Maintaining Muscle: Use This Technique To Preserve Your Gains

"Time under tension."

Maintaining Muscle: Use This Technique To Preserve Your Gains

Exercise apps are great for working a sweat, and your mum’s pilates routine is great for ‘toning your tummy’, but when your goal is to maintain a hard-earned benchpress PB or an Olympic squat record, neither cut it.

As the rest of the nation merrily makes the best of it and is content to yoga their way to enlightenment, you are gnashing your teeth at lost gains. So what do you do? Gnash no longer: DMARGE has spoken to a self-professed fitness freak (and F45 fitness ambassador and trainer) Cory George, to get the down-low on how best to maintain your guns from home.

His advice was surprising: rather than tell us to lift our sofa and curl our TV’s, as proxies of what we would have been doing in a gym, Cory challenged our core premise: “In my experience, the diehard lifters who are trying to isolate a specific area of their bodies are going to find it challenging to maintain mass without weights. Instead, they might want to consider prioritizing cardio. For most, this is actually a great thing!”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Cory (@coryg_) on

Fellas, let us introduce you to a new – and often overlooked – rule: time under tension. “There’s one rule for trying to gain muscle on resistance days, and that’s ‘time under tension.’ This refers to how long that muscle is under strain during that set. So, serious conventional lifters can focus on tempo controlled movements and high reps. For me, that looks like 300 push ups, sit-ups and squats every night. I’ll add 50 more reps every week.”

This is simpler than you’d think.

  • Chest – Push-ups
  • Arms – Dips
  • Core – Plank
  • Legs – Squats

Then, to add in a bit of balance, Cory says you may as well chuck in a few of the more ‘general population exercises’ F45 recommends (and which F45 experts can take you through if you sign up to their program): “I can lead you through a balanced 45-minute at-home F45 session including movements that hit all muscle groups with only a few planes of motion, including jump-squats, squat-pulses, moving planks and mountain climbers.”

“Join me by logging into the Challenge website or Challenge app, where existing F45 members can join the sessions on-demand. New members can contact their local studio for details to sign up.”

Read Next