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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2307 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 25, 2025

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I assume when you're saying you're doing hypertrophy-focused workouts you mean moderate-to-high reps in lots of exercises? Don't do that. Everyone I know who hops on semaglutide, and most people on cuts anyway, lack energy so you don't want to be trying to do long workouts with tons of sets of tons of exercises. You'll wear yourself out and increase the likelihood of injury.

I think that's what I'm doing, 3x10 or till failure, with progressive overloading.

Ozempic drastically reduces my appetite, but I can still eat more if I want to.

Once I'm back in the UK, I might have difficulty going to the gym 5x a week as I'm currently doing, so maybe it'll balance out?

I'm convinced that the body is "smarter" than we think it is in terms of building muscle or burning fat, in repsonse to the stimuli it gets from the outside world. Your body interprets calorie restriction as famine, food is less available. In that scenario, if you don't need maximum strength, your body is going to discard muscle as unnecessary. But just a few sets of high intensity lifts, and your body is going to assume that it needs that muscle to keep getting food in a famine environment, and will preserve it.

To a degree, semaglutide suppresses that famine response, or perhaps just the hunger itself. You still lose muscle with the fat, but that's true of any weight loss technique. Unfortunately, all the studies I've seen suggest that it's possible to retain muscle on semaglutide while working out, with nothing on trying to gain more. That's to be expected, since the primary demographic of interest are obese people and not gym nuts.

Thanks for the advice! I think I'll try and do it all for a month or so, but if turns out that's not helping, then I'll choose between cutting and bulking till I get good results.

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