I was recently injured and wont be able to do any harder workouts for a bit. While I recover I’d like to lose as little muscle mass as possible (I know, we all would). Anyone know if any of the episodes ever talk about keeping muscle mass while recovering from injury?
I’ve made sure to keep my protein up just as high and I’m trying to make sure I don’t lose weight - but didn’t know what the coaches thought or papers said.
Look up blood flow occlusion/restriction training.
It’s best used exactly for this scenario.
If you go down this path, don’t buy cheap bands and be careful. I would at least get some ‘smart’ cuffs, if you can’t get the more expensive, let’s say physician-grade cuffs.
That sucks, sorry to hear that. What is your injury?
The doctor said it’s probably tendinitis or overuse but didn’t seem to know for sure. I’m hoping PT will help figure it out, but at least the scans and tests seemed to rule out anything super bad. I can walk now and the pain is gone, but I can also tell something is wrong with it.
I talked about it a bit here: I have a sharp pain behind my left knee that is only there when I point my toes up. Any ideas? - #5 by adammeyer
Uhggg! If you aren’t already, get some upper body resistance exercises going and also some lower body exercises as you can. After reading the other thread I remember having a nagging pain that has come and gone and hasn’t come back.
Anyway, If you are worried about muscle loss, doing resistance exercises that don’t irritate the pain will mitigate any muscle loss issues since cycling itself isn’t doesn’t really illicit anabolic effects.
I do a bit of upper body resistance work (all body weight) but Iv’e never done real weights before. I’m hoping the PT person can help me with that. Otherwise I’ll look into getting a trainer for a bit so I don’t hurt myself. I probably should have been hitting the gym for leg work anyway
Had last summer also overuse injury. At that time did nothing but later bought SkiErg:
I am actually thinking to focus coming Dec-Feb fully to SkiErg + weight training, have gotten too skinny due too much cycling 
HMB has some evidence behind it that it can at least help maintain muscle mass when inactive
What is HMB?
Hydroxymethylbutyrate, a generally recognized as safe supplement, pretty cheap and it doesn’t taste bad. Body builders often take it, there is not much evidence that it can help grow muscle though but the evidence that it can help prevent muscle wasting during periods of inactivity or inadequate protein intake is a lot better.
Can you do any lower body lifting without aggravating it? High protein (at least 1g/lb body weight - look up the leucine threshold and make sure to hit that at least 3 times per day) and lifting are generally going to preserve muscle better than endurance activity anyway.
Thanks!I’l check that out. I’m going to ask the PT person about weights when I go in - Iv’e never done it before and don’t want to make things worse by guessing what I should start with
Just a small update
It’s been 2 months and I have managed to keep my TSS about 50% of what it was. I made sure to do some harder stuff when I could and generally speaking it seems to have worked to an extent. I probably lost about 8% on my FTP, but my endurance has been affected a lot I can tell.
Mental toughness has been hurt the most though. My brain is always trying to weasel out of any planned harder training rides where before I would look forward to most of them. I still have a lot of fun going hard in the moment, but don’t like planned workouts.
I’ll get it back. I should be able to start a new training plan in a month
Rhonda Patrick (Found my fitness podcast) has an episode about use of omega 3’s to spare muscle atrophy after injury/surgery