November was similar to October with a few differences. I stuck with my diet, tried to work out as much as time permitted, and ended up losing a little bit of muscle. The one thing I discovered, however, is that body weight exercises are more time efficient than weightlifting. Besides the fact that they can be done anywhere, I found that I was more tired after doing body weight exercises than weightlifting. I only found out about this at the end month but for those who are in a hurry and simply intend to maintain muscle, body weight exercises are the way to go. Learning this is helpful because it’ll allow me to change my workout regimen to be more effective in the small amount of time I have to workout.

It was also during this month that I realized just how hard it is to maintain muscle. Regardless of how much protein I ate, because I wasn’t constantly using it, I lost some muscle mass. This was disheartening but I was able to prevent myself from feeling too down by dedicating a weekend to working out as much as possible.

I’d definitely recommend a “workout weekend” to those who find that they have trouble finding time to workout. What I did was push nearly everything else aside (within reason) and dedicate the entire weekend to working out as much as possible. Returning to my summer regimen for two days was extremely refreshing and allowed me to regain some of the muscle I had lost in the last month and a half.

Overall, I ended this month with about as much muscle as I started with. Which is a slight improvement over October’s results.

Right: The “workout weekend” was a great decision as it allowed me to boost my morale and undo some of the damage of not working out as much during the previous month and a half.

Wrong: November fixed the issue with October leaving it one of the few months where there wasn’t a glaring improvement I could have made to get better results.