Can muscle turn to fat?
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Arnold Schwarzenegger <[email protected]>
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Arnold's Pump Club welcomes new subscribers and addresses the question of whether muscle can turn into fat when lifting stops. The club explains that muscle and fat are different tissues and that taking a break from training can change their proportions, but one does not turn into the other. They provide insights into how the body adjusts to inactivity and aging.
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Does Muscle Turn Into Fat If You Stop Lifting?
Muscle can’t become fat, but time off changes both. Here’s what matters, how much time you can take off, and how your body adjusts as you age.
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Reader Question
Does Muscle Turn Into Fat When You Stop Lifting?
Your muscles can get smaller when you stop lifting. Fat can increase. When both happen together, it’s easy to see how the idea that one becomes the other got started.
But muscle and fat are different tissues. Taking a break from training can change how much of each you have. It does not turn one into the other.
Your body constantly repairs and replaces muscle protein. Lifting helps you build and maintain that muscle. Without enough work to keep it, your muscles can (and will) gradually shrink.
Meanwhile, skipping workouts means burning fewer calories. If your portions stay the same while your activity drops, you can start storing more fat.
Losing muscle contributes to the drop in calorie burning, but less than you might think. A pound of muscle uses about 6 calories a day at rest. Missing the workouts and moving less throughout the day can make a much bigger difference than losing a little muscle.
Fat can also collect between muscles during prolonged inactivity. In one small study, young adults who kept weight off one leg for four weeks lost muscle while fat increased between the muscles. The muscle cells shrank, and the fat between them grew. One tissue didn’t turn into the other.
That doesn’t mean a week away from the gym will noticeably change your body. And looking smaller doesn’t automatically mean you’ve lost muscle.
Stored carbohydrate and water in your muscles can also shift their size by a few percent. Those stores change with your diet and training, so the mirror can’t tell you how much muscle you’ve lost.
Even when you lose some muscle, a short break doesn’t necessarily set back your long-term progress.
Researchers randomly assigned young men to 24 weeks of either continuous bench-press training or a program that included two three-week breaks. The break group lost about 3% of their triceps size during each pause, then regained it after returning.
By the end, triceps size had increased about 19% in the break group versus 21% in the continuous group. Strength gains were 50% versus 51%, even though the break group did 25% fewer workouts. It was a small study of previously untrained men doing one exercise.
But it suggests that a few weeks off, as long as you’re consistent overall, doesn’t derail months of progress.
You can also train far less and still hold onto your gains. In one trial, young adults maintained muscle size and strength for roughly eight months with one challenging set of each lower-body exercise, once a week. Adults ages 60 to 75 kept their strength but lost some size, even with three sets once a week, suggesting they need more training to preserve muscle. Strength proved sticky overall: even people who stopped training entirely kept most of their strength gains.
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