Ep. #667: Q&A: Volume When Cutting, Training by Muscle Fiber Type, and Best Tip for 40+ Lifters

Hello, and welcome to Muscle for Life. I’m Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for a q and a where I answer questions that readers and followers ask me. If you want to ask me questions that I can answer for you and that may be chosen for future q and a episodes, shoot me an email. Mike, muscle for Life, just f o.

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So in this episode, I answer three questions. The first one comes from Sean Shank Redemption over on Instagram, and it’s a bit long, so I’ll summarize it. Basically he’s asking why should we not? Reduce the amount of volume, weightlifting volume that we’re doing when we cut, because you don’t need as much volume to maintain muscle as you do to gain muscle.

And when you’re a deficit, you’re not gonna gain muscle. So why train five times a week when we could just train three times a week and maintain our muscle? And then just use our diet and maybe some cardio to drive the fat loss. I guess that wasn’t a short summary of his question. That was basically his entire question.

Uh, anyway, moving on. The next question comes from Jayden Brown, 4 24 20, bro, over on Instagram, and he asks about muscle fiber type specific training. Are there different ways to train different types of muscle fibers to gain muscle and strength faster? Good question. Despite the Instagram, And the last question comes from Deb, L N B Z, Deb, Deb, over on Instagram, and he or she asks, what one piece of advice would you give for continuing exercise through forties and.

Older. Also, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you, is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the world, and we’re on top. Because every ingredient and dose in every product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research.

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All right, let’s tackle the first question from Sean s. Shank Redemption over on Instagram, and he asks, why not cut weightlifting volume when cutting from, let’s say five days of lifting per week to three? Because we’re not gonna gain muscle when we’re cutting unless we’re new. And you don’t need as much volume to maintain muscle as you do to gain muscle.

And this is a good question, and his assumptions. Correct. Obviously we’re not gonna gain any muscle or strength to speak of us experience weightlifters when we’re cutting and he’s correct that you do not need nearly as much volume to maintain muscle and to maintain a lot of your strength as well as you do to gain muscle and strength.

The research is not entirely clear, but I think it’s. Fair to say that you can maintain your current level of muscularity in a lot of your strength with one third to maybe even one fifth of the amount of volume that it takes to gain muscle and strength. That said, what Sean is missing here is that the amount of volume that it takes to maintain muscle and strength is greatly reduced when calories.

Restricted. So that’s just under normal circumstances. However, things change when you’re in a calorie deficit because that primes your body for muscle loss. And the long story short here, without getting into too many technical details, is the same stimulus that it takes to gain muscle and strength. So the same amount of volume and.

The frequency scheme that you’re using to get to that volume and the intensity scheme that you’re using to make sure that you’re lifting heavy enough weights and to ensure that you are coming close to muscle failure in your hard muscle building sets. That is also approximately the amount of effort that it takes to maximize muscle retention when you’re in a calorie deficit.

And that’s particularly true if you’re lean, wanting to get very lean. And if you are doing a fair. Cardio now, if you have a lot of fat to lose, then you are less likely to lose muscle when cutting. And so in that case, you may be able to do a bit less volume than you normally would when maintaining or lean bulking and retain just as much muscle as you would with.

Higher amounts of volume. But for most people who are interested in this question, I’m gonna guess that you are already pretty fit. You’re pretty athletic, you’re pretty lean. And when you cut, you are going from, let’s say you’re a guy, you’re probably around 15% body fat, probably not any higher than 20%.

And when you cut, you’re trying to get down to the 10% ranger. So, and if you’re a woman, you’re probably around 25%, certainly no higher than 30%. And when you cut, you’re trying to get down to 20% or. And I guess that goes from men as well. Maybe you’re trying to get to sub 10%. And again, in that case, it is, I think, smartest to assume that it’s gonna take just as much work as you normally do to gain muscle and strength, to maintain maximum muscle and strength when you’re cutting.

Now, what you don’t want to do is actually what many intermediate and advanced weightlifters do who understand the basic principles that. Was thinking with when he asked this question. And that is reduce the weightlifting volume and usually by a lot, like at least 50% if not more. So for example, if this person was doing 15 on average, 15 or 16 hard sets per major mouse group per week when maintaining or lean bulking, and then they start cutting and they’re doing no more than let’s say seven or eight now, and on certain major muscle groups, maybe they even reduce that to five or six.

And again, they do that thinking that. I’m not gonna gain any muscle or strength to speak of when I’m cutting. So why waste my time in the gym grinding out workouts that feel a lot harder? I’d rather just put that time into cardio, which is the other element of this mistake, and that is to do a lot of cardio and.

Not a lot of weightlifting. Research shows that that can significantly raise the risk of losing muscle when you’re cutting. Now, if you combine the reduction in weightlifting volume and the increase in cardio volume with very low calorie dieting, so let’s say a calorie deficit larger than 20 or 25% and not enough protein, which often manifests as sporadic protein insufficiency or sufficiency, depending on how you wanna look at it.

That I have not found too many experienced lifters over the years who just consistently eat way too little protein when they cut, who consistently eat, let’s say it’s one half of a gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. But what I have seen many, many times over the years is they’ll be good about their protein intake several days of the week.

So there’ll. Let’s say around a gram per pound of body weight per week, maybe a little bit higher, maybe a little bit lower, and then there will be a couple of days per week. Sometimes in a row, like sometimes it’s the weekends, for example, where protein intake will plummet. I mean, for example, I have seen a hundred and seventy, eighty, ninety pound guys eating 60 to 70 grams of protein several days of the.

And what they don’t realize is, while you can get away with that, when you’re new, that’s your first year of proper weightlifting. Sure you can get away with that and you’re still gonna recomp, you’re still going to gain muscle and strength while cutting, even with spotty protein intake. But once your newbie gains have been exhausted, and you’re now an intermediate weightlifter, and particularly if you’re an advanced weightlifter, so you’ve gained a lot of muscle and you are now trying to go from lean to really lean, that mistake alone can make a significant.

In your muscle retention. So to wrap up my answer to this question with some practical takeaways, my recommendations are when you’re cutting, don’t make any significant reductions in your weightlifting program period. And particularly, don’t cut your volume or intensity. Frequency is just a tool you use really to get in enough volume so you could reduce frequency, but keep volume and intensity to the same and get good results.

Just as you can go from a five day program to a four day program and still do well with it, right? So really what we want is just as many hard sets per major muss group per week as you normally do when you are maintaining or lean bulking, unless you go crazy. When you lean bulk and do 20 plus hard sets per major muss group per week and somehow don’t break yourself.

I would not recommend that amount of volume when cutting. But if you are, like most of us, you are probably doing 14 to maybe 16 hard sets per major mouse group per week. Again, if you’re an intermediate or an advanced lifter, if you are newer, you are probably doing maybe nine to 12 hard sets per major mouse group per week, and I wouldn’t change that at all when cutting.

In neither of those scenarios, are those volume numbers too much for cutting. And I also wouldn’t recommend reducing the intensity of your training. So if you are following a periodized program like My Beyond, bigger, leaner, stronger program, then I would follow it exactly as it’s laid out. So if you are in a meso cycle that has, you go from, let’s say, 70% of one rep max.

The big lifts to 75 to 80 and then D load. And then in the next meso cycle it’s gonna be 75 80, 85 D load and so forth. Just follow that exactly as it’s laid out. And if you are following bigger, leaner, stronger, it’s a bit simpler. It’s just double progression. You’re working in the four to six rep range.

You would just continue working in the four to six wrap range when cutting and. Work in a slightly higher rep range with certain isolation exercises as discussed in the book. And the point here though is I would not recommend going from, let’s say, four to six on the primary lifts and 68 on some isolation to eight to 10 or 10 to 12, or 12 to 15 or higher rep schemes when cutting.

You can do just fine with higher reps. It’s not going to work. Worse, but it’s also not going to make it any better. You’re not gonna get better results when cutting by doing higher reps rather than lower reps. And I would argue that you are probably going to enjoy your workouts more with lower reps because higher rep training is already, uh, more uncomfortable period.

But it is particularly more difficult when you’re cutting and especially as you get deeper into. Now if you want to reduce volume because maybe you’re feeling a bit run down and a bit beat up, or maybe you have to because of life circumstances, then so be it. I would recommend though, that you reduce the volume of your isolation exercises, your accessory exercises.

I would recommend maintaining your volume of the big compound lifts. So do the same amount of squats and dead lifts and bench presses and overhead presses every week, and then maybe do less. The leg curls or the biceps curls or the lap pull downs and so forth. And then as far as cardio goes, I think it’s a good idea to include cardio in your regimen.

When you’re cutting, you will lose fat faster. And there are also health benefits, of course, uh, particularly cardiovascular benefits to doing regular cardio. But you wanna make sure you don’t do too much. That is the key. And a good rule of thumb is to do no more than about half of the amount of time that you are spending training your muscles.

So if you are lifting four hours per week, I would recommend no more than two hours of cardio per week, and I would recommend that you make. Most of that moderate or low intensity cardio and don’t do too much high intensity cardio to put a number to it. I would do no more than probably one or two high intensity sessions per week.

If I were lifting, let’s say four hours per week, and I would make those sessions no more than probably 20 or 25 minutes, the rest of my cardio would be moderate intensity, which means cardio. That wins me a bit. That wouldn’t allow me to record a podcast like. But would allow me to have a discussion with someone so long as they don’t mind me catching my breath every 10 seconds or so.

Alright, let’s move on to the next question from Jaden Brown, four 20. And this is about muscle fiber types. Are there different ways to train muscles based on their muscle fiber type that will result in faster muscle growth than if you did otherwise? And let’s start this answer with a quick breakdown.

Muscle fiber types. So generally speaking, there are two categories of muscle fibers. You have fast twitch and slow twitch fibers, so fast twitch muscle fibers, which are also called type two muscle fibers. By the way, they contract faster and they have about a 25 to 75% greater potential for size for muscle growth than slow twitch or type.

Fibers. The downside of type two fibers though of the fast twitch fibers is they are easily fatigued and they also take a bit to recover their ability to perform maximally. Again, this is one of the reasons why we rest two, three, or even four minutes in between sets of our big compound lifts that involve a lot of muscle tissue, and of course a lot of type two muscle.

Now the slow twitch fibers, the type one fibers, they contract slower and they can’t produce as much force, and they have a lower potential for muscle growth, but they’re also very resistant to fatigue and they recover quickly even after hours of continual use. Now, most of the muscles in our body are about 50 50 fast and slow twitch muscle fibers.

That said, upper body muscles do tend to be slightly more fast twitch. Most people, and then lower body muscles tend to be more slow twitch in most people. And some research suggests that specific muscle groups like the deltoids, for example, can be skewed pretty significantly away from this 50 50 split.

And that has led people to hypothesize that certain muscle groups will respond better to certain types of training because of what we know about these different types of muscle fibers and how they respond to a training. And let’s talk about that. So when you perform an exercise, your body first activates the slow twitch fibers, and then it starts to activate more and more of the fast twitch fibers as you get closer to muscle failure.

Now that got some people thinking, and an idea was born that you could do a lot of lighter weight, higher rep training to target the slow twitch fibers and also to maximally stimulate muscle groups that contain more slow twitch than fast. Fibers and then you would do a lot of heavy lower rep training to target the fast twitch fibers and to elicit the biggest response from the muscle groups that are comprised of more fast twitch than slow twitch fibers.

There are a few problems with this theory though. One is as you get closer to failure, your body starts recruiting all the muscle fibers, every kind that it can. There are also hybrid fibers I didn’t talk about, but we don’t have to get into that for the purpose of this discussion here. So my point with this first contention is that whether you use sets of 15 or five reps, you are going to reach a very similar level of overall muscle activation and muscle growth.

If you take the set to within a couple of reps of. That’s the key, getting close to failure. And my second quibble is studies go back and forth on whether or not some muscle fibers respond better to low or high up training. The current best evidence shows though that both heavy training with let’s say three to five reps and 85 to 90% of owner rep max, as well as lighter training with let’s say nine or 10 or 11 reps, around 70% of owner rep max works equally well for building.

Fast and slow twitch muscle fibers so your muscles don’t seem to really care. They just need it to be heavy enough and to put a number to that, I would say above 60 to maybe 65% of one rep max. You start getting below that and you’re gonna run into issues just regarding the intensity alone. But so long as the weight is heavy enough, it appears that so long as you take a set close to muscle failure, it is equally effective for gain.

Muscle, both with very heavy weights. So let’s say 80, 85, 90% of one rep max and much lighter weights. 65 70, 70 5% of one rep max. And the third and final point I want to make here is, as I already mentioned, most muscles in the body are roughly an even split between fast and slow twitch muscle fibers. So even if one style of training was able to target.

A specific muscle fiber type, you’d still want to do both higher and lower rep training to get the most muscle growth possible. And that’s why one of the most extensive reviews on muscle growth conducted to date that was published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research concluded that a fiber type prescription with respect to repetition range has not been borne out by research.

In other words, there’s just very. Evidence that you should use certain rep ranges to target different muscle fibers, and that you should get very particular with your rep ranges according to the muscle groups that you’re training. The best evidence that we have shows that for intermediate and advanced weightlifters in particular, using a variety of rep ranges is the best way.

To build muscle everywhere on your body. Every major muscle group is gonna respond best to a combination of heavy, moderate, and light. And when I say light, I mean still heavy ish, right? So no lighter than 65 or 70% of one rep max, but that. Approach we know works well, and particularly with intermediate and advanced weightlifters.

With novices, not so much. Actually. It’s an unnecessary complication as far as programming goes, and it is probably not going to result in any additional muscle and strength gain. When you’re a guy and you have. Yet to gain your first 25 or so pounds of muscle, you can keep it real simple, bigger than, or stronger, honestly, is all you need nine to 12 hard sets per major mouse group per week.

Four to six reps with about 80, 85% of your one rep max on the bar, double progression and 68 reps for the isolation exercises that are a bit too. Awkward to do in the four to six rep range, and you just get to have a good old time. You just get to add weight to the bar every week or two, and you just get bigger and stronger like clockwork.

Eventually though, the honeymoon comes to an end and you have to start working harder for less. Muscle and strength gain, and primarily that means you have to do more volume. You have to go from that nine to 12 hard sets per major muscle group per week to something around 15, probably to continue getting bigger and stronger.

And then it is worth looking at more involved periodization schemes like the one that I have in my Beyond bigger, leaner, stronger program, which you can find in my book Beyond Bigger, leaner, stronger.

If you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my sports nutrition company Legion, which thanks to the support of many people like you, is the leading brand of all natural sports supplements in the world. Okay. Let’s move on to the final question here, which comes from Deb Ellen BZ or D E B L N, BZ.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to read this over on Instagram, and this is what one piece of advice would you give for continuing exercise through forties, through your forties and older, and here it is. Don’t get hurt statistically. And anecdotally, one of the most common reasons people let themselves go is they stop working out because of an injury.

I’ve heard from so many middle-aged people over the years who got into CrossFit, got hurt, and then got fat and sedentary. And I understand because you get hurt and it throws off your routine, it sinks your morale. It makes it a lot harder to gain momentum again and just get back to where you were at.

It’s not very fun. And that. Event often is the thin edge of the wedge that leads to people giving up on fitness entirely and really just throwing in the towel. And while you certainly can come back from even the most debilitating injuries, there are very few injuries that you can’t come back from. It’s not easy.

It’s hard physic. It is hard mentally. It is hard emotionally, and that’s why many people don’t make it, or at least they don’t ever get back to where they were previously. Now, if you are a regular listener of Muscle for Life, you’re not most people and you probably do have what it takes to fight. Back from even an extreme injury that sidelines you for months.

But unless you just really wanna prove to yourself that you can do it, that you have the grit to come back from the depths of dysfunction and disability, it makes a lot of sense to take reasonable precautions to reduce the risk of injury. As much as possible, and if you do a good job at that, there is no reason why you have to suffer any major acute injuries.

If you lift weights long enough, you are gonna deal with some nagging aches and pains here and there. You might develop some rsi, some repetitive stress injuries where you have to just kind of lay off a muscle group or an exercise for a bit here and there, and those. Perfectly normal occurrences that probably can’t be avoided because if you are going to make progress, you are going to have to be training hard and continually pushing your body a bit further than what it can currently do and deal with.

And that process repeated often enough, will have side effects. But if you manage your training and your diet and your recovery, particularly your sleep correctly, you don’t have to ever get seriously. Now something that you should be aware of is as we get older, we can still be in great shape. We can still gain muscle and strength, but our muscles, our tendons, our ligaments, stiffen with age, and that can increase the risk of injury.

And so what that means is as we get. Older. We just can’t get away with as many shenanigans as when we were younger and we have to really be a stickler for good form and we have to be smart. We can’t allow our lower backs to round when we pull. We can’t allow our knees to be always Boeing in on our squats.

We can’t be flaring our elbows on the bench press to get 10 more pounds on the bar. All of those things increase the risk of injury at any. , but they get more and more dangerous as the years go by. So much so that I would say that people who are doing these things will eventually get hurt if they’re also lifting heavy weights, which of course they should be.

Another tip is to stop when you hit pain or strange. Don’t try to push through that. If it hurts, stop. If there’s something off, it feels weird in the middle of a set stop and. Rest and then try again. And if it still hurts or feels off, then do something else. Because pain and strange is often a warning that something is wrong.

And if you don’t heat it, then injury can follow real injury again, not just, oh, my back is a little bit sore from the deadlifting, or my elbow is a little bit pissed off from the bench pressing, like unfortunately something that would send you to the physical therapist and keep you outta the gym and so forth.

And don’t hesitate to take a few days off training. , if the aches and pains that you have accumulated are making your workouts painful and very uncomfortable, or if you have developed little niggles that are not going away and are only getting worse, another good strategy for enhancing recovery and staving off injury is deloading sooner than you normally would.

If you feel like you need it again, if you are noticing a bit more discomfort than usual in your training, and if your joints are feeling a bit beat up, and let’s say normally you would go another week or two weeks of hard training before deloading, take your deload early. Nothing wrong with that. Also make sure to exercise patience with your progress.

And hopefully you are following a well designed workout program. And if you are, actually follow it. Don’t try to accelerate the progress based on how you feel, because you can feel great coming into, let’s say the first week after a D load and you’re thinking that you can get away with. The bit more weight on the bar or a bit more volume, or maybe some extra reps in your sets.

But what can happen is after a couple of weeks of doing that, you are now not feeling so great and things are kind of hurting and the weights are starting to feel real heavy. And now you have to take an early deload. And as far as. Injuries go. If you get too zealous in your volume in particular, that can become a problem because volume is harder on the body as a whole than intensity.

Intensity is something you feel more particularly in your joints because there’s a lot more stress, acute stress that’s produced in the muscles and in the joints. The heavier weight. But as far as systemic stress goes, volume drives a lot more than intensity. So again, don’t try to do 20 plus hard sets per major muscle group per week because some definitely natural guy on Instagram says that that’s what everyone should be doing.

And another tip worth sharing here is to take at least one day off of the weights every week. And. Two is better so you can prioritize recovery. It’s okay if you wanna do some cardio on those days. I wouldn’t recommend much high intensity stuff. Again, the idea is to give your body a bit of a break, and that’s advice that I would give to 20 year olds because while I have met some people over the years who can get away with lifting six or even seven days a week for at least a couple of months before having to deload, they are the except.

Not the rule. Not only do you not need to be lifting more than five days a week to get in enough volume for all major muscle groups to continue getting bigger and stronger. If you do train six or seven days per week and you are not careful with your volume and ensuring you’re getting plenty of sleep and ensuring you’re not in a calorie deficit, you are going to fall behind.

In recovery, and even if you are watching your volume, you may still run into issues. It may still be better overall for you to take those one or two days off the weights per week. And I know I have already said this several times, but I’m gonna close with it. I’m gonna say it again because it is that important for not just getting jacked, but also just maintaining optimal health and mental performance and longevity.

And that is make sure you’re getting enough sleep. And this is particularly important as you get older. Because your ability to recover from your training is impacted directly by how well you sleep. And research shows that even slight sleep deprivation can impair muscle protein synthesis, which could reduce muscle growth and muscle recovery.

If you were to regularly. Not sleep enough. Alright, super friends, well that’s it for this episode of Muscle for Life. Thank you for joining me today. I hope you found it helpful and insightful, and here’s a little preview of what I have coming next. I have a monologue on the best workout splits for women that’s coming next week.

An interview about entrepreneurship and marketing and creativity that I did with my buddy Michael Chernow, who is a multiple time winner in the game of business as well as. Successful media personality. And then I have a says, you coming where I’m gonna be talking about low bar versus high bar squats, recreational weed use, and fasting for health, as well as another q and a on prehab.

Ideal cutting protocol, lifting and cardio, and doing a single cycle of steroids. All right. Well, that’s it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don’t mind doing me a favor, please do leave a quick review on iTunes or. Wherever you’re listening to me from, in whichever app you’re listening to me in, because that not only convinces people that they should check out the show, it also increases search visibility, and thus, it helps more people find their way to me and learn how to get fitter, leaner, stronger, healthier, and happier as well.

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I read everything myself, and I’m always looking for constructive feedback, even if it. Criticism, I’m open to it and of course you can email me if you have positive feedback as well, or if you have questions really relating to anything that you think I could help you with, definitely send me an email.

That is the best way to get ahold of me, Mike, at multiple life.com. And that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.