How much muscle or strength do you actually lose when you miss a few workouts?

How about a week, two or three? A month?

Typically folks start to lose some muscle mass in about 2-3 weeks after going from training ‘x’ amount of time to literally zero workouts…not that bad eh!?

Now you might be thinking, but even if I don’t workout for 3-4 days I feel like I’ve lost muscle…

You haven’t lost muscle mass, but you have lost some intramuscular swelling which is just a fancy way of saying that quote on quote ‘tight feeling’ you get after a workout that tends to stick around for a day or two.

When you train a given muscle, let’s say your biceps in this case so you’re doing a bunch of curls…your biceps start to fill up with blood and that’s what’s often referred to as ‘the pump.’ The pump typically lasts roughly 30-60 minutes depending on a whole bunch of factors, but what sticks around after that 30-60 minutes is just a little bit of swelling within the muscle worked…in this example, the biceps.

Now that small amount of swelling that is often accompanied by a bit of soreness lasts for a day or two like I mentioned, and then goes away and once it goes away your muscle returns to what it was before sans swelling.

This phenomena can often be confused with muscle loss but it’s actually just a lack of muscle swelling meaning, actual muscle loss doesn’t start to happen until 2-3 weeks down the road more or less.

Now something that I’ve noticed is that when folks have been training for a longgg time so for example let’s say there’s a football player that’s been training hard for 15-20 years, it’s likely going to take even longer than that 2-3 weeks for this person to start losing muscle. Reason being is that they’ve just put in so much time and their body is so used to being jacked and strong that these folks likely have even more leeway with the muscle loss time frame.

Now you can actually manipulate this time frame to a smaller degree via diet so for example, if you eat a low protein diet you’re going to lose muscle faster because you need protein in your diet to maintain and build muscle, so reducing dietary protein will accelerate the muscle loss process.

Also you could hypothetically accelerate muscle loss even further in the upper body specifically by doing a whole bunch of super long distance running…now I’m not talking a casual 30-60 min run here and there, I’m talking long distances like training for a marathon.

Now the #1 factor in maintaining and/or building muscle is stimulating it, you can eat all the protein in the world but if you don’t actually lift weights you’re not building any muscle.

If ya don’t use it ya lose it…after 2-3 weeks that is.

Also it’s worth mentioning that if you do take some time off training for whatever reason, re-gaining lost muscle is easier than gaining that muscle in the first place…so in other words, muscle memory is a real thing!

This is why if someone has been muscular before, stops training and then starts again, they get back to where they were in the past a lot faster as far as muscle mass goes than they did the first time around…the body essentially ‘remembers’ hence the term muscle memory.

Now you might be thinking, well if I don’t even start losing muscle for 2-3 weeks, how often do I need to go to the gym to maintain my current progress or muscularity?

I’ve got good news, it’s infinitely easier to maintain your fitness than it was to get to your current fitness to begin with or gain additional fitness, for example…

Let’s say you were working out 4 days per week, so you were doing 2 upper body workouts and 2 lower body workouts and you were making progress with that, meaning gaining muscle and strength.

You’d likely be able to maintain that level of muscle mass and strength by cutting your workload in half…crazy right!?

So doing either 1 upper body session and 1 lower body session per week or just 2 whole body workouts.

This means that if you get to a certain fitness level and you’re stoked on where you’re at and you just want to maintain it, you could likely just cut your weekly workouts in half and still hold on to that progress. You still have to train hard but it takes significantly less workout volume to maintain progress than it does to achieve it in the first place.

Think about it like learning a language, building your language base takes a fair bit of effort but if you just want to maintain what you’ve already got, it doesn’t take nearly as much effort or time to sustain your current language level.

The key take-home point here is that if you get sick, you go on holiday, life happens or for whatever reason you stop training for a bit, don’t sweat it. You’re not going to start losing muscle for 2-3 weeks with zero training and then also if you had it before, you’re going to gain that size and strength back even faster this time around.

I often hear folks say that they feel like they’re starting from square one again and in a mental and momentum sense I understand where they’re coming from, but I’d encourage you to hop back on the horse and simply get back at it.

Also, if you’ve only missed out on the gym for say 2, 3, 4 weeks…in the big scheme of things it’s really not a big deal, so don’t fall into the trap that you lost all of the progress you made because you just haven’t.

The same concept applies to diet, a few funky meals, a few funky days, even an off couple weeks…you can only gain so much fat in that period of time if any at all, so get back on track because you’re only ever one meal or one workout away from doing so!