#41

My take on it after reviewing exercise benefits studies is that you need to continue exercising to maintain muscle mass. If you stop that muscle mass will go away rather quickly. Also interestingly you can still maintain or add muscle at any age.
This concept of adding extra muscle in middle age kind of sounds to me like what bears do to fatten up before long winter hibernation. If it works then great. I just didn’t see any studies to support it.

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#42

What type of study? Clearly data showing steady decline in muscle mass as you age. Clearly data showing significant loss of muscle mass during illness, or after injury/surgery, especially in the elderly.
Don’t know what the definition of “extra muscle” would be, but I’m guessing average person doesn’t have enough.

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#43

Agreed. Another factor on which there is some disagreement is “muscle memory” (in terms of lost muscle can be regained faster, more easily than new muscle). When I have lost muscle from non-use (over a few years) or from injury (in a cast), I have been able to regain what I once had very quickly. Gaining incremental (new) muscle that i never had before is much harder. I’ve heard top physiologists say I am wrong, but I am not wrong as far as my body is concerned.

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#44

I’ve seen studies indicating that one of the key developments in hypertrophy is the addition of new myonuclei, and it is the number of these myonuclei that govern how big a muscle can get. If you lose muscle size from disuse, you do not lose myonuclei, and so regaining muscle that has previously been built can be much faster than the rate at which it was initially accrued. As always, maintenance is much easier than attaining new capacity the first time.

This is why I think for optimal results, it’s absolutely critical to make good choices when you’re young. Build the muscle in your twenties and early thirties and just coast the rest of your life. Way easier than realizing at 55 that you’re frail and you need to make up a bunch of ground.

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#45

Jensen, this sounds like a reasonable approach for your age. Johnmacc

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#46

Just took 6mg rapamycin so for the next 48 hours ill avoid most animal products/protein and wont do any strength training exercise.

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#47

I made the same point in another thread, which I largely still agree with. @Joseph_Lavelle and @Ryan_McCarter point out that although gross mass is lost very quickly, there are some other adaptations that stick around at least somewhat longer. I overlooked that in my previous remarks, for which I apologize. Some folks argue that new cell nuclei, for instance, are permanent. Others provide good reasons to believe this is not true. AFAIK the science is far from settled once you get out to the scale of years.

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