The Surprising Number of Weeks You Can Stop Lifting Weights Without Hurting Long-Term Gains

Once you catch the weightlifting bug, it's hard to take a break. But life happens. Whether you need time to focus on your growing family, recover from an illness, or simply take a break and enjoy a hard-earned vacation, there comes a time to take a break from training.

If you're panicking that all the work you've put into your chest workouts, upper body exercises, or glute exercises will be in vain, relax. According to a new study from the Faculty of Sports and Health Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä, downtime won't defeat your long-term goals as quickly as you think.

Published in research S.kandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, We set out to see how taking a 10-week break from resistance training affected maximum strength and muscle size.

researchers He compared two groups of lifters over a 20-week period. One consistently completed a strength training program, while the other took a 10-week break halfway through.

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The study found that after 20 weeks, both groups had similar levels of maximum strength and muscle size development.

“For the group that trained continuously for 20 weeks, progress clearly slowed down after the first ten weeks,” said Eeli Halonen from the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences. “This ultimately meant that there were no differences in muscle size or strength development between groups.”

It was also noted that maximum strength was maintained better than muscle size during the break, but when resistance training was resumed, muscle size quickly returned to pre-break levels.

“Progress was very rapid in the first few weeks after the break, and after only five weeks of retraining the pre-break level had already been reached,” Halonen said. he added.

This isn't the first study to show that you can maintain muscle strength even if you take weeks off from the gym. Individuals who regularly trained their strength to maximum capacity maintained their gains even after a 16- to 24-week detraining period, according to a 2022 review of 20 randomized and nonrandomized studies.

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Based on these studies and previous research, it seems we have little to worry about when it comes to occasional leaves of absence, especially if training continues on a regular and progressive basis throughout the rest of the year.

All this to say, your gains were not made in a day and will not be lost in a day.

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