Quote: (09-27-2017 06:40 AM)zatara Wrote:
Quote: (09-27-2017 04:30 AM)Fortis Wrote:
You'll definitely need to get comfortable with the idea of losing a little bit of muscle, but one thing you can do to help save your muscle mass is eating a lot more protein, taking BCAA supplements and throw in some strength training 2-3 times a week. Nothing crazy but enough to keep your muscles engaged.
You also will just need to eat more in general. You will be burning a fuck ton of calories with all the martial arts that you do, so the calories necessary to maintain your current mass will be a lot higher.
^this.
BCAAs and a protein and calorie dense diet will help reduce muscle loss, but if you're going from a decent weight training regime to essentially just doing cardio / weighted cardio all week as it sounds theres no way to avoid losing a lot of muscle mass. You need to find a way to fit in weight training at least twice a week.
It depends on what sort of weights you were moving previously, but for any reasonably sized man 20KG DBs won't be anywhere near heavy enough to maintain a decent amount of muscle mass. For the bigger lefts like shoulder presses, db bench presses etc you'd be needing to move far heavier weights than that.
If we're talking about maintaining a reasonable level of musculature without being heavily muscled, then I would have thought 20kg dbs would do the trick. For example, a shoulder/chest/triceps workout that did the following exercises would allow one to maintain a high degree of strength and muscularity:
Handstand pushups
followed by
5x20 DB strict press
followed by either
200 total bodyweight dips
or
50 total reps (dips) with 20-40kg of dbs between your legs or in a backpack
followed by
DB flies on a bench, or even better, rollout flies from a pushup.
Finish with a few max sets of pushups.
Personally I think you could build/maintain a reasonably impressive physique with a push workout like that.
Pull would need to be mainly chins, weighted chins, and bodyweight (plus db plates) rows.
Legs could be one leg DB deadlifts, goblet squats, split squats, pistols, sprints, snatches & swings (one and two arm), etc etc.
I think it would be possible to put together a routine that let you build a powerful, strong, and athletic physique with those exercises. Obviously you'll never win a strength or bodybuilding competition, but that doesn't sound like it's the goal.