Reducing upper body muscle mass/size to drop weight and be faster

[gspo13]

small yet difficult question...

how do i reduce my upper body muscle mass/size?
to clarify, i have a history of team sports such as rugby and football where that little bit of upper body strength is needed. So after 4 years of just riding my bike and not training my upper body at all, I appear to be stuck with strong, large arms. well large for cycling :-/

my weight, fat mass and diet is sound and well controlled.

ive heard of doing 2 sets of 100 reps on my targeted areas (biceps, triceps and deltoids)

any stories of this technique, or even any proven ideas???

im after ways that one could use to train to be smaller up top.

cheers

 

[Felt_Rider]

You are doing the best thing for losing the size by not training.

People sometimes speculate that overtraining can be catabolic, but many times for the mesomorphic body type changing the stimulus is still a training stimulus. There is potential for your body type that you may actually gain more size.

About the only thing one can do is not train (no stimulus) and hope for atrophy. Even the most muscular people that are stricken with a catastrophic injury that lands them in a wheel chair you will find their legs will eventually atrophy to the point of little muscle at all.

However, for normal folk and especially those with keen genetics for adding muscle mass doing daily activities is enough to maintain muscle. For instance people that sit an entire day in the office and do minimal walking in the office, to the car and around the house can maintain some decent muscle mass with barely any stressor. I hope this makes sense.

Just so you know I come from a background in consulting strength related sports and I am a former competitive lifter.
Keep training on that bike.

Best wishes

 

[gspo13]

this is my issue, i have not trained upper body at all, and during the season i dont touch a weight. your discussion about genetically strong is believable. the blood gets flowing once on the bike, and i suppose the nutrients are still feeding my arms, therefore, they dont descrease in size, they just remain the same size.

im trying the 2 sets of 100 reps on biceps and triceps in the attempt to change my thick fast twitch fibres into thin slow twitch fibres....

this is such a difficult isse, does anyone know how to train a muscle to descrease in size?

 

[Felt_Rider]

I hear ya /img/vbsmilies/smilies/smile.gif

I was once qualified to compete at the national level in bodybuilding. I picked up cycling in 2004 because I had put on so much muscle mass for my frame that I had really bad blood pressure issues. Because I spent so much time trying to increase muscle mass I tried to reduce cardio as much as possible unless it was to make my weight class. Lifting suits my genetics far more than trying to be an endurance cyclist, but here I am as a small shetland pony/clydesdale. At 5'6" and a very light skeletal frame I started cycling at a fairly lean 190 pounds. I am now down to 163 pounds and as time goes on I am sure I will continue to lose muscle size. Also note that I still train with weights five days a week, but my training is not progressive in nature for a few reasons.

I am not going to try to convince you, but here are my view points and reasons muscle wasting / atrophy / sacropenia as I have studied and experienced in training and training others to gain lean muscle. When trying to help an athlete gain muscle size we look at these bulleted items as a base foundation. There are more items to look at but these are some of the key elements. (so one could potentially turn all these around and use this information to intentionally create muscle wasting. However, I do not recommend improper nutrition since cycling training still requires proper nutrition for recovery.)

• Lack of exercise or training
• Poor nutrition
• Excessive cardio

I am losing muscle size for several reasons.

• Because of some past injuries I cannot train at the same high level with weights (progressive overload) as I did when I was younger. That type of training is what increased my muscle mass. Now, even though I still train with weights, it is not the same intensity and I am actually detraining from previous years. I was considered a "hard gainer" so I literally stopped all cardio to save calories and that all my body's energy went toward high level training with weights and then recovery.
• I have increased cycling/cardio volume over the past few years and that intensity is increasing each year. My body is becoming more efficient (adaptation) to what it is called to do. If one increases training triceps the triceps adapt and become more resilent to the training stress. Same is true for training any bodypart. If the triceps do in fact progress in high volume training I would then ask how are well trained triceps going to help increasing the endurance of the legs?
• I have changed my nutrition to some degree. I try to fuel my workouts with just enough, but I am not providing the ample amount that I used to and as a result I am losing weight.
• I am now 48 and my hormone levels are declining. With less natural release of testosterone and GH it is harder for me to keep that muscle mass.

Just my opinion, but I think if you asked Alex Simmons or Fergie as a coach they might say save your energy on the tricep training experiment and put that energy toward cycling training.

I am personally not against experimentation. Best wishes on whatever you choose.

 

[gspo13]

Thanks for that FeltRider, that was very helpful.

i am not neglecting my riding, it is currently the off season now so my riding is minimal and will increase to 3-5 hr rides 4 times a week come october. I thought that in teh interest of cross training i would try some different stuff in order to catabolise my mass. i will measure my arm circumfereence and give the 100 rep program a go, then when the time is right....nail some low intensity high duration riding on low carb/calorie intake (nothing like glycogen depletion training)

For your interest, the program is this:

2 sets of 100 reps with 90 sec rest between sets. (i aim to target bi's, tri's, pec's and rear delts)
once the workout is complete...NO PROTEIN for at least 3 hrs.
in its essense, the muscle should get its energy from the muscle itself and begin to degenerate.

cheers for your help

 

[swampy1970]

I think you're hoping that the muscle will essentially provide it's own protein to 'unbuild' itself but that relies on the premise that you can pick and choose where the protein comes from. Like trying to target fat use from a specific area, I think you're on a losing battle.

How much are you relying on your arms to provide excessive amounts of support on the bike? Is every bike ride an endurance exercise for the arms too and could you benefit from alterning your position to use the arms less on the bike as a means of support instead of just using them to steer the bike.

 

[lanierb]

There are a bunch of us in a similar boat to you. I used to play rugby and lacrosse and weighed a very lean 205. Now I weigh a lean 175 and while my arms and shoulders are smaller than they once were, they are not small, especially for cycling. I think the best you can do is drop weight until your body says enough (performance goes down) and then just keep holding that weight. Slowly over time you will lose a bit more, but it's pretty slow in my experience. For me at least, doing any work on my arms at all means they blow back up pretty quickly.

 

[danfoz]

Originally Posted by lanierb .

Slowly over time you will lose a bit more, but it's pretty slow in my experience. For me at least, doing any work on my arms at all means they blow back up pretty quickly.

Same boat, lot's of weighlifting as a teen (more like bodybulding) and still stuck with some of the upperbody mass. The last routine lifting was over 2 decades ago but I have to be very careful with stuff like push ups and pullups, etc. In an effort to become a faster ascender, last two years I have not done a single thing except the bike but still need to wear LG armwarmers under a MD jersey or my hands start to go numb from the elastic "tourniquet". It's a slow process. Ironically a couple months ago a colleague at work asked "are your arms getting smaller?" and I replied with a loud "They are? WOOHOO!"... She thought I'd flipped my lid./img/vbsmilies/smilies/wink.gif

I dunno enough(anything) about converting muscle fibers, but 2x100 reps of anything arm related does not sound like the way to go.

 

[moto1]

Same for me, last 4 years have dropped from 200lbs to 173 lbs. I still lift 2-3 days a week, mainly for shape. I cycle 3-4 days a week and race every other weekend. I'll never be world caliper so I'm happy with my routine. I can win a cat 2 mtn bike race and still bench my body weight for 15 reps. I'm 49 yrs old. I'm in a good place. Feeling great.

 

[AdamSean]

I think I heard somewhere that stretching muscles can make them leaner. It couldn't hurt. Being loose and flexible is a good idea too. I would look into Pilates, which focuses on elongating muscles to build strength, but not gaining in size or mass. I am in the same boat as you. I bulked up to look more the part of a security officer, but my cycling is more important to me now so I want to trim down and drop a few pounds to perform better. Try the stretching or maybe even pilates. Like I said, it couldn't hurt.

 

[upstateSC-rider]

Same way here, very stocky, built like a brick $&#! house. /img/vbsmilies/smilies/smile.gif

Originally Posted by moto1 .

Same for me, last 4 years have dropped from 200lbs to 173 lbs. I still lift 2-3 days a week, mainly for shape. I cycle 3-4 days a week and race every other weekend. I'll never be world caliper so I'm happy with my routine. I can win a cat 2 mtn bike race and still bench my body weight for 15 reps. I'm 49 yrs old. I'm in a good place. Feeling great.

That's almost my same exact current and goal weights, glad someone achieved good results, hopefully I can make it one day.

Love your avatar, I ride a yz250f and my kids ride a ktm 105sx and ktm jr 50.