Maintain Muscle Without Working Out

Once you have some mass to be proud of, you don’t want to let it go. All you want is to maintain muscle mass.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons why you might lose your gains.

In particular, keeping your mass can be difficult if you eliminate or minimize working out as part of your typical routine. I’ve spent some time experimenting with my own body by packing on weight and then risking the gains to figure out ways to make sure my gains are sustainable.

The experimenting cuts into my own personal progress with gaining mass, but it gives me more to share here and also helps me learn.

Maintain muscle? What makes you lose muscle?!

Many things can actually make you lose muscle. This is called atrophy. Obviously, as you lose muscle mass you will look smaller. One of the most commonly cited reasons for loss of muscle mass is aging. In actuality, loss of use is the biggest contributor. So, to maintain muscle, you have to stay active.

Injuries, being busy, aches and pains, and a host of other reasons may cause you to become less active and lose muscle mass.

You might be wondering if it’s possible to keep all of the muscle you’ve gained without committing to working out consistently. If you’re searching for this topic, and reading about it on this site in particular, it’s likely not because you don’t want to put in the work. You probably have some conflict that is going to prevent your lifting routine for a while.

Maybe you are traveling, nursing a serious injury, or have to take care of family matters that will gut your gym time.

You are frantically making sure you won’t lose your hard earned gains while you wait to get back at it.

The short answer is no, you can’t maintain muscle without activity. Your muscles need to work to keep their size and shape. As your body gets used to less stress on a regular basis, it will shed the muscle mass.

However, there are ways to minimize the impact of lower activity on your build. Maybe just enough to hold you over until you can get back to a gaining lifestyle.

Eat to maintain muscle without working out

Of course, if you can avoid going completely sedentary, that’s the best thing you can do. Maybe you have to modify your typical routine and focus on ways to build muscle without weights. This includes band exercises that may be faster to perform and easier on your body if you have an injury.

However, if you really have to cut out resistance training, then start by focusing on eating. Especially for people who are naturally skinny, properly eating to build muscle is usually a bigger problem than working out. To maintain weight, you need to be in a caloric surplus. The more that these calories come from protein, the better. That is the macronutrient that serves as the building block for muscle mass.

This will at least help slow down the rate at which your muscles atrophy, and help you maintain your overall weight. Just be warned that you’ll be a lot less toned and lose some vascularity, as your muscles will lose that wonderful pump over time.

Avoid too many supplements

Supplements to gain weight can be a great addition to your mass gaining and maintenance routine. However, overdoing it can have its negative effects. You might turn to something like whey isolate to provide enough protein to slow down any atrophy.

However, something like creatine might feel great while you are actively gaining, but because it makes you retain water weight, when you take breaks, you’ll lose a lot of mass in the form of water weight. This can be frustrating.

Obviously, anabolic steroids are not recommended as a viable option to maintain muscle mass.

Overall, what I’ve found in practice is that it’s better to make gains without too many supplements involved, because the gains are much more sustainable and don’t disappear as quickly.

Sleep to maintain mass

Sleep builds muscle. Getting rest is the easiest change anyone can make to control their weight, whether to lose it, add it, or maintain it. Studies have shown that lack of sleep can greatly diminish your gains and eat away at your muscle.

The trinity of gaining mass for skinny people is training, fuel, and recovery.

If you can’t lift, then get your food and rest right.

Kumail Nanjiani once said he wishes body transformations were like a video game where you can save your progress, but that’s not how it works.

Making gains requires a lifestyle and commitment to consistent performance.

In the end, you want to minimize how long you go without training of any kind. However, if you need to skip your workouts, at least knock your recovery and fuel out of the park to ward off losses.

Thoughts or questions? Let me know in the comments!