Depends on how much muscle mass you actually want to keep. All of it or grow some? Target 8-15 reps per set at 0-4RIR (reps in reserve… ie. reps from failure or form breakdown) for 3-6 sets per movement.
The two biggest drivers of hypertrophy are cumulative muscle damage, and time spent under high muscular tensions, specifically dynamic (moving) tension. Both of these far outweigh any contribution from metabolic disturbance. The very best way to accomplish a large degree of muscular damage and tension, in a repeatable way so that adaptations can be chronic and continuous is: high volume resistance training that involves progressive overload from week to week. (More training each week, followed eventually by a deload week).
Deload serves three purposes:
- Psychological recovery, for which a week of shorter workouts is a generally-accepted and reasonable time frame to allow for some much needed mental down-time. Not to mention catching up on life (or sleep!)
- Physiological recovery: This involves glycogen restoration in the muscles as well as hormonal recovery (reduction of chronically elevated stress hormones and a concomitant increase in testosterone). Generally, reducing training volume is the most important factor for this, and taking a week of lowered training volumes allows for good restoration.
- Physical/mechanical recovery: This is the physical repair of your tissues to prevent injury. Cumulative microtrauma, if added up for many phases without reducing the load on the bar, can lead to injury. This is why the second half of deload week can be so crazy-light.
But… I’d recommend letting just a wee bit of the muscle disappear if you’re mostly concerned about:
- Tri performance
- Cycling performance
- Longevity and orthopedic health
- Secondarily, aesthetics/muscularity
If you go with a lower volume approach like:
- 3-6 reps per set
- 2-4 sets per movement
- 1-7 RIR, most of the time
- 4-6 movements per session
- 1-2 sessions per week
…You can maintain the vast majority of muscle with less total work and actually slightly improve strength with the same or minimally less muscle mass. You’ll have less indiscriminate hypertrophy (non-productive muscle mass for swimming and everything else) and less total fatigue to dissipate/recover from before each endurance training session.
And including explosive movements and a bit more core work is probably a good idea for movement economy in all three disciplines. (well… explosive stuff isn’t going to benefit the tri swim… but everything else holds true).
That’s how I’ve written the Endurace Sport Lifting Templates
They’re just a good strength training program with better fatigue management for endurance athletes who don’t plan on taking time off of, or reducing, volume of endurance training while touching on and developing strength and power in the gym. If you’re a triathlete and that’s a primary goal, 2d/wk lifting is plenty, FYI. Feel free to ask questions.
Does anyone know if TR offers/sells strength training programs? If so, I’ll remove this post immediately because I don’t think that would be kosher! (I profit from the sales of those programs)
These 2 articles were all I could find:
PS. Target 0.7-1.0g of protein per pound of lean mass you have, if you’d like to hold lean muscle well during a hypocaloric diet phase. More on that and other muscle retention and training quality nutrition detail the my book listed here: Recommended Books / Reading Thread