I often get the question: “If I go on vacation and can’t work out for 9 days, will I lose all my strength”?
Or
“If I lift lighter for a week, will I lose all my muscle”.
Both are legitimate concerns when you’ve worked so hard to achieve a certain strength level or level of muscularity.
There are few things more depressing than when a weight you’ve handled fairly easily in the past feels like you can barely move it. At times it can feel like you’ve lost strength. In reality, that isn’t what has happened. At some point, the stress you can place upon your body through weight lifting exceeds your bodies capability to recover from it. So you regress.
It’s important to remember that you are not actually weaker. It’s just that your central nervous system is shot. You’ve accumulated fatigue and fatigue depresses performance. Rest is in order to let your CNS recover. If you take a week off completely, or maybe even two weeks, you’ll come back stronger because you gave your body the time it needs to rest and adapt. Remember that successful strength training strikes a balance between training and recovery. So rest can be thought of as fatigue management. Fatigue can cover up your fitness gains. Let fatigue dissipate and your true fitness level is revealed.
So, will you lose all your strength and muscle if you rest for a week or two? You are in more danger of losing a little strength than losing any noticeable muscle, especially if you keep your calories up. But the great thing is that although your first workout after the extended rest may feel a little hard, within two or three workouts you’ll probably surpass what you were doing before the rest. It’s like taking one small step backwards to enable you to go two steps forward.
A week of rest is a great idea from time to time. I take one about every three months. However, there is another way to manage fatigue without taking a full week off. You simply back off for a week in a planned manner. The idea is that after training at a high intensity for one week, you deliberately lower the intensity for one week to give your body time to recover. It’s especially good for people who have been lifting heavy for a long time and approached their genetic potential.
Two quick examples on how this can be done for more intermediate lifters (people who have been lifting for more than 6-12 months in an effort to get stronger).
1. Three weeks of hard lifting, trying to improve on the weight you are lifting or the number of reps you are doing, followed by one week where you decrease your volume by 20-40%
2. Alternating intensities weekly for a 4 week block. In this case your four-week training block would look like this:
Week 1: High Intensity
Week 2: Medium Intensity
Week 3: Very High Intensity
Week 4: Low Intensity
Varying the intensity does a few things.
First, it prevents the body from accommodating too quickly. Accommodation is when the body adapts to the stress being placed upon it and stops responding. By varying the intensities, you keep the body guessing.
Secondly and more importantly, by backing off on the intensity on the second and fourth weeks, you give your body a chance to adapt to the stress of the heavy lifting on the first and third weeks, setting the stage for further gains.
I’ll go a little more in depth in a future post and give some examples on how you can set this up.
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