How Fast Do You Lose Fitness?
In this episode. find out how fast you lose muscular and cardiovascular fitness if you stop training.
Ben Greenfield
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How Fast Do You Lose Fitness?
In “How Fast Do You Get Out of Shape? you learn about a study, which observed that conditioned athletes who had been training regularly for at least a year and then suddenly stopped lost half of the aerobic conditioning after 3 months, as well as research that shows that beginner exercisers who have worked out for about 2 months experience a complete loss of all aerobic conditioning after 2 months of not working out.
But lately, new research was highlighted in an article from Outside Magazine, in which a sports physiologist named Iñigo Mujika explained you should never, ever stop training for more than two weeks if you can help it.
In the article, Mujika explains how when you first start working out, you get strong very quickly with just a few sessions, because your muscles aren’t very big. These gains happen primarily due to neuromuscular adaptations, not musculoskeletal adaptation. Basically, this means that before your muscles even start to get bigger or thicker, your brain gets better at communicating with your muscles, and recruiting more of those muscles.
In the meantime, when it comes to endurance training, (defined as at least 30 minutes per day, five days a week of increasing your heart rate to at least 60 percent of its max), you experience primarily an increase your plasma and blood volume, which is why, a few weeks into an endurance training program, your heart rate won’t spike as high as it did when you first started training, and you also get better at shedding off body heat via sweating, and better at utilizing fatty acids as a fuel.
Mujika explains that if you keep up your strength training, you’ll gain muscle mass and strength and if you keep up your endurance training, then after six months of endurance training, it’s possible to increase blood volume by as much as 27 percentopens PDF file .
So what’s the catch? All of these benefits quickly disappear when you stop training, and Mujika says: “When you stop training, almost immediately, we think three days, you lose plasma volume and blood volume in general…your heart rate for a given intensity increases.”
After approximately 10-14 days, your maximum oxygen utilization drops at a rate of about 0.5% a day. After two weeks off, your brain’s ability to recruit muscle drops by 1-5% drop. After three to four weeks off, your muscles begin to atrophy, your fatty acid utilization drops and you become more sensitive to fluctuations in blood sugar.
In the end, Mujika says that you can roughly expect it to take twice as long to get back into shape as the time you’ve spent being inactive, meaning if you take two weeks off, it could take 4 weeks to build back up to your previous fitness. But if you’re already fit with a good training history, that time can definitely be shortened.
So what are my quick and dirty tips to consistently train, day in-day-out , week after week, all year long?
Here are five tips:
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Don’t have an all-or-nothing approach. Even if you can’t do a six-day-a-week, perfect cardio and strength exercise routine, you should still stay physically active, and you can try to exercise at least once per week. For example, if you’re working on a big project and know you won’t make it to the gym for a while, set a goal of doing one long run on the weekends, and try to amass 100 burpees by the end of each of the other days.
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Cross-train if you’re injured. If it’s an injury that’s keeping you from doing your usual workout routine, there’s no reason that you can’t still exercise. For more information on that, see this article: How to Stay Fit When Injured.
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Use body weight workouts. There is no excuse for not exercising just because you can’t make it to a gym. For example, a simple series of push-ups, squats, lunges, and crunches can be combined with jumping jacks or running for a highly effective fitness-maintaining workout. You can also learn alternate body weight exercises for specific body parts. If you’ve been toning the backs of your arms with cable pushdowns at the gym, try switching to narrow grip pushups at your home or office.
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Do circuits. If you’re simply pressed for time, don’t ever do workouts that require you to sit and rest between sets. Not only will you save time, but keeping moving is also better for fat burning, which I tell you in the article: The Best Workout for Fat Loss.
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Realize there’s no perfect routine. Most importantly, don’t get caught up with the notion that there is a perfect fitness routine that you must stick to, day in and day out. If you do, it will simply drive you mad and produce unnecessary stress when your routine is interrupted and you begin to stress about losing fitness. To keep your body from growing accustomed to a certain style of exercise, it is actually best to change exercises, workout routines, and workout modes frequently–so fluctuating through various programs throughout the year can actually be a good thing, as long as there’s some method to your madness.
So the next time you find yourself fretting that you might lose your nice muscles as you work the next two weeks on the fourth quarter budget or get caught up in a school project, just drop and do 10 push-ups. Wasn’t that easy?
Do you have questions about how fast you lose fitness? Join the conversation at Facebook.com/getfitguy.
About the Author
Ben Greenfield received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from University of Idaho in sports science and exercise physiology; personal training and strength and conditioning certifications from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA); a sports nutrition certification from the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN), an advanced bicycle fitting certification from Serotta. He has over 11 years’ experience in coaching professional, collegiate, and recreational athletes from all sports, and as helped hundreds of clients achieve weight loss and fitness success.