While increasing exercise and reducing calorie intake can help you get fitter if you’re overweight, sometimes we end up overdoing it and producing negative results, including muscle mass loss.
You can spend countless hours in the gym and train hard, but if you have poor fitness habits, you’re shooting yourself in the foot and it’s very unlikely that you’ll reach your fitness goals.
Fortunately, by making small adjustments to your diet, exercise routine, and daily behaviors, you will avoid the pitfalls of bad habits and greatly improve your ability to grow muscle.
Here are 5 bad fitness habits that make you lose muscle mass instead of building it, according to the Times of India:
1. Not eating enough calories
Those aiming to lose weight may cut their calories too much. However, food is the fuel for your muscles and not consuming enough calories will force your body to burn muscle.
If you cut extra calories and also engage in intense cardio, you will tend to lose muscle over time.
Make sure you fuel your body properly before engaging in intense cardio exercise. This is because apart from calories and fat, cardio will also burn your muscles once other energy sources are depleted.
2. Overtraining
Continuous training is essential to building muscle. However, overdoing everything, even training, is bad. It is important to allow your body to recover properly following consistent and vigorous training sessions.
Aside from losing muscle mass, overtraining can lead to fatigue, poor sleep quality, low energy, persistent muscle soreness, and mood swings.
3. Not eating enough protein
Getting enough protein is a must for building and maintaining muscle mass. Make sure you get your protein from whole food sources and if you do consume protein powders, make sure they are of high quality.
The International Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for the amount of protein you should consume is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight.
Those aiming to improve muscle growth and recover from workouts faster may need to increase their intake.
The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) recommends consuming between 1.2 and 2.0 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day for best results.
4. Not prioritizing sleep
Practicing good sleep habits along with quality sleep is a top priority to help you maintain and grow muscle. Your muscles recover and grow while you sleep.
That’s why experts recommend getting eight hours of sleep every night. According to research, not getting good or enough sleep can increase your risk of losing muscle mass.
5. Do a lot of cardio
While regular cardio is great for overall health, going too far can cause muscle loss. The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans recommend that healthy adults get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity cardio exercise per week.
Constantly exceeding this threshold — combined with not eating enough calories or doing strength training — is a bad habit for anyone who wants to maintain or regain muscle mass.
Making sure you fuel your body properly before cardio is crucial, because as much as it helps you burn more calories and fat, it will also burn muscle once your other energy sources are depleted.
The bottom line is that you should find a good balance between cardio and strength training if your goal is muscle growth.
