How To Avoid Loss of Progress During Time Off

Oct 6

loss-progress-maintenance-runner-fitness

Takeaway Points:

It’s harder to lose muscle mass than we think it is, people can go up to a month off without noticable muscle mass loss. Strength is harder to maintain in off periods, but once training resumes, strength quickly returns.
If you’re traveling or unable to do your usual workouts, performing various bodyweight exercises that work the same areas will help stave off muscle loss. If you’re recovering from injury, start reintegrating exercise by focusing on the non-affected areas. Go slow and don’t push too much and reinjure yourself.
Most importantly, keep moving! Doing whatever physical activity you’re able to do helps more than you realize.

One of the questions I see most often about fitness is the simple “what should I do if I have to take time off from training, but don’t want to lose my gains?”. So, today I wanted to dig further into this topic and explore the training and dietary strategies we can use to minimize risk of loss of gains.

How Fast Do I Lose My Gains Anyway?

The reality is, not very quickly. On average, we only lose a little bit of total muscle mass each year due to aging when past our prime, and that can easily be offset by being active and building a bit more muscle to compensate. Further, research has shown that muscle mass can often take quite a long time to disappear when you’ve been consistently training - even up to a month off is unlikely to cause much serious loss.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course. People who are more muscular to begin with (or are used to some chemical assistance) may fall off a bit quicker. This “it may take up to a month” rule is also generally dependent on the fact that you’re still somewhat active - keeping moving, giving the muscles a bare minimum level of stimulation, and so on. If even that minimum level of activity is removed - such as during an extended period of bed rest to recover from an injury or illness - then you can often lose a lot of muscle mass rather quickly, because even a small level of movement stimulus is infinitely preferable to no stimulus at all.

Strength can generally be lost a bit faster. Strength partially relies on muscle mass, which decays slowly, but it also partially relies on less physical qualities like neural patterning - the ability of your brain to effectively coordinate all that muscle. Without regular practice, these patterns can be quickly forgotten - and this can lead to a relatively rapid decrease in strength even if you’ve maintained your muscle mass. Luckily it will quickly recover again when you’re able to get back to the gym and retrain those neural patterns, but it can still be disappointing to see how quickly that strength can seemingly be “lost”. The important thing to remember here is that it’s not truly lost, and will quickly return.

Doing A Minimum Level Of Volume

Luckily, as I’ve written extensively about before, there’s a well-known effect in which it takes far less effort to maintain a previously built quality than it takes to build it in the first place. There’s no hard numbers, but it’s often something like ⅓-¼ th of your previous training volume.

This means that, if you were used to training with 20 sets of leg work per week, for example, then something as little as 5 sets per week should be more than enough to maintain leg muscle and strength. In general, this means that you can likely train just one day per week, hitting every major muscle group and movement pattern you want to retain, and see minimal loss in strength or size - for potentially a very long time.

This means that it’s generally a lot easier to maintain than people think. I’ve written a lot before about how these kinds of maintenance phases can be used strategically - for example, if you want to focus on a new kind of training for a while but retain the previous training, or if you wanted to simply focus on other things in life than training for a while. It’s also true that, if you don’t have super high athletic goals, than even just 1-2 short, half-hour training sessions per week may be more than enough, thanks to a recent study which showed that trainees on exactly such a plan saw huge results in the long term.

Doing A Different Kind Of Training

This may not be convenient, depending on the reason why you’re taking time off. If you’re traveling and don’t have access to a gym, then it may not be possible, for example, to train with heavy barbell movements even just once a week.

In this kind of situation, using a different kind of training that still uses the same muscles will be preferable, and will still go a long way towards staving off any muscle loss. It will be less useful in staving off strength loss since the movement patterns will be different, and therefore less specific, but it will still help prevent some strength loss. For example, a few challenging sets of pushups may be a lot easier than a heavy bench press, and may not help maintain your strength as much, but they will be sure to stave off muscle loss, and are a lot easier to get done without any equipment.

In general, a very simple travel workout could consist of a few sets to failure each of:

Pushups
Squats
Glute Bridges (or Single Leg Glute Bridges, alternating)
Pullups (if available) OR Band Pullaparts (if you’ve got resistance bands to bring with you)
Pike Pushups (or Handstand Pushups)

And that would be more than sufficient! Likewise, if you’re more on the cardio end of things, it would be simple to stay moving and get your steps in even if you’re not able to go for a run.

Unable To Move At All Due To Injury

Naturally, injury is a harder one because it means that very often, you’re directly unable to do the desired movements without potentially exacerbating the existing injury. After the initial period of rest to enable it to heal up, you will want to shift to focusing on unaffected muscle groups - for example, if you have an upper body injury, you may still be able to do some lower body exercises, and vice versa.

Something is better than nothing! Even things like unweighted exercise or simple conscious flexing of the muscles (within tolerance) can go a long way towards keeping the muscles active and your blood flow elevated, which promotes a fast recovery. Take it slowly, and don’t rush it - reinjuring yourself is the opposite of ideal, but whatever you can do to stay active within your limits will be helpful.

Dietary Strategies

I’ve seen a lot of questions in particular about this. The reasoning goes, that since eating protein promotes muscle growth during periods of heavy activity, it may also promote some muscle growth even when you’re unable to work out.

Unfortunately that’s not really the case. The effect of protein is minimal compared to the effect of the exercise stimulus in provoking a strong adaptation, and largely just helps your body to recover effectively and build back a bit better - in short, it is largely synergistic with exercise, meaning that it enhances the effect of the exercise in developing muscle, and does not build much muscle on its own.

At the same time, you don’t want to change your eating habits too significantly. Going heavily into a caloric surplus or deficit will likely cause unwanted body composition changes that you’d probably need to put effort into reversing later. So, while your diet won’t have too much impact in terms of retaining your gains, you’ll simply want to avoid letting it shift too far from what you’re used to.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

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