Lean Muscle and Birth Control

The joke I remember hearing a long time ago is that the side effects of a woman taking oral contraceptives were things like nausea, weight gain, and mood changes. So the pill itself isn't what prevents a woman from getting pregnant, it's the side effects that make her less likely to be desirable for a man to want to have sex with her.

But this study presented another side effect of oral contraceptives: Women putting on less muscle.

They found women who were not taking birth control pills gained 60 percent more muscle mass after a 10-week weight training program than those who were.

That's pretty significant. But this is the start of trying to figure out why that is:

And blood samples before and after the training period showed the women on the pill had lower levels of muscle-building hormones such as testosterone and far higher levels of muscle-breaking hormones such as cortisol.

But, I found a different article talking about this same study that goes a little deeper.

Essentially, the women that were on the pill had lower levels of androgen hormones that are there to build that muscle after a workout and a higher level of cortisol that is there to breakdown muscle.

Normally, it's not a bad thing to have cortisol breakdown muscle, because the androgen hormones will come along and re-build the muscle after an intense workout that triggers those hormones to spurt off (known as protein synthesis).

It seems that the contraceptive is putting a halt to the release of those androgen hormones.

But when they dug in a little deeper, they found that it even came down to the type of oral contraceptive that was being taken:

Women who took pills containing low-androgenicity progestins acquired muscle through exercise as effectively as did women not on the pill. But women whose oral contraceptives contained medium- or highly androgenic progestins attained less than a 0.5 percent gain in muscle mass over 10 weeks — a far cry from what the others achieved.

From a trainer's perspective, this is pretty interesting as it might be a question that is necessary if you're seeing your female clients not put on the muscle that you think they should be over a period of time. It could also be a reason why a female would have minimal or even fat gain over a period of time (assuming workouts are being followed and nutrition is in check). Ladies, if this is a concern for you, you might want to talk to your doctor about it but at the same time, I think more research needs to be done to give us the reasons why it's happening.

www.leanbodyfitness.com
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