Minimum effective dose

I'm an avid lifter and last year had to get 2 surgeries on both elbows. This kept me from doing any upper body training for about 8 months, and I just did basic things for my legs that I could do. I.e. no squats, no leg press since I couldn't even carry the weight plates myself. Basically just leg extensions, leg curls and biking on a stationary bike.

I kept most of the leg strength and muscle mass with even just this but my whole upper body basically went back to not looking like I lift at all.

The upside though and what proves your point around muscle memory is as I'm writing this it has been 12 weeks since my second surgery finished. I started going back to the gym after about 6 weeks with the lightest dumbells on the rack, literally starting from 5lb on every exercise.

In just this 6 weeks I basically look like I never stopped lifting and have approximately 85-90% strength back on all of my upper body lifts (for example 6 weeks ago I couldn't even bench press the bar and struggled to do 10 reps with a 5lb db, yesterday I'm back to hitting 225 for 6-8 reps) and I'm sure if it wasn't just due to surgeries and was just a long break I'd probably be back at 100%, that's how powerful muscle memory is.

My understanding is that *strength* comes back quicker. This enables mass to come back quicker, but the causation is reversed. A lot of strength is neuromuscular control over muscle, not muscle mass itself. So it doesn't take as long for the relevant brain neurons to remember how to more efficiently recruit the muscle mass that's there.

This is a similar effect to how one sees all the time a leaner, wiry person be stronger than a more muscular, pumped person.

Going to the gym to weight lift 2-3 a week for 30-45 minutes has changed my life profoundly.

I feel more energized. My back stopped hurting. I’m in such a good mood on those days.

Makes we wonder why I re-started so late.

IME, when I take long breaks from lifting, keeping my protein intake high means I lose muscle much more slowly. One gram of protein per pound of body weight daily has been a major game changer in losing weight and gaining muscle. Gray beard BTW.

Agreed, I'm consistently inconsistent. I'll lift for a while, then mess around and not lift for a while.

Each and every time I've gone back to consistent barbell lifting it would only take me a few months to get back to higher numbers I've run into in the past. This is part of the reason why I love weightlifting so much.

I used to be an avid runner, and not running after a long while has made it much more difficult. Lifting is always easy to get back into (at least for me).

I've been weightlifting quite a bit, nothing extreme but all the usual full body stuff plus targeted ones. I've broken my legs several times in past few years, always something unique.

Last one was nasty - bad paragliding fall right on tarmac with my heels taking brunt of the hit (better them than spine). Both legs broken, 1 month wheelchair (before wheelchair came I was literally crawling between spots at home, interesting experience for sure), 2 months crutches since one leg took most of the hit and calcaneus was to pieces (yet somehow magically they stayed together so no surgery & metals required).

Needless to say, after those 3 months, leg was concrete level of stiff with 0 stability working and yes all muscles gone, quads most visibly. especially jarring when next to it was a leg which still was 1 month fully out of order, and just used in 2 months, they look like from different people next to each other. That leg was the stronger and slightly but visibly bigger one before.

What I want to say - losing muscles is a trivial issue, an afterthought compared to losing all flexibility and strength in tendons and ligaments, especially if you used to do tons of sports. Our joints are always the weak spot, going away much sooner than some muscles and bones, taking much longer to build safely (you really don't want to sprain or tear one). Training that takes much longer, and rebuilding muscles can only follow what connective tissues allow. I've spent countless hours in hands of physiotherapists since they come each time with novel ways and equipment use to challenge these tissues, also part of it was in the pool, really cool idea. yet still after 3 months of therapy there are still big differences in everything, at least I can walk cca ok and did a small easy skitour last weekend.

Comparatively, I can easily re-build all muscles I need with just some basic home free weight equipment, you just need few good exercises done in good form, with mild variations.

Muscle mass is lost quickly during detraining, but the additional myonuclei gained when someone puts on muscle are retained for much longer, potentially years. Myonuclei govern protein synthesis, so when training resumes, muscle returns more quickly.

A nice article about the advantages of stop training https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/ta...

It is really complex, but stop training can be benefical.

Due to a gnarly accident, my right arm was in a cast for six months. They had to change the cast several times due to shrinking soft tissue, and by the time the cast came off, from wrist to elbow was all the same width. It was awful. But, like you said, it came back to the 80% level very quickly. At first I was genuinely worried that I'd never recover, but at three months I was already two-thirds of the way to normal, and was at 95% by a year.

I've read somewhere that the peviously trained cells, while after injury and long rest period smaller and fewer are still built with a large number of mitochondria (that was needed for the previous performance levels). This seems to be one of the muscle memory mechanisms.

> I don't know how your recovery is going

Slowly. Lots of complications. I'm eight months away from the accident and a month past the third and hopefully last surgery. Right now I'm focused on getting range of motion back before new scar tissue forms, then I'll switch to building strength back.

I'll probably always have some stiffness in that joint but with luck I'll be back to all of my usual activities later this year.

They’re used to that, as they do that while in space, too.

https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/counteracting-bone-and-...:

“Each astronaut aboard the space station engages the muscles, bones, and other connective tissues that comprise their musculoskeletal systems using Earth-like exercise regimens. Crews exercise for an average of two hours a day.”

This sort-of indicates that once someone goes, say, to the Moon, and stays there for five years or so, they might not be able to come back on Earth at all, or need extremely long adaptation. The difference between 0.16G and 1G would be massive.

Any deployment of people to the Moon will have to take this into account.

And kids born and grown in lunar gravity may not be able to come to Earth under any circumstances.

Punctuated equilibrium [1] is one of the predominant theories of evolution so it’s not at all far fetched. In that theory population bottlenecks are one of the main mechanisms of cladogenesis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium

We "evolved" dog breeds in microseconds in evolutionary terms. As long as the selective pressure is high change can come fast.

Adaptation need not only mean genetic (slow), it could just as well be epigenetic. The latter is not well-understood enough to be taught in school textbooks yet, but has been of great interest in recent decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

Elephants are evolving to lose their tusks.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-...

Both the phenotype and the genotype of a species/population can, and do change overnight. Think about nazis killing people with big noses. The average nose size for humans shrank, and the responsible genes disappeared.

Evolution (as the change of the characteristics of a species) working in million years is stupid. It doesn't even need one generation.

> When they said “80 year old bones” is that just due to the reduced usage from the broken ankle?

Yes, just lowered bone density from not using it. Bone density increases in response to stress placed on the bone, especially impact stress. No stress on the bone and it basically hollows out.

> Cycling is the way to go

Yeah, I started biking to work a few years ago for my health.

That's how I broke my ankle. :-/ Slipped in a puddle and landed really wrong. Trimalleolar fracture with dislocation and severe fracture blisters.

> Being the best at one thing is very different from being good at everything, so it's unclear how that advice applies to your children.

My kid pushes too hard when he realizes he's plateau'd at some skill level and then gets disappointed at the steepness of the learning curve.

It'll go from chess to skiing, then it is swimming and now he's running a trail 10k in March. While he's able to say Good morning in everything from Esperanto to Klingon, by way of Welsh and Japanese, he's not gotten fluent at any language so far.

Not that any of that is bad in itself, but he goes into a maximum-effort "not fun" mode when he gets moderately good at anything.

The "not fun" mode kills the joy and then the activity becomes almost painful.

Mostly I try to help him stay in the happy zones with "A little is enough" instead of setting himself up for failure constantly like this, by failing his own expectations.

The younger one is obviously out to out-compete the older, so hopefully I only have to do this teaching once for both of them.

Not OP but I read it as: It's ok to just do some. People stress about their abandoned side projects, their career progression, being the best, this world has become hyper competitive, hyper "do" - this wasn't and isn't the default for a lot of people and a lot of history, there is a lot of joy to be found in just "do some" - but it's a dying art.

I think “do some” is about putting reasonable effort into things.

I read it as you don’t need to play football, basketball, and be writing a book, but you probably should do something. At the other end you don’t need to be the best in the world at anything, but you should try.

Knowing to cook is a useful life skill. That doesn’t mean learning a dozen types of ethic foods or preparing instagram worthy meals, but it does mean you should learn a little. Thus “do some” not “do everything” or worse “do nothing.”

Anyway, here's Wonderwall

To my experience this is only true if you totally max yourself out when exercising. An alternative is to do light (ish) exercise every day. Makes getting totally ripped pretty much impossible, but it makes staying fit easy, because it's easy to build a habit around and it's easy to make fun.

I disagree.

Imo this is mostly true of running and bodybuilding... where the average person is most likely to encounter "programming."

A "gotcha" with minimum dose is that you need to precisely define the goal.

"Minimum effective" to build muscle or cardio might not be sufficient to build "habits" or whatnot.

A short, daily warmup might be the minimum effective dose for habit building.

Physiologically, 20 minutes every 10th day training heavy deadlifting... will be effective.

But this will probably be below effective does for habit forming, and other psychological/behavioral changes.

Rest days are for mobility and stretching exercises.

No, muscle memory refers to a different phenomenon where nerves outside of our brain can be trained and get better at skills.

I think what you're seeing here is that when you initially build muscle, you are building new muscle cells. When you lose those gains, you still mostly have the same number of cells, but they muscle fibers in them reduce. When you go to regain it, it's easier to regain because you still have most of the celluar framework there.

Or, at least, that's how it was explained to me. I probably have some details wrong.

> Like riding a bike.

Or walking. Humans take such a long time to gain the muscle strength and the motor skills to simply take a few steps.

Fair question. There's no way to know rigorously but many friends have said it increased their base muscle permanently

No just 3 reps of each then out

I read light prose several times faster than an audio book; 60-100 pages in an hour for a typical paperback. That works out to 240-400 pages for the author's 240 minutes.

I read Going Postal by Pratchett in under 4 hours.

[edit]

Also, consumers of audiobooks may turn the speed up. My wife listens at 1.25-1.5x speed, depending on the narrator's pace.

That raises the question: how much faster can we read without speaking, than read aloud? I'm guessing its a number less than 2 times.

I've never warmed up before. I'm not a super advanced athlete, but I can put 315 on the bench and I don't weigh very much.

I'm not sure there's a ton of point warming up. It feels good, sure, and if you are doing maximal lifts it's probably a good idea to feel out how close your are to your limit, but otherwise I don't see how warmups help.

I didn't bother most of time when I was training. I might do a couple reps a plate down, or a set with just the bar, but never did more than that.

> There have been a few research articles showing that in the last few years too that says the same thing.

It's been known for decades. I remember 20+ years ago pointing out to people that according to the research, multiple sets are inferior to one set (i.e. load that one set high vs a smaller load so you can do 3 sets).

Yet even today, most exercise advice is 2-3 sets.

I've never warmed or ramped up in over 12 years of heavy lifting. That being said, that could explain my bad back.

This is what GPT-4 summarized from deep research.

Krieger, J. W. (2010). Single versus multiple sets of resistance exercise: A meta-regression. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 24(4), 1150-1159.

This meta-analysis found that multiple sets lead to ~40% more muscle growth compared to a single set. Schoenfeld, B. J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2017). Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and muscle growth: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Sports Sciences, 35(11), 1073-1082.

Concluded that higher training volumes (≥10 weekly sets per muscle group) produce greater hypertrophy. Ralston, G. W., Kilgore, L., Wyatt, F. B., & Baker, J. S. (2017). The effect of weekly set volume on strength gain: A meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 47(12), 2585-2601.

Found that strength and hypertrophy improve as volume increases up to a certain point. Schoenfeld, B. J. (2016). Science and development of muscle hypertrophy. Human Kinetics.

Discusses the mechanisms of hypertrophy and the role of training volume. American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) Position Stand (2009). Progression models in resistance training for healthy adults. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 41(3), 687-708.

Provides guidelines for resistance training and muscle growth. Haun, C. T., Vann, C. G., Osburn, S. C., et al. (2018). A 6-week resistance training study on the minimum effective training dose for muscle hypertrophy in trained men. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 118(3), 593-605.

Found that low-volume training still leads to substantial hypertrophy but not maximal growth. Heaselgrave, S. R., Blacker, S. D., et al. (2019). Effects of resistance training frequency on hypertrophy and strength: A systematic review. Sports Medicine, 49(12), 1935-1947.

Concludes that training a muscle 2–3 times per week is more effective than once per week for hypertrophy.

> Are you doing interval training in your swimming? I think how you train can have a big impact on your VO2MAX improvement vs. time invested. That said long distance running does require a lot of time investment. I'm not sure if you can get to run a marathon by running an hour a week but I expect that answer is no.

What had the biggest impact on RHR was when I was just swimming 1km per session at normal pace (it took me about 25 mins, I'm a beginner). RHR dropped week over week down to 42. When I got a coach he had me do mostly interval training and interestingly my RHR crept higher although I did improve in terms of speed. Past month I've been lazier and training again to swim continuously and I see my RHR decreasing again. Unsure about the science of it and whether it applies to others. I don't think RHR is necessarily a marker for fitness but I thought it was interesting that pretty significant change was happening although I was maybe swimming 30 mins a couple of times a week.

I think resting heart rate is mostly genetic, from what I read it tells very little about fitness - if you're already fit you may already be at your "optimal" heart rate. If you stopped exercising it may go up.

There are many factors incl. physical size

If it’s the same as mine, it measures your heart rate overnight after you settle in. Then, when you wake up, it tells you your “resting heart rate” number.

It can be an indicator of short-term stress if it is higher than normal, for example. But the interesting part is the trend over time. As you get more fit, the average drops

Unless you are very fit 40bpm is very low (bradycardia) and could be a medical issue.