The daily grind of maintenance keeps you strong

Is it easier to maintain muscle once you have built it or will it always be this difficult?

We are lucky in SA.

We have a bureaucracy that is neither an expert in the science of building nor maintaining, and so metaphors abound.

Johannesburg perfectly illustrates the answer to the question above.

Many suburbs, just like elsewhere in the country, are in a state of decay.

Now, imagine what these areas would have looked like had they been maintained and not allowed to degenerate, year after year.

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 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 onto everything for fear of a great drought or unforeseen famine.

To build muscle 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 demands.

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 just being good genetics?

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.