Help, I’ve become interested in other things and can’t get up!

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

Over the last couple months , my athletic interests have changed. Though lifting is still very much my base , chasing new numbers isn’t a care right now. Instead , running a few times a week and also grappling ( wrestling and bjj) a few times a week.

I have been trying to continue to progress at all of these
things at the same time , and it’s burning my body out a bit. Though im not super concerned with numbers right now , I still very much want to keep my muscle mass and size.

And I know I’ve already heard you talk about it before that numbers don’t necessarily equal muscle mass and hypertrophy. So I guess I’m just looking for reassurance that if my squat and deadlift go from 600 to 500 that I won’t be losing muscle. My training will stay the exact same I just will
be keeping the rpe to 7-8 and won’t be doing heavy singles anymore I’ll just work down to heavy triples and restart back to 8s.

2

It has been shown that individuals can maintain their muscle mass on a fraction of the training volume that was required to build it (and if you maintain your training volume, you may in fact still be able to build additional muscle, even if your top-end strength performance goes down during this time). 1RM strength, on the other hand, requires a set of skills and neuromuscular adaptations that cannot be maintained without exposure to heavy loads.

3

Thank you for the response doc ! Training volume will
stay the exact same ( and maybe even increase a small amount) and the structure will stay the same even from
the aspect of wide variety of variations and then becoming more specific as I get closer to triples , the only thing that will change is adjustment of load so that my running and grappling is less affected.