for everybody different and it will wary from exercise to exercise. That’s why it’s important to just play with the weights first to find your first set load. One way to do this is to start weight training with the very light weight and every week increasing the weight by 5 pounds.
Rule 2: Ad weight to your second set. Here you will still be able to finish all 20R. But, you will be finishing them with a lot of effort. About 80% and more. It will feel like, you won’t be able to finish all 20R but you eventually will. It will feel hard.
Rule 3: Ad more weight to your third set. Here, you will be able to finish 15R and more R with this load, but no more than 17R. You will basically fail before reaching 20R. Now, right after you fail at 17th repetition, decrease the load you are lifting by 10 pounds and finish it to 20R.
It will depend how much weight you need to add in your third set based on the kind of exercise you do. For upper body exercises, adding 5 – 10 pounds is good, for legs 10 – 20 pounds is good.
Give yourself a little time before applying this rules, if you are just starting. Two weeks of playing with light weights, getting to know your loads and experimenting lightly and easily is a smart thing to do. Than start ruthlessly applying those 3 rules and you will become muscle mass preserving and building animal. Good for you! Actually, great for you, your health, your wealth, your life, and every aspect of it.
I got so incredibly consistent with my weight training, that I am never afraid to lift even the heaviest weights; the ones I can do only 3 – 5 repetitions with. I am experimenting with this supper heavy weight lifting to see, if it can boost my muscle to grow just a little bit more. I am plateauing right now at about 193 pounds at 6’3″ Height with about 7% of body fat. I would like to gain another 5 pounds of muscle and lifting very heavy weights might get me to do that. I will let you know how I am doing with it. And if I am successful, I will share the experience with you.
Keep it simple
Stop losing your muscle mass with diligent consistency and intensity. Keep it simple. Focus on few simple things: get consistent, lift intensively and persevere. After about a year, if you can do this, you can start experimenting further with much heavier weights and less repetitions. But first, you need to get very consistent and your workouts need to become intensive with this system. I am sorry to repeat that so many times. But this steps are so important, it’s worth to repeat them many times.
Related articles
>>How to stop losing muscle mass: part 1 – muscle = good health
>>How to stop losing muscle mass: part 2 – resistance training
>>How to stop losing muscle mass: part 3 – strength training 101