Muscle lost if workouts stop?

Well, it turns out that I unintentionally did a little research project on myself to answer your above questions. After six months of not working out upper body because of shoulder issues, I am finally back to limited upper body workouts. You folks who complained that my legs were proportionally too small got your way, I reduced the size of my upper body to match :) The first thing you have to define very precisely is what you mean by “stop working out” because the results will vary dramatically. By “stop working out” do you mean:

1. Do no physical activity at all, no cardio, no resistance training, no isometrics, no nothing, feel sorry for yourself and eat potato chips on the sofa all day long. … or …
2. Stop working out the affected bodypart but do what you can and keep a good attitude. Continue working out all the other bodyparts as well as continuing your cardio. Continue with excellent nutrition.

Surprisingly enough, the answer to how much muscle is lost is highly dependent upon this. There has been research that shows that even just doing cardio can help reduce muscle loss. Odder still, there has been research that shows a very interesting carry-over effect. If you workout your left arm only, your right arm will get bigger to without it doing anything. Obviously your right arm wouldnt get as big as if you were actually working it out, but it does get bigger. The number I remember reading is that the non-trained part gains about 10% of the muscle that the trained part gains. Still pretty incredible. Nutrition plays a huge role as well. We all know that nutrition is extremely important for bodybuilders who want to gain muscle, its just as important for injured or sick people who dont want to lose muscle. Letting your nutrition go to pot will accelerate your muscle loss. Now I mention mental attitude as well. I have no proof for this whatsoever but I suspect that a positive mental attitude reduces muscle loss as well.

Back this spring right before my shoulder problems started I did a series of articles on carb cycling and as part of this I very carefully charted my weight and bodyfat. Now remember, I did #1 above – I did everything I possibly could within the limits dictated by my doctor. Today I am exactly the same bodyfat as I was back then (7%) and I weigh 2.0lbs less. So there is your answer. I stopped working out upper body for six months and lost 2.0 pounds of muscle, that is surprisingly little! By looking at my weekly videos over this timeframe you can see that most of the muscle lost seems to have been from my shoulders which is not surprising because with them I couldnt do anything. Remember, this isnt a research study. To do this properly and come up with really accurate results would require hundreds of people and gobs of money. My personal experience just gives you a ballpark number of how fast muscle loss occurs.

And remember, dont despair. Adding muscle is a very slow process but getting it back after an injury is much, much faster. When peoples legs atrophy in a cast, the leg very quickly gets back to its normal size when the cast is removed.