Diet during injury

If a client of yours was on a cut during injury (lets say 1lb a week). Would you recommend they go to maintenance until the injury subsides or would remaining on the cut have no effect on rehab?

The angle I am asking about is whether it will delay healing and not as much about the muscle loss aspect. I imagine that on a major tissue injury like a tear, where you need to regrow alot of tissue, it’s probably a good idea to at minimum be in maintenance. But what about something like a bad lower back pull. Not a minor tweak, but something that legitimately makes you barely walk for a few days.

Advice?

Hey @timelinex - first, we need to address the last part of your comment - “But what about something like a bad lower back pull. Not a minor tweak, but something that legitimately makes you barely walk for a few days.” - It’s important to state, the intensity and severity of the pain experience someone has does NOT correlate to any measurable amount of tissue damage. We’ve discussed this a lot on podcasts and in other places on the forum/Facebook group. With that said, when someone is working through an issue, we don’t typically recommend any dramatic alterations to their nutrition.

Thank you for your response, I have watched basically all the BBM publicly available content, so I definitely appreciate your guys advice!

Your response makes sense in the model that you guys follow. I just wanted to clarify one small part. Even if we accept that there is physical damage, I can see how being in a calorie deficit can hamper “recovery” back to baseline because of hormones or other factors? So I just wanted to clarify your last sentence. You wouldn’t recommend any dramatic alterations to their nutrition, even if they are currently on a moderate cut. Is that correct?

Outside of major tissue injury like post-surgery, for example, we would probably not make significant alternations for typical pains and gym-associated injuries, nor would we expect that a calorie surplus would substantially alter the course of recovery for such things. We are assuming the individual is consuming sufficient protein either way, though.

Thank you for the reply.

My last concern is being in a deficit (cut) and muscle loss during the “rehab”.

I’ve already increased my calories so that I’m losing about 3/4 LB a week (@190lb). I’m also currently at squats a few inches above paralel using about 50% weight and deadlifts at about 30% weight. I’m happy to put in the work required to get me back to 100% and recognize it can take time. But it’s already been 1.5 weeks and I fear that too much longer and my quads will start to lose muscle mass from how little stimulation they are getting. I really didn’t want to derail my cut while I have good momentum and have already got used to the proper lifestyle changes, but the msucle loss fear is strong!

At what point would you change a lifters diet for concerns of too much muscle loss during the “rehab period”?

  1. How many grams of protein are you consuming per kilo of bodyweight right now?

  2. You either need to find a tolerable way to provide sufficient stimulus to the area of interest, or you need to accept some short- to medium-term loss of muscle mass (which you can minimize by addressing # 1 above) that will come back once you’re able to train normally again.

The minimum protein a consume is 1.86 gr/kilo (160gr at 190lb). My weekly avg is about 2.1gr/kilo (180gr). I think that’s good, right?

I am going to try lunges today for the first time, hopefully that provides a decent stimulus and that shouldnt be painful based on preliminary trys.

Yeah, we have some evidence that 1.6-2.3 g/kg is reasonable when in maintenance/surplus, but that bumping it up to 2.3-2.8 may be beneficial when in a deficit, since you’re inducing a degree of anabolic resistance.