Are you training for a competition? If so, you could well need to cut down your weight. But how do you prevent muscle loss at the same time? Let’s find out.
Change Your Diet
To prevent losing muscle as you lose weight, you should follow a diet that suits your specific nutritional and energetic requirements. You should eat a meal that contains protein, healthy fats, and carbohydrates within forty-five minutes of finishing a workout. All of those things can help with post-workout recovery, while carbs help your body to replace your glycogen stores that were used while exercising. The best carbs to eat after working out include fresh fruit, yams, leafy vegetables, legumes, grains, oatmeal, milk, and whole wheat pasta. Getting protein into your post-workout meal is the thing that helps you to maintain lean muscle. Good sources of protein include seafood, eggs, beans, quinoa, brown rice, nuts, and buckwheat. As for foods with healthy fats for your post-workout meal, great sources include nuts, eggs, avocados, chia seeds, and fatty fish.
Use Supplements
Some supplements are ideal to use when you’re cutting weight for a competition but also wanting to maintain your muscle. For instance, chromium picolinate is thought to have a positive effect on weight loss, hunger, and blood sugar levels without losing lean body mass. But the best supplement to take if you want to prevent muscle loss while cutting down your weight is Creatine HMB. When you take creatine monohydrate and HMB combined, you can decrease fat mass and prevent lean muscle loss. Furthermore, the supplement can help you increase your endurance and enhance your strength. StrengthSeries’ Creatine HMB includes ingredients at clinically effective dosages. Also, it doesn’t include any artificial sweeteners, colors, or harmful additives.
Adopt the Right Types of Workouts
As you’ve probably guessed, preventing muscle loss when cutting weight isn’t only about the things you digest. It’s also about doing the right workouts. To lose fat while also maintaining or gaining muscle mass, you should do moderate to high-intensity cardio workouts for at least two and a half hours each week. Excellent forms of cardio exercises include running and cycling and playing sports like basketball, boxing, and soccer. Whatever type of workout you do, you should increase the intensity gradually to challenge yourself, burn more calories, and push your muscles to the max.
Strength training is also highly recommended to prevent muscle loss and increase muscle mass. You should strength train two to three times a week by combining weightlifting, resistance band exercises, and bodyweight exercises. Things like yoga, tai chi, and Pilates can also be beneficial. When lifting weights, start off with low weights and fewer repetitions and gradually work up to more reps and heavier weights. Also, make sure your strength training routine is balanced and targets all of your main muscle groups. And remember: give your muscles time to recover. That means targeting each muscle group no more than twice a week. As for losing weight, incorporate interval training into your workout schedule.
Final Thoughts
Don’t be surprised if you lose a little muscle mass when you first start losing excess fat. The important thing is having a good diet and workout plan in place to help you gradually maintain or increase your muscle while you lose body weight. Maintain a calorie deficit diet while eating plenty of healthy carbs and proteins and use cardio and strength training exercises and other suggested workouts and sports. In addition to all of that, you need to set goals. Set attainable and realistic goals but also challenge yourself to improve. When you stay focused and consistent, there will be nothing to stop you from losing weight, preventing muscle loss, and giving it your all to win that competition.
