The daily grind of maintenance keeps you strong
Q I appear to have finally made some great progress in the gym. Is it easier to maintain muscle once you have built it or will it always be this difficult?
A We are lucky in SA. We have a bureaucracy that is expert in neither the science of building nor maintaining, and so metaphors abound.
If you live in Johannesburg, think of any suburb within 10 minutes of your work or home that is in a state of decay. Now, imagine what that area would have looked like had it been maintained and not allowed to degenerate, year after year.
A colleague in one of the old suburbs, those picturesque ones nestled under oak-tree-lined hilled streets, sent this acerbic comment last week referencing the fact that whether his area has power supply or not —
irrespective of load-shedding —
is about as random as predicting SA’s news cycle.
“Apparently the transformers and 66KV cables, and whatever else, are more than 70 years old. [shocked emoji]. [expletive]. No wonder. Dare I say that the infrastructure had a pretty good innings. [series of emojis suggesting ironic celebration] Hang on ... My suburb is 70 years old. I’m guessing your suburb is around 50 years old, meaning you have another 20 before it goes kaput. Lucky you.”
He’s wrong, of course. My suburb was built when millennials were breastfeeding and is already barely operational — large temporary power cables are connected directly into small substations on pavements and are led across treetops and nonfunctional street lights, over pothole-riddled rivers (caused by burst municipal water pipes and sewerage lines) masquerading as streets, and connected to the outdoor power boards of individual houses with a clamp.
Don’t worry, powers that be, it’s not the end of the world, and the population is not plotting your demise.
Johannesburg perfectly illustrates the answer to your question. Maintaining something that is strong and beautiful and functional is exponentially easier than building it up from scratch. However, the cautionary tale is that once you let it slide too far, you will find yourself back at square one and have to start all over again.
When it comes to muscle, our bodies are lazy. They only hold on to exactly the amount of muscle needed to perform their daily tasks. When it comes to fat, they’re greedy. They hold on to everything for fear of a great drought or an unforeseen famine.
To build muscle, as you have experienced, requires regular, intense, workouts with resistance that is built on the premise of progressive overload. You need to show your body that things are becoming more difficult and it needs to adapt by building more muscle to cope with the increased demand. Of course, you can’t do this without eating enough protein, cutting out processed and unhealthy foods that play havoc with your hormones and fat stores, reducing your alcohol intake and getting sufficient rest.
Once you have the muscle, however, maintenance is far easier. You can’t suddenly eat poorly and drink like a sailor. That’s not maintenance, that’s abandonment. While keeping your lifestyle in check, you need to stimulate your muscles enough to signal to your body to keep them, and then eat at maintenance calories.
Whereas before you’d have needed to train to failure and a few millimetres of meeting your ancestors, you can now generally get away with two to three sessions a week, to mild exhaustion. The frequency and intensity doesn’t have to be at the same level as before and resistance doesn’t have to be near your personal limit. Challenge yourself, but you don’t need to test yourself as often. Ever see really well-built older people train in this manner and dismiss it as good genetics?
YOU CAN’T SUDDENLY EAT POORLY AND DRINK LIKE A SAILOR. ... NO MAINTENANCE, THAT’S ABANDONMENT
It’s like the motivational story of the bamboo seed. When it is planted it must be watered and fertilised daily for five years. You see nothing for five years and then, within a month, it shoots up about 30m at a rate of about 2.5cm every 40 minutes.
The concept of perseverance — even at a lower intensity — holds. Eat properly, eat enough but not too much, sleep enough, and train regularly. Maintaining muscle is easier than building it but it’s not a walk in the park.