What would happen if you just suddenly stopped training? Well I stopped training
for three months and this is what happened. I've been training in the gym
since my early teens and although I have approached training with different levels
of seriousness and intensity, I've never really had a long break from the gym.
However after a series of injuries, being busy with work and lots of traveling I
ended up taking an unplanned three-month break from the gym. My thoughts on this were
that I would lose all my muscle, lose all my strength and probably get fat ending
up with the dreaded skinny fat physique. So I think my biggest fear is that all
the muscle that I spent years trying to develop would just simply be lost almost
overnight. Now thankfully of course that didn't happen and I think generally
speaking the average person, if they were to take a look at me, probably wouldn't
really notice any difference in my physique. Strictly speaking it takes
around two weeks before the body actually starts the process of muscle
loss from stopping training and the process is pretty gradual. Actual losses
in lean muscle tissue probably won't kick in until about two full weeks of
inactivity. Assuming you still have a half decent diet in place about two
weeks is probably what you're looking at and that's just in order for the process
to start. Now I know that I've lost muscle particularly in my legs but
generally speaking the differences seem to be pretty minor. Now of course I can't
quantify this because I haven't had a DEXA scan done before or after so it's
all fairly anecdotal. Overall my muscles felt far less full but this was probably
largely due to the amount of glycogen that was being stored in the muscles as
well as the amount of sarcoplasmic fluid in the muscle. Now I've actually
started training again as of about three weeks ago so I'm really keen to see how
quickly I can get back to my previous shape and in fact already in the three
weeks I've already passed I'm already feeling and looking a little bit better.
So I've now started training again and I've been training for about three weeks
and have to say my first session back at the gym it was like I had never actually
trained before. I was as weak as a kitten and I had no work capacity whatsoever so
I'd completely lost all my fitness. On exercises where I may have
four sets of ten reps easily a particular weight, I would now maybe get
eight or nine reps on that first set but then I'll completely struggle on the
following set to maybe get seven six or five reps so I really did struggle getting
back into it. However my fitness and strength does seem to be returning
pretty quickly, so I've been training for three weeks as I said and already I
can feel a lot of my strength returning and my fitness is coming back
pretty quickly which is very reassuring. Now because I was do "de-trained" the DOMS
after my first training sessions were so severe it actually felt like I've been
run over by a car! I'd wake up the following morning after a leg workout and my legs
were just so insanely sore, it would actually take me about 10 days before they
actually fully recovered from that first session. Now when you're not training
the diet becomes really important and I could have minimized my fat gain if I'd
really dialled in my diet. So unfortunately I am an all in or all out kind of guy so
if I can't train my diet pretty much goes out of the window and loses all
structure this was made a million times worse by the fact that I was very very
busy so ends up getting away take aways and had to do a lot of travel so again
eating food in hotels or eating airplane food or any other kind of junk that I
wouldn't normally eat. Now I was still eating a relatively high protein diet so
still probably getting my minimum protein requirements to maintain my
muscle mass but I was probably eating way over my maintenance calories at
least 500 calories per day now. That might not sound like that much but 500
calories per day is about 3,500 per week which is about one pound of fat gain per
week. So at the end of three months I was incredibly embarrassed by my physique
and I'm actually a little bit embarrassed to show you the clips I'm
showing you now. However this is gonna serve as a very good motivation to get
back into shape. Now I should point out that weight is relative and although you
might not think I look that fat in these clips, I feel very
overweight for me personally and so I cannot wait to get back into the shape
that I normally I am in. Now the weight actually really did sneak up on me I was
keeping an eye on my weight and I was looking at myself in the mirror
regularly and thinking "I don't look too bad" and then all of a sudden I looked in there
whoa I am now really out of shape. Now one very positive aspect about taking so
much time off is that a lot of chronic injuries I've had for a very long time
seem to be better. Now I'd be interested to see if it stays like this as my my
training progresses but so far so good. Now when I talk about chronic injuries
I'm not talking about very severe injuries I'm talking about for example
pain in my shoulder when I'm doing pressing movements. The reason that they're
chronic is because I've had them for so long and I have really just kind of
adapted my training around those injuries and it's made me realize that
actually if I just given them the time that they needed to recover in the first
place then they probably would have healed a long time ago and that would
have had a much more positive impact on my training. Now what is weird
is that I still wake up in the morning with lots of pains and aches
particularly in my wrists shoulders neck and I just kind of put that down to
training in the gym. However I still had those aches and pains even when I wasn't
training so I guess that's just part of getting old? So one of the biggest issues
for me personally is that not training had a really big impact on my psychology.
Now I've been training for a very very long time and I kind of associate
training and being fit and being strong with part of my identity it's how I kind
of see myself. So when I wasn't training anymore and I didn't feel strong I
didn't feel fit I didn't feel quite myself and it had a really big negative
impact on my overall confidence. Now I'm sure that all sounds but very dramatic
but now that I've started training again already just after three weeks I can
feel my confidence returning I am associating myself back with that
element of my identity that was missing before and I can now feel my confidence
returning I now feel really good again. So once I was in the position where I
could actually start training again it felt like
effort after having so much time off. Simple things that had become habits
after years and years of training and positive routines had to be reformed as
new habits. In some respects I was highly motivated because I could not wait to
start training again and I couldn't wait to get back into good shape. In other
ways I just found it so incredibly difficult to just actually get motivated
to start. So although I've been training by myself the best part of three years I
decided the best way to get straight back in was to dive in at the deep end
and I've actually started a new six-week program with an online trainer to
actually motivate me to get me going and give me that boost I need to get back
into training. So I'm currently three weeks into a six-week training plan and
went at six weeks is over I'm gonna share the result in a separate video so
make sure you watch out for that one. So what have I actually learned from taking
three months off from training? Well the first thing is that muscle that's taken
years to build and develop isn't going to get lost overnight. It's a very very
gradual process so hopefully in the future this will stop me from getting
overly anxious or overly neurotic if I need to take another break from training
again in the future. Secondly if I can't train then I really
need to dial in my diet I want to make sure that I'm getting in at least my
minimum protein requirements and I'm getting as close to maintenance calories
as I can. I want to be able to preserve as much muscle as possible and avoiding
any unnecessary fat gain. And thirdly taking a break from training can
actually be beneficial particularly if you have chronic injuries that could
really benefit from taking rest. So hopefully you found this video useful or
interesting and please take a look at some of the other videos I have on this
channel. In a few weeks time I will be posting the results of a new six-week
training program that I've been working on and hopefully I'll be a bit closer to
my original shape prior to taking the break so keep your eyes peeled for that
one and I'll see you in the next video
you