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Contraceptives Prevent Women from Building Lean Muscle

Study shows women who want to be buff have to forego the pill

Apr 21, 2009 17:31 GMT  ·  By
Oral contraceptives negatively influence a woman’s ability to build muscle mass, study shows
   Oral contraceptives negatively influence a woman’s ability to build muscle mass, study shows

As women looking to lose weight but also to build significant muscle are working out hard at the gym, they should also consider skipping the pill to achieve said goal. A new study comes to show that contraceptives prevent them from building lean muscle, although the exact connection between the pill and working out has not yet been established, MSNBC informs.

The study has shown that women who work out intensively while also taking contraceptives are less likely to build lean muscle than those who don’t. Although it is still to be determined how the pill influences the muscle mass, experts believe women who want to be more buff should forego it for a while and go for another contraceptive until they achieve their goal, it is further said.

Led by Chang-Woock Lee and Steven Riechman of Texas A&M University in College Station and Mark Newman of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, the study will be presented this week at the American Physiological Society meeting in New Orleans. It has successfully established that women not taking the pill gain 60 percent more muscle mass than those who are, as part of a program that lasted 10 weeks. Women aged 18 to 31, half on the pill and half not, were submitted to a resistance exercise training program, while also focusing on eating healthy so as to allow their body to build muscle mass.

At the end of the 10 weeks of training, the 73 participants were all measured, with those who did not take the pill having gained considerably more muscle mass than those who did, despite the fact that they had trained and eaten the same. Blood tests also revealed that women who did not take oral contraceptives had higher levels of testosterone (muscle-building hormone), as opposed to those who did, and in whom the cortisol (muscle-breaking hormone) levels were elevated.

Researchers have concluded that oral contraceptives negatively affect a woman’s ability to build lean muscle. However, it is only through further testing that the exact way in which this comes to happen is to be established.