Outside Magazine asked sports physiologist Iñigo Mujika to talk about what happens to your body once you stop working out after you’ve gotten into great shape. His answer wasn’t the most encouraging. The takeaway: you should never, ever stop training for more than two weeks if you can help it.
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Here’s what happens as your body starts training:
- When you start working out, wonderful things begin to happen – your brain gets better at communicating with your muscles and is learning to use them more efficiently.
- Just a week of endurance training (at least 30 minutes per day, five days a week of upping your heart rate to at least 60 percent of its max) increases your plasma and blood volume. So by a few weeks, your heart rate won’t spike like it did when you first started running, or whatever your sport may be. And you’ll get better at dissipating heat through sweat. After six months of endurance training, it’s possible to increase blood volume by as much as 27 percent.
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All of the above adaptations lead to peak performance. But those benefits erode almost immediately (in as little as 3 days!) if you stop moving. Here’s what happens to your body once you stop training:
- After about 10 days to two weeks, your VO2 max, or the max amount of oxygen you can take in during exercise, will start to drop at a steady rate of about 0.5 percent a day.
- Two weeks off, and your brain’s ability to recruit muscle will drop, by about one to five percent. That’s not much. But it can cut power in sports that require fine-tuned movements for optimal performance, like swimming.
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- After three to four weeks off, your muscles will start to atrophy. Meaning, it becomes harder to burn fat and easier to get fat.
As much as this information may be disheartening, it doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t ever take a break; breaks are necessary to avoid over training and burnout. Mujika tells his athletes, including three-time Olympic triathlete Ainhoa Murúa, to take two weeks completely off from training at the end of their seasons, then spend two weeks doing physical activity that’s not sport specific.
Expect it to take twice as long to get back into shape as the time you’ve spent being inactive, says Mujika. He also said: “There are some indications there’s some kind of muscle memory … the more trained you’ve been before, the quicker you get back into form in terms of muscular strength and power.”
Curated article from:
Outside Magazine
