[citrin_ru]

I'm noticing some decline of skills I don't practice regularly and LLM is just one of reasons why one stops practicing. Switching to another area of work gives a comparable decline. If you want sharp skills you have to use them.

[Archer6621]

True. People don't do it though, because keeping skills sharp and using them takes effort, and we have a predisposition to be as efficient as possible with how we spend our effort; if there's an easier way to do it in our awareness, we will naturally gravitate towards that. LLMs are often a universal crutch or swiss-army-knife that significantly take away workload for many abstract tasks, so all kinds of atrophy in abstract thinking is to be expected.

However, when looking at muscle, once you have it you don't need to use it as much in order to maintain it. I wonder if the same is true for skills; in that case, some kind of regiment where you still use the skill you delegate once a week or so could maybe help with avoiding this loss of skill for most part.

[eueje]

“ However, when looking at muscle, once you have it you don't need to use it as much in order to maintain it”

No.. this depends on how much muscle you have. The appropriate comparison is mass and density of knowledge/understanding vs muscle. There’s not a chance in hell you will retain mass and dense muscle without pushing the body hard. Just in the same way you will not retain very deep understanding of things unless a) you’ve been reciting it for over 10 yrs b) you go back and push the understanding continuously for it to remain as part of your being

[cj]

Building muscle is much harder than maintaining muscle.

And if you went 3 years without exercising, you'll be able to get your muscles back much quicker than had you never had the muscle before.

It's pretty comparable to skills. You don't need to practice as hard to maintain a skill than you do to build it. And if you let the skill atrophy, it's much easier to recover the skill compared to building it from scratch.

[mywittyname]

> And if you went 3 years without exercising, you'll be able to get your muscles back much quicker than had you never had the muscle before.

This very much depends on age. I went on statins about 18 months, which destroyed about 15lbs of muscle over the course of a year (160->145). Along with that muscle loss came about a halving or more of the weights I could lift in any given exercise. I interpreted the "do you have any weakness on this medication" question as inability to function levels of weakness, it wasn't until I showed my training logs to my physician that she asserted that I was having weakness.

It's been a year since I went off them and I'm still lifting barely what I could in high school. I'm exploring some different training plans, but AFAIK, there isn't much research into if different weight/volume breakdowns work better for older guys.

[galangalalgol]

5/3/1 without any extra sets (no bbb,fsl,ssl etc) is pretty well regarded for people with poor recovery. Slow, but steady and low risk.

[eueje]

Again you are not understanding the comparison.

I’ve got 20 inch lean arms - I know far more about muscle building and retention than you. I train just as hard to maintain them as I did to get them there.

The people who say “oh it’s easy to maintain” LOL it’s easy to maintain 16 inch arms.

[cj]

> I know far more about muscle building and retention than you

I am a competitive bodybuilder…

> I train just as hard to maintain them as I did to get them there.

Are you enhanced? Were you enhanced when you built the 20” arms? If so, yes I agree.

Edit: With 20" arms, there's nearly 0% chance you're natural. You can't compare your enhanced experience to naturals.

[conductr]

Chiming into this little tiff to say I think bulk muscle is a bad analogy in the first place. It’s more akin to a muscle memory/skill. Something like golf is a better analogy. If you took any golfer, at any level, and had them refrain from golfing for 3 years. I feel pretty confident asserting they would all perform worse than they had. Their skill is diminished.

[cloche]

To maintain the muscle you have, you only need about 1/3rd of your normal workouts. It can be retained with 1-2 workouts per week. I imagine the same would be for something you've learned. If you've already put in the effort to learn it, reviewing it ~1x per week is probably enough. During the accumulation phase though - whether it be muscle or learning a new skill - once a week is definitely not enough.

[Archer6621]

Yes, this is my experience for muscle at least. I used to work out 3-4 times a week, maybe a little more sometimes. Lately due to circumstances, I've been doing smaller workouts about 1-2 times a week. I've lost some finesse, but my muscle mass has remained roughly the same.

Also like some people hinted at this in sibling threads, I think it's different between purely abstract skills, and skills that involve muscle memory. For instance, I could probably stop using my bicycle for a very long time, and still not unlearn how to use it, or learn it again really quickly. Maybe it is because abstract skills are inherently more complex and require more cognitive effort and connections to knowledge overall, and are therefore more fragile.