I’ve completed my rep max testing for all lifts I will use in my HST cycle. I was going to do the two weeks of 4’s with negatives, but as it happens, an unexpected weekend trip out of town would put me at a 3-day gap in training, and I don’t know that I would have gotten any hypertrophic stimulus from doing anymore training anyway. I’ve been lifting so hard and so long, with quite high frequency that I’m quite sure all my efforts produce very little disruption to the status quo in my muscular system. So what the hell… time to Strategically Decondition, aka don’t lift.
Based on all the research I could find online, muscular atrophy for someone who is as trained as I am doesn’t happen to any measureable extent until around 14 days with no training. 10 days without lifting seems to restore some of the anabolic signalling in the mTor pathways, which I don’t understand at all, but it sounds cool to say. My plan now is to take 10 full days off, with a potential of 2-3 more depending on how I feel after the 10.
My biggest concern is calories doing this break. I’ve been cycling calories in this current deficit/bodyfat reduction phase and dropping weight steadily and on target. My average calories are 2170 so clearly that level is below maintenance. However, that’s if I’m training. Without any training and as little moving around as I can muster, 2170 may be a good maintenance level for me so I’ll start there and see what happens.
I can’t say I’m excited about doing this, but I am at least fairly confident nothing adverse will happen, so even if HST doesn’t cause me to get swole, worst case is I don’t lose anything and I get a nice break.
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