Perseverance has always been considered the focus of developing and implementing an exercise program, which can lead to people giving up altogether after missing a few workouts. But a new study has found that even after a 10-week break in strength training, it only takes a short time for people to return to their original state, revealing fascinating new insights into the mechanisms of muscle memory.
Researchers from the Faculty of Exercise and Health Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland have found surprising results in their study, which investigated the effects of 10 weeks of rest during a 20-week resistance training session on muscle size and strength loss.
In this study, a group of 22 participants exercised twice a week over a period of 20 consecutive weeks, with a focus on muscle strength and volume. In the second group, 22 participants followed the same exercise pattern for the first 10 weeks, then stopped exercising completely in the middle of the study and restarted the twice-weekly exercise after 20 weeks for 10 weeks.
What they found was striking: while muscle mass had decreased, strength did not decline as expected, and once you resumed your workout after a break, it only took a few weeks to get back to where you were before your “fitness holiday”.
Even with a 10-week break, there is little to no loss of muscle strength
Eeli Halonen of the School of Exercise and Health Sciences said: “In the first few weeks after the break, the progress was very fast, and after only five weeks of retraining, it was already at the level before the break. “
What’s more, those who trained for 20 weeks saw a dip in performance after the first 10 weeks, while those who took a break quickly caught up and even surpassed them in some metrics at the end of the study.
This is the first time that researchers have compared the “retraining” routine with a continuous training model. Halonen added: “For the group that trained for 20 weeks straight, there was a noticeable slowdown in progress after the first 10 weeks. This means that there is ultimately no difference between the two groups in terms of muscle size or strength development. “
Experimental Design (A): The ultrasound probe and leg press icons represent muscle size and strength measurement time points. CSA assessment of (B) biceps brachii and (C) latissimus muscles utilizing axial plane ultrasound. (Image C is for illustrative purposes only).
The participants ranged in age from their 20s to their 30s, and they all enjoyed sports but had never participated in any form of long-term resistance training program.
Previous studies have shown that short breaks in an exercise program don’t bring one back to square one, but such long pauses have not been tested. Interestingly, maximum strength was better maintained during the time away from training, and the decline was much slower than expected.
“This can be explained by the fact that changes in the nervous system may be more persistent than peripheral changes in the muscles,” Halonen said. “
The size of the muscles decreases somewhat after rest, and it takes about five weeks to return to the level of consecutive sets, but it’s good news for people who are worried about injury, vacation, illness, or similar COVID-19 lockdowns that might mean starting from scratch after a break. The interval slows down some progress, but the good news is that it is possible to reach pre-interval levels at an alarming rate.
Now, the team will study how muscle memory works at the cellular and molecular levels, with a view to gaining new insights into how the body maintains the changes that occur through training.
“The physiology of muscle memory is not yet fully understood, and our next step will be to look deeper into the cellular and molecular changes in muscle that may explain this phenomenon,” noted senior researchers Juha Hulmi and Juha Ahtiainen. “
“While training continuity is an important basic principle of physical activity, our findings suggest that recreational resistance training (RT) practitioners should not be too concerned about occasional 10-week training intervals, such as once a year, as long as the resistance training performed is effective and regular,” the researchers noted in the study. “