The bottom line on taking a week off without training Is that a week away from resistance training shouldn't hinder strength or muscle size according to the research we currently have.
It is totally fine, and actually beneficial, to take a week off from the gym. Most of your progress is made outside the gym in the form of recovery. When you lift heavy weights, your muscle fibers break down, and then when you aren't working out, they repair with stronger fibers.
Based on the research and expert opinions available, taking a week off from training is not likely to result in significant muscle loss for the average individual. In fact, a short break might even be beneficial for recovery and muscle growth.
It might have taken weeks or months to make substantial progress and sometimes even years to notice any change in your body composition. “When you look at the big picture, missing a week or two due to illness and recovery isn't going to set your progress back if you were lifting consistently for months prior,” he says.
Short term “breaks” from the gym (1-2 weeks) are not the end all be all of your hard-earned progress. But, be sure to keep your diet high in protein and feed your body what it needs to help you hold onto that muscle!
“There's no hard and fast rule for how long a 'break' from exercise should be,” Ting says. “It may be as short as a few days, but it's important to realize as well that it can also be up to one to two weeks without any significant detriment or loss in previous fitness gains.”
Even if we're super-fit to begin with, stopping training altogether will result in a pretty rapid degradation in fitness. Admittedly, the losses in the first week of total inactivity are small and in the first 2-4 days there may even be fitness gains as you recover fully from prior training.
Skipping workouts for a few days, or even a week, is unlikely to have much of an effect on your body, particularly if you're fit and healthy. The biggest impact of missing a week or two here and there is likely to be on your ability to stick to the habit of regular exercise.
Thanks to muscle memory, muscles quickly recover their size and strength once you return to your routine. For regular exercisers, experts say it usually takes about half the length of the break to get back to your previous fitness level.
Physiological muscle memory
This form of muscle memory occurs because when you first build muscle, your body adds new cells to those muscles. But when you lose muscle, those new cells don't disappear, as previously thought. Instead, they stick around and are easily reactivated when you return to your typical routine.
The bottom line on taking a week off without training
A week off results in a boost in muscle-building hormones, which won't mean more muscle growth, but perhaps a better mood for when we return to training. A better mood might translate into better workouts, and thus a new and improved mindset to training.
Studies have shown that muscle memory after resistance exercise may last 12 to 22 weeks. An older study suggests that muscle memory causes muscle cell changes that last for at least 15 years. But how long muscle memory lasts likely depends on several factors, including exercise intensity and frequency.
"When you go on vacation for a weekend, a week, or even two weeks, it's physiologically impossible to gain that much fat," he told BI in 2022. In addition to water weight, the food inside the stomach can actually cause the scale to go up, he added.
You may be surprised to learn that taking a few days or a full week off from working out won't necessarily hurt the gains you've made. Sometimes it's good to take extra days off to rid fatigue in your body.
You will probably keep your muscle mass if you don't workout for a week. But there are exceptions. This is what science has to say. 1️⃣ It normally takes 3 weeks to lose muscle mass.
But research actually shows that the genes in our muscles contain a memory imprint — effectively holding genes responsible for muscle growth in a semi-prepared state. This means that our muscles are ready to respond quicker and better to training in the future and promote growth after a period of rest.
But many fitness influencers assert that taking time away from the gym every six to eight weeks — known as a “deload week” — is actually the key to improving fitness gains. Deload weeks mostly involve toning down the intensity of your workouts. These are typically done during periods of heavy training.
Generally, it takes anywhere from two to 12 weeks to regain cardiovascular endurance and muscle strength and feel like you're back at your previous level of fitness.
However, if overreaching is extreme and combined with an additional stressor, overtraining syndrome (OTS) may result. OTS may be caused by systemic inflammation and subsequent effects on the central nervous system, including depressed mood, central fatigue, and resultant neurohormonal changes.
No, missing a week at the gym likely won't hurt your progress significantly. It may even be a good thing! A short break allows your body to recover and come back stronger. You might feel a bit weaker initially, but muscle loss takes longer than a week to set in.
Experts recommend 2 to 3 rest days between strength-training workouts like lifting weights. So you can plan resistance workouts that target different muscle groups. For example, you might do upper-body exercises on Monday and lower-body exercises on Tuesday. On Wednesday, you could do a cardio workout.
In the first ten days to two weeks of inactivity/de-training, there is a measurable loss in cardiovascular fitness, but even this level of decrease is only about 2-3% drop in values such as VO2 Max, MAP (maximum aerobic power), or FTP (functional threshold power).