I noticed a weird thing, And I can’t prove it and don’t even know if it makes scientific sense. But I noticed a phenomenon that I would almost call muscle migration. I think it applies mostly to those close to their genetic limit for muscle mass.
I’ll use a real life example to illustrate the theory:
For most of 2008-2016 (except for when I got out of the hospital 3 years or so ago) my weight as around 215 at 10% body fat (roughly).
My training often changed… at one point I got back to the olympic lifts and did mostly olympic lifting training, at another time I spent 5 months only doing gymnastics ring work (no weight lifting), then I’d do bodybuilding “bro training” for 4-5 months, then I’d train powerlifting-style, etc.
What I noticed is that my weight would always stay right around 215 and my degree of leanness would not change BUT my body would look completely different.
When I did bodybuilding training my delts, arms and chest would get larger and my legs and glutes seems to go down… when I switched to olympic lifting my legs would grow and my traps would get thicker but my arms and chest got smaller, when I did gymnastic ring work my biceps, lats and delts really improved but my legs and chest went down.
Always being right around 215.
I just concluded 6 months of bodybuilding training and switched to my current style which is basically:
PER WORKOUT
- One olympic lift trained mostly for skill and speed
- One strength lift (bench, squat, sumo dead, military press)
- 2-3 bodybuilding exercises using 1 all-out set to failure (best damn training…)
And my traps, back and legs have already improved but my arms feel smaller (I’m still training them) and my chest seems a bit flatter.
So my theory is that when you are close to your genetic limit it might be possible to continue growing some muscles as long as your total lean body mass doesn’t change… which means losing some muscle elsewhere (maybe through a combination of protein degradation and protein synthesis, I don’t know).
It’s like when I change my training focus the body feels the need to add muscle in certain places to adapt to the stress BUT since it’s close to its limit it can’t just pile on muscle so it breaks down other muscle to be able to add muscle where it is needed.
It sounds out there and might totally foolish but it does seem to work like that for me.
Maybe your body really does have a set-point in muscle mass that it cannot exceed naturally, but you can still make visual changes while staying within that set-point.