It is not really the kind of rest most people engage in that prevents loss of muscle mass. Quite frankly, most of the people just rest. They rest all the time. They watch tv, they sleep until 2 pm on weekends, they sit in their cars looking for the parking spot that is just at the stores door and the worst, they sit in their cubicles for the whole day.
The kind of rest I am talking about is the deserved rest. When you weight train intensively, you are braking the muscle fibers. This sends the impulse to your brain that the muscle needs to grow to become stronger. For muscle to grow, you need to rest. Your muscle needs some time to catch up. But you put that rest to work only after you made that muscle building impulse with heavy weight training. And after that, with combination of great nutrition, your muscles can grow while you are resting.
Some people go overboard with their weight training and they start lifting intensively every day. They get obsessed by this weight training – muscle building lifestyle. But they don’t realize, that that muscle needs time to rebuild itself. They keep damaging it day after day without a break. Don’t make this mistake. Realize, that sometimes less is more. And I covered this in my previous chapter. You should weight train each muscle part 2 times per week. The rest means muscle resting, low intensity cardiovascular exercise.
Deserved rest
Deserved rest means, that you did your strength training and now you are purposely not lifting heavy weights, but doing some fun cardio, like for example playing tennis or swimming or kite boarding. In your deserved rest, your muscles are growing and rebuilding themselves. Like I mentioned before, when you rest all the time, your muscles will not become stronger and you’ll slowly loose it. The impulse in the form of heavy strength training makes them grow and get stronger.
Super compensation
This is also called super compensation. You tyre the muscle to the maximum and push it to the limit. Than you give it some rest and those limits next time increase. That’s why athletes need to manage very well the training load and rest.
I still remember, when I was in competitive rowing team, we would go through a brutal winter preparation and toward the main race of the season we would slowly ease the training load until we did almost no workout at all and we just played table Fussbal, or ping pong. We were timing the form. We were using a super compensation. And if done right we would be standing on the start line ready to explode with lots of energy and power. We had so much build up of it in us. In one way, it’s the same thing you want to apply in a little bit smaller scale with your muscle growth and muscle preservation.
Sleep
Sleep is very important for muscle growth and loss of muscle mass prevention. The majority of the growth and rebuilding of our body and muscles included happens when we sleep. The HGH – human growth hormone is responsible for this. Pituitary gland releases most of the human growth hormone when we sleep. That’s why babies sleep so much and why sleep is so important for them. They are growing fast and they need a lot of HGH.
You too, if you want to stop loss of your muscle mass and build some extra muscles, you have to get enough sleep. At least 7-8 hours and more if you can. So no more partying and watching late TV on weekends and sleeping only few hours. Or working too much without getting enough of sleep. Your sleep is way more important.
I still remember, when I came to San Francisco when I was 25 years old. We used to live in a youth hostel and downstairs below us was a disco club. It’s name was Cat Club. Maybe you heard of it. Fun place to hang out if you are 25. And we loved it! We would go there sometimes 4 days in the row and we would stay and party to the late hours.
Of course as a fresh immigrants, we had to work. And I was working as a mover. Very physically demanding job, that also demanded lots of rest and sleep. But hey, we were 25 years old, living in San Francisco and nobody cared about rest. Work hard, play hard was the mantra and so we lived it.
Until one day I realized that I loosed about 10 pounds and couldn’t lift an TV entertainment centre piece of furniture. Quite a routine task for a mover. I had to withdraw from my moving shift day completely exhausted. Luckily it was my friday, and I slept for one day straight filling my sleep deficit.
When you are young, it takes shorter to recover, that’s why some athletes, me included when they were young could party all night on Friday and still perform decently the next day on the important race. But, that’s youth! That’s not reality. And people who face the loss of muscle mass are more offer the ones 40 years old and older. And there is not a place on skimping on you sleep when you are 40 and older. You will not get away with it. It will cost you your precious muscle mass among other scary side effects.
Stress management
Do you feel stressed for most part of your day. Your job, your health, your children, your husband, your finances could put a lot of stress to your life. There is nothing wrong with occasional mental stress. Nobody is immune to it. But there are people out there, and a lot of them that experience too much stress. Stress can be dangerous to our health and it kills the muscle mass.
When you are in constant stress, you are in constant catabolic stage. That means, your body is constantly breaking down and it doesn’t have time to recover. You are losing muscle mass when you are stressed out and the only way to stop it is to manage your stress. So how do you manage your stress?
First, no matter how busy your life is, you need to start regular exercise program. That means 2 times per week strength training and at least another 2 times per week cardiovascular exercise. Why exercise first? For increasing your pain tolerance and of course the most important that suffers by stress – your health. Plus it stops the loss of your muscle mass. Stress is a form of mental pain. And people who are physically fit can handle this kind of pain much better, further reducing their overall stress level. Convinced? No? It doesn’t matter. Start reducing your stress in your days with regular exercise.
Than, equally important as exercise is to improve your diet. Blood sugar spikes are powerful stress increasers and you can manage them by eating whole natural diet, free of simple carbohydrates and rich in protein, good fats with plenty of fruits and vegetables.
Than, and only than, start dealing with you stress sources. First, realize that all problems, unless they are related to your health, health of your family and friends are not really a serious problems. Life is too short to make it even shorter stressing about stuffs like jobs, cars, houses and spouses. If they are stressing you out, get rid of them! If your kids are stressing you out, you cannot really get rid of them. Be little bit tougher on them and make them appreciate things more. Spoiled brats can be a major source of stress.
I got to the point in my life, that I am simply not stressing about anything. You can take everything away from me and put me under the Golden Gate bridge with my family and as long as they are healthy I will get over it very soon. The next day I will be humming under the bridge, making fire, cooking some fish, surfing GGB spot and doing other fun stuff. Hell, I will be probably even happier and more relaxed than I am now. Can somebody actually arrange this? Hmm, that would be cool living without TV and all the terrible news, without Facebook, with no car, no rent or house payments, just hanging out with my family and occasional friend dropping by for some fresh grilled tuna I caught that same day.
The point here is, that if you are stressed out of your mind, you are loosing muscle mass and you are most likely causing this to yourself. So stop stressing. Start exercising, eat well, eliminate, don’t go for that promotion, step down from the corporate lather and become more relaxed. It is in you power more than you think.
Rest to grow
After good physical stress – strength training, you need to rest, to grow and to stop loosing your muscle mass. It all comes down to few sentences: Did you lift hard today? Than rest tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Than lift intensively again. And stop stressing. Life is too short for that.
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
>>How to stop losing muscle mass: part 4 – consistency and intensity
>>How to stop losing muscle mass: part 5 – muscle building and preserving diet