THIS HAPPENS to Muscles When You Don’t Workout

You may have noticed that when you take a few days off from working out, your muscles start to look a little leaner or smaller in size. Right?

To understand whether this is muscle loss or not, let’s go back to basics.

Our muscles are about:-

• 75% water
• About 18-20% protein
• 1-2% carbohydrates in the form of glycogen
• similar fat percent
• 1% electrolytes

And a few other things like creatine.

Now, If you pay attention here, you can see that muscles are mostly water, and glycogen is also stored with 3 times the amount of water.

So, when you don’t work out for a few days, the first thing that happens is that the amount of glycogen decreases, which also takes a lot of water with it.

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So, the main reason why your muscles look smaller in the initial few days is water AND GLYCOGEN loss. Yes, if you don’t train for a few weeks or months, then gradually protein breakdown will be higher than protein synthesis resulting in a reduction of net protein, which will cause the muscle fibers to shrink, which is called muscle loss or muscle atrophy.

So the key takeaway here is, nothing will happen to your muscles in a few days to a week or so, in fact, this could be an opportunity for your muscles to recover best during couple of days of rest.