At this moment of being cooped up in our homes, or at least I hope you are, I bets lots of
you are wondering, will you LOSE all of your hard-earned gains by not being able to go
to the gym?
And although there are more pressing matters right now, I understand the concern, especially
if you’ve been pretty locked in with your training during this wonderfully strange year
of 2020.
So, to help you out, let’s see how long exactly the research shows that we can endure
inactivity before things start going south.
First and foremost, in terms of losing your gains, it will depend on the gains you’re
referring.
Cardiovascular fitness gains tend to go down the quickest.
Aerobic fitness measured via VO2max can drop by as much as 20% in just two weeks.
If you’re a little more of an athlete, like marathon runners, the loss is a bit slower,
but there are still observations of up to 25% loss of aerobic capacity gains in just
3 weeks of inactivity.
For strength and muscle gains, we’re gonna refer to an article from our buddies at sci-fit.net.
Let’s look at strength gains first.
We do see drops in strength start around 3 to 4 weeks in both beginners and trained individuals
but trained individuals usually retain a bit longer.
Although it starts around 3 weeks, strength gains will drop increasingly faster the longer
you remain inactive.
Losses in muscle gains is a bit trickier with no clear consensus of when it STARTS.
Some data show drops as early as two weeks with some going as far as six weeks of inactivity.
But the thing is, research typically measure changes in muscle through fat-free and lean
body masses.
However, these do not only measure changes in muscle, but also changes in things like
water and glycogen.
With that in mind, we’ve seen instances where loss is largely, if not completely,
attributed to water and glycogen depletion during two to four weeks of inactivity.
Gym-goers, especially beginners, need to account for this, since glycogen stores do amass quickly
in the beginning stages of training, which also accumulates more water into muscle.
To be safe, we can assume that muscle losses probably occur around the similar 3 to 4 week
range.
So now taking all of this into consideration, it’s kinda unfortunate because some of us
are already at that 3 to 4-week mark of not going to the gym.
And given a lot of estimates of the total length that we’re not gonna be able to go
to the gym, some projections lasting months, then it’s not gonna be pretty for our poor
poor gains.
Fortunately, this doesn’t mean we’re out of luck entirely.
Instead of thinking of making GAINS at this point, we might be better off shifting our
focus to maintaining it.
When it comes to maintenance, we can get away with much less frequency and volume, about
a third of what you were doing before.
If you trained 6 days a week before, you can just train two days a week or do six days
but with only a third of the work capacity, given you’re training all your muscles.
As long as you’re able to train near failure with the exercises you choose, it should be
sufficient, or combine more eccentric-style movements, which have shown to support fitness
maintenance.
Of course, without the gym, the workouts you do will be limited to what you can do at home.
If you have trouble figuring out exercises you can do at home, I highly suggest the video
recently uploaded by the homie Jeff Nippard over at his channel.
Honestly, I think he’s got one of the better, if not the best video covering the topic of
training at home.
So please, give it a look if you need some good home workout ideas, and I promise, he
didn’t ask me to say any of this.
I honestly think his video is great.
But now what about the case where you can’t train at all, like you have to recover from
being sick?
Well, of course, first, make sure you get better and healthy.
And when things do get better, yes, you probably would have lost a good amount of gains, but
luckily, you’re gonna be able to REGAIN it all pretty fast thanks to a little thing
we call muscle memory.
The skill of knowing how to do the exercises properly will still be with you.
Like riding a bike, you don’t have to RELEARN the entire process after not doing it for
a while.
On top of that, the myonuclei in your muscles produced from your prior training will remain
in your muscles even after long periods of inactivity.
That means your muscles don’t have to recreate these nuclei, accelerating the process of
your gains the next time you start training.
Muscle memory, it’s awesome.
And finally, the most important thing I wanna say is just… be safe.
I know we all want them gorgeous gains, but nothing’s more important than being healthy.
Stay safe, your gains will be waiting for you when you get back.
If you found this video helpful, give it a safe thumbs up and share it with your muscle
memory loving friends.
Subscribe for more future fitness videos.
As always, thank you for watching and GET YOUR PROTEIN!