Q: Hi Mike, i am currently 145 -147lbs, I did my BF on the tanita ironman series and I am coming in at 17.8 % bf, my lean weight is 114lbs ..I Did 1 Figure body building comp and since then my legs and arms are very very muscular. I train 5 days a week and bike regularly to get around. HOW can i reduce my muscle and apear less muscular????I feel really self concious in dressess and people make comments all the time:( Please help I don't want to be called "muscles" anymore!

A: Sorry to hear about your problem. You have a couple of options here... One option is to gain weight in the form of fat. This will increase your body fat percentage and you won't appear so lean, even though your actual muscle mass will be the same (or might even increase a bit with newly gained weight). This may be a good option if you are mainly concerned with your leanness as opposed to with your bulk. If you have well-defined but relatively small muscles new fat will mask them. But if you are concerned that your muscles are actually too big (as opposed to just well-defined) then this may not be a good option since the bulk will still be there, just covered by a layer of fat. If you go with this option you will want a low-protein diet to minimize new muscle formation and skip all training.

The other option is to actually try and lose muscle mass. The only good way of doing this is through losing weight while minimizing your body's ability and reasons to maintain muscle mass. This means no resistance training of any sort for the muscle groups you're trying to reduce and an overall low-protein diet to make it harder for your body to maintain muscle mass. Low-intensity long-duration cardio is OK here (unless the muscles you are trying to reduce are calves) but most other training will need to be skipped.

So, to summarize, in all cases you want a low-protein diet and you want to eliminate all or most training (definitely training that targets the muscle groups you want to reduce). Then you can decide to either gain new weight and fat to appear less lean but maintain/increase the size OR lose weight and muscle to reduce size.