Originally Posted by
ithryn
I'm totally not qualified to have an opinion here, lol, but when I did a cut session or two with Santana he had me doing this for the big lifts. Basically HLM making sure to get at least one good 5x5 or seven sets of three or some other high volume workload in, and then more volume in different variations for the L and M days. Which flew in the face of what I've dug up from the distant past on these boards, i.e. if you're on a cut you should dispense with all volume and just do high intensity singles and triples to maintain absolute strength. In fact Santana was dead set against peaking up to heavy 1-3 rep maxes if we were on a caloric deficit.
I got the sense you're just working the muscles repeatedly very hard. I mean if your body is trying to choose which tissues to catabolize into energy to keep you alive, and you're consistently doing lots and lots of work with a muscle tissue, say your arms, or your posterior chain, or your whole musculature, it's probably not going to choose that muscle tissue. Your baseline activity level is signaling that you need those structures.
Obviously on a massive caloric deficit it would eat those up anyway just to maintain normal functions of life, but at a maintenance level or a slight cut it's going to trade away other structures before it starts consuming those. That's my armchair physiologist guess.