“What happens if I stop strength training?” That’s the audience question hosts Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher address in this new episode of Strength Changes Everything.

Join them to hear about the benefits and negative consequences of doing and stopping strength training, as well as a 2017 study that looked at how a group of people were affected by halting their 6-month strength training.

You’ll walk away with a better understanding of how strength training works and what will happen to your body and mind if you decide to suddenly stop doing it.

• Hosts Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher address a question from a listener: “What happens if I stop strength training?”.
• Dr. Fisher explains that our body will react to the demands that are imposed on it and that, when it comes to muscles, there’s a sort of “use it or lose it” dynamic.
• You can make a muscle-skill analogy: stopping practice will lead to you seeing a deficiency in that skill. The same applies to your muscles.
• The consequences of stopping strength training will depend on several factors, such as someone’s age and training history, their genetics, and how long it took to make those initial muscle adaptations.
• Ceasing strength training completely today could lead to loss of strength and muscle mass, loss of type-2 muscle fibers, loss of cardiorespiratory fitness, an increase in body fat, and body fat percentage.
• Metabolic changes, changes in sleep patterns, and increased risk of cardiovascular disease are additional issues that may arise as a result of an abrupt halt in strength training. 
• Dr. Fisher expects most people who are past their 40s or 50s to start to see the implications and effects of detraining within a 3 or 4-week period.
• Dr. Fisher shares a 2017 German study that looked at the impact of detraining, after having done strength training for several weeks, on a group of elderly people.
• After six months of strength training, those who stopped did lose strength and muscle size, but were still stronger and had more muscle mass than they did at their baseline level.
• The group of elderly people who decided to keep training on their own, after the six months of the initial supervised strength training, lost almost as much strength as the group that had chosen not to train at all.
• For Amy, the 2017 German study makes a case for “If you don’t have a great reason to stop, why should you stop?”.
• Amy lists the benefits of strength training, including improvement of your metabolic health, decreased inflammation, decreased disease risk, improved mood, and improved hormonal state.
• A quote to keep in mind: “You can have all the problems in the world, but if you don’t have your health, you have one problem.”
• Amy and Dr. Fisher explore the mental and cognitive aspects of strength training – and what may happen if you stop it.
• Dr. Fisher points out that people who go to the gym and engage in strength training on a regular basis have a sense of accomplishment in the task, rather than in the outcome itself.
• Amy invites us to be mindful of our brain: it’s always looking for excuses to sabotage the healthy habits that we intend, especially if they’re newer!
• Did you know that being weak is more detrimental to our health than being overweight? Dr. Fisher and Amy explore the “Fat but Fit” paradigm further.
• Dr. Fisher and Amy talk about the scenario in which someone picks up strength training for a month but then stops.

Mentioned in This Episode:

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Dr. Jürgen Giessing

Dr. James Steele

Previous episode – Why Most People Fail in the Gym (and How Supervision With a Personal Trainer Can Help)

Previous episode – The 6 Essential Elements of an Effective Strength Training Program with Matt Brzycki

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Any healthy habit that you do, it is tempting. Our brains are wired for the path of least resistance. We have to remember that. Our brain is always looking for excuses.

If we don’t use the muscles, we do tend to lose it to some extent. There is a kind of a use it or lose it.

Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well-being. I’m Amy Hudson.

I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co-hosts are Brian Saigon, co-founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence-based strength training. And now for today’s episode. Okay, we have a listener question today and the question is, what happens if you stop strength training?

And another way to phrase this question might be, how long, if I’m participating in strength training, how long, if I stop, is it going to take me in order to start to feel the effects of stopping my strength training? And this might come up in somebody’s life if they have participated in a strength training program and they have a long vacation coming up, they may ask us this question, they’re not going to be able to participate for a little while, or they just maybe have that a little bit shorter term mentality of let me do this for a little bit and then coast after that. So let’s address this question from several of these angles. Dr. Fisher is with us today. And so Dr. Fisher, what happens if somebody stops strength training?

I think this is a great question. Lots of people engage in strength training for a period and then maybe they go on vacation or their lifestyle patterns change and so the structure of the workout within their kind of normal routine becomes difficult. The reality is that our body will react to the demands that are imposed on it. So a really contemporary topic right now, this is going to date this podcast, is the return of the astronauts from the International Space Station after sort of nine months. So our bodies when we’re in space, it’s not reacting to being in gravity or having the same amount of gravity. It’s a microgravity environment in space. So our muscles waste away because they’re not being used, our bone mineral density will decrease and our strength will decrease and so forth. And that’s simply a product of our body reacting to the environment that it’s within. So in the same sense, if we engage in strength training, we know that we build muscle strength. We know that we build muscle mass and the increase the size of our muscles. And we know that we improve our bone mineral density. And this is an addition of course, to all the other health benefits as well.

Um, but we can, we can also, uh, make this a comparison to if you are injured, if you immobilize an arm because it’s in a cast, maybe you break your arm, it goes in a cast and therefore the muscle will waste away, the strength will diminish because simply it’s not being used. So if we don’t use the muscles, we do tend to lose it to some extent. There is a kind of a use it or lose it. We can also kind of make the analogy to the skill element, which is the neurological element of strength.

So if you are a basketball player, or if you’re maybe a golfer or something like that, and you take a prolonged period of time away from the sport, then you wouldn’t expect to return to the sport with the same skill level. And that’s simply because you haven’t practiced that, uh, neurological recruitment of motor units and the corresponding muscle fibers to perform the scale that you’re asking your body to perform. Um, and so you have the same thing in strength. When you do strength training you’re actually practicing that recruitment of muscle fibers. You’re sending that neurological signal to the motor units to recruit those muscle fibers to contract. And that’s of course the stimulus that’s the catalyzes many of the other adaptations, but if you. Stop practicing that, then you will start to see, uh, a deficiency in that skill element as well.

So my burning question is how long does that deficiencies take to show up?

And that’s of course is the million dollar question. How long, if I stop strength training, how long will I lose my gains? How long will it take to lose my gains? And of course, the reality is a lot of this will depend on things like age or training history, maybe genetics, or even how long it took to make those adaptations initially. So somebody that’s very young might not make any losses even over a two or three week period. If they go on vacation and they stop training completely, as long as there’s still some physical activity, they might maintain strength and muscle mass to comparable levels. Somebody that’s a bit older will probably lose it that bit quicker because of their hormonal status and so forth.

So it’s kind of difficult to say there’s a lot of sort of supposition that, uh, metabolic conditioning will be lost very quickly. Um, and then strength will sort of follow on. But ultimately, if we, if I were to sort of cease strength training completely today, then over a period of time I would start to lose strength, I would certainly lose muscle mass, there would be a loss of type 2 muscle fibers which are the key muscle fibers that we want to hold on to for functionality. There’d be a loss of my overall fitness, which is called my VO2 max, my cardiorespiratory fitness. I’d obviously start to add some body fat, so there’d be an increase in body fat percentage. There’d be metabolic changes as far as glucose regulation, increased risk of cardiovascular disease, reductions in bone mineral density, and so forth. And we can even then go further to say, well, there might be cognitive decline, there might be changes in my sleep patterns, and so forth. Now, how long it takes is a difficult question to answer, and obviously we’ve talked about some of the factors there. I would expect most people who are past the mid point of their life, e.g. past their forties or fifties to start to see, uh, implications or effects of detraining within a three or four week period. Um, so it’s really, uh, like we said, it’s really a use it or lose it approach. Now, interestingly, we did a study that to some extent looked at exactly this, uh, that was published back in 2017. And this was with some colleagues of mine in, um, in Germany.

So Dr. Jürgen Giesing was the lead author on the manuscript and I published it with Dr. James Steele and with some other authors as well. And actually what we did is it was in a group of 60 to 80 year olds or 60 to 81 year olds I think they might have been, and they went through a six month progressive resistance training program. So when they first started they kind of trained to a relatively high intensity but they sort of went through the motions a little bit and then a few weeks after a few weeks we increased the intensity so they they worked a bit harder and the coach kind of pushed them that bit further and so forth and eventually by the end of the six month intervention, they, they were really being pushed pretty hard. Um, and, and the initial six months was supervised, uh, strength training. And of course they made fantastic gains in kind of body composition and strength and muscle mass and so forth. Exactly what you would expect. What we then did is we went to the clients, we said, okay, so thanks so much for participating. What we did is we went to the clients we said okay so thanks so much for participating what we can let you do is be a member of the gym and then you can come in and carry on training on your own. I love them so that’s great you know i would love to do that and i said okay and that they weren’t so interested so first of all we were able to track whether they were engaging in in strength regularly. And many of them of course chose not to engage at all. They’d been part of a study that increased their strength quite drastically, um, but now they, they didn’t want to do it anymore. And that’s okay. And others of them chose to carry on strength training in hopefully a similar pattern to the way that they had been supervised to do so. Um, but what we found was really quite startling. So first of all the group that stopped training completely well they lost strength and they lost muscle size and their body composition changed as well. Now actually even after six months of detraining they were still stronger and still had more muscle mass than they did at the baseline level. So six months of training had given them effectively a six-month insurance policy. They trained for six months, they didn’t do anything for a further six months, but they were still stronger than they’d been at baseline. That’s really important. I think that’s a really, really important statistic. The group that had carried on training lost strength to the same degree, almost as the group that stopped training entirely. So this is a group that said, okay, I’ve been a part of supervised training, but now I feel like I can go off and do it on my own and maybe their engagement wasn’t as consistent, maybe their intensity of effort wasn’t as high, or almost certainly their intensity of effort wasn’t as high, maybe their intensity of effort wasn’t as high or almost certainly their intensity of effort wasn’t as high and maybe they chose not to continue progressing loads the way it had been progressed during the during the intervention itself. So after six months of just training on their own, they’d lost almost as much strength as a group that had just chosen not to train at all. Now once, they were stronger than the group than they had been a baseline and they were a little bit stronger than the group who hadn’t trained at all.

But they had certainly lost conditioning as a product of training their own guys without any supervision.

It sounds like it’s hard for an individual to keep up the level of effort required to progress, progressively add strength if they’re not working in a supervised strength training environment. Is that accurate?

Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve of course talked a lot about supervision on this podcast. It’s been a key area of my research for a number of years. We’ve had a previous podcast that talks specifically about kind of facets and characteristics of supervision and one of those being the intensity of effort of the clients or the trainees in that environment. I’m yeah absolutely so many people will go away and think i can go away and do this on my own. And they’re simply not going to make the same adaptations as they would with supervision, or they might even end up losing strength. I mean, this group in the six-month period obviously made incredible gains during the initial six months. But after that, they lost a lot of those adaptations by effectively just not training at a high enough intensity of effort.

Well, that’s pretty sobering. But it just makes the case that you don’t have a great reason to stop.

Why should you stop? Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is the key thing that we. You know, we’ve talked a lot about this when we talked about goal setting and we’ve talked about being process driven rather than outcome driven and things like that, um, it’s really important to recognize that strength training is really the long haul. We’re doing this for, not for the adaptations that we can see in the first six months, or if we’re trying to, I don’t know, lose weight for a wedding, or get fit for the beach for the summer.

Those are great goals to have. I would never discourage people from having those goals. But of course, once we’ve achieved that goal, we then might be inclined to kind of slack off a little bit. And of course, that’s not what our body’s there for. We want our body for the long haul. We want it to function the way it functions now. We want it to function in our 80s or our 90s or, you know, at least our 60s or 70s, and that’s going to require that continued effort.

And of course, Matt Briskey was on the podcast recently, and he talked about exactly this, that, that a strength training program should be, um, should be manageable, should be sustainable. Uh, it’s not something that we should go to the gym and do for three or four hours every day, um, you know, for six or seven days a week.

And we can sustain that for a month, but not beyond it should be something that is, you know, one or two days a week, 20 to 30 minutes, you know, a low volume, a low frequency, but a high degree of effort as the stimulus to catalyze those strengths and those physiological adaptations that we want, but to do over the course of a lifetime. And we’ve made this analogy before, Amy, but I’ll make it again. If I said to somebody, okay, great, so you’ve brushed your teeth for the first 10 years of your life, don’t worry about brushing them again. How long would you expect your teeth to last? Probably not that long. And of course, if you engage in strength training for six months and then you stop strength training, well, well, now the demands imposed on your body have changed, so you can’t really expect your muscles to, to hang in there while you’re not using them.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So what I’m taking from this whole conversation is keep in mind what strength training accomplishes, which is improvement of your metabolic health, decrease inflammation, decrease disease risk, improved mood, improved hormonal state, and basically, and more. And then the reverse of that is true when you stop strength training, right? So whatever you whatever benefits you’re achieving from strength training, it’s just you won’t have those anymore, if strength training, right? So whatever you, whatever benefits you’re achieving from strength training, it’s just you won’t have those anymore if you stop, right? And all of your increases go up in terms of the risk. And not to mention too, just the mental piece of the satisfaction of knowing that you’re taking care of yourself and your body and doing something good for yourself, it’s hard to put a price tag on that and even quantify that, but man, you know, just having a habit of knowing that you’re doing something proactively for your health and you’re taking care of your body, we’ve said the quote before that if you don’t, you know, you can have all the problems in the world, but if I don’t have my health, I have one problem.

Yeah, and you know, you make some excellent points there. One of the things that I often think of is people that have been engaging in strength training, they don’t even know the health implications of ceasing strength training. You know, I’ve been strength training probably, you know, all of my life since I was in my early to mid teens and if I stopped strength training now, I don’t know how that might impact my physical or my mental health. I might have a predisposition to certain medical conditions that might suddenly occur in my life that I wouldn’t have even thought of, but I’ve been able to kind of ward off because of strength training. My sleep patterns might suffer drastically, you know, we’ve talked about cognitive decline whereas in terms of, you know, mental processing skills, but there might also be sort of self-esteem and, and social physique, anxiety issues and things like that about how, how we look and our physical self-worth. So, you know, all of these things that we. As people that go to the gym and then engage in strength training regularly, um, kind of have just as a day to day part of our life, that, that sense of accomplishment in the task, not in the outcome, I think is really beneficial. And yeah, we’re able to keep a base so many different comorbidities, which don’t even know what could crop up if we cease. And I don’t want that to be, that’s not a scare tactic for anybody, but it’s really a true statement. If you look around our society, we see so many people overweight, obese, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, pulmonary disease, renal failure, different types of cancer that we know that exercise can positively impact or help prevent. So, it always sounds like I’m preaching the good word of strength training, um, but, but I am that’s what I’m doing. I truly believe that it can, you know, can, can say, can save the population.

Yeah. But, and that’s why we have this podcast because we all need those reminders. We need those reminders that this is good and don’t quit. Any healthy habit that you do, it is tempting, our brains are wired for the path of least resistance, we have to remember that. Our brain is always looking for excuses to make, to stop us, or sometimes to sabotage the healthy habits that we intend, especially if they’re newer. And so, you know, we have to basically practice the good behaviors and until they become second nature and show ourselves and prove to ourselves that, no, we’re going to follow through in what we want to do. Um, it has to be convenient. It has to be enjoyable, which is why, um, our clients find that they can fit two 20 minute workouts into their schedule ongoing and it’s a part of their lifestyle. We want to overcome those obstacles that are everywhere to our health and so this is what we are trying to do. Right and when we talk about strengthening we often put it in context of other healthy habits so good nutrition, maybe other cardiovascular exercise or outdoor activity and so forth and other healthy habits. But we’ve also talked previously about the idea of what’s called the fat but fit paradigm, that being overweight or obese is actually a secondary concern to being weak. Being weak is more detrimental to our health than being overweight. You are better to be strong.

And then if you’re overweight or obese, that’s not so much of a problem because you’re strong. So even if your dietary habits kind of change and you start to think, Oh, my health isn’t where I want it to be. I’m going to take a break from the gym and then I’m going to get everything back in a row. That’s absolutely the worst approach Go into go into the exercise coach or go to the gym and engaging in strength training is the one thing that you should absolutely Sustain almost irrespective of any of the other habits in your life, you know engaging in those other things You know might not be great for us, but engaging in strength training can to some extent, um, combat those, uh, those other, uh, poor habits. I’ve got one final question for you about this. What would you say to somebody who, who says I’m just going to strength train, try it for one or two months and then, and then stop?

Well, of course, if somebody is not engaging in strength training at all, and they’re on a path to thinking of beginning it, then I would actively encourage them to start it. And if they think that they’re only going to do it for one month, then at least one month is better than not doing it at all, you know, I would never be that person that says, no, you’ve got to do it for the rest of your life. Or, or don’t do it at all.

I would say. Do whatever you can do. But I would hope that within that month, they start to see the benefits and they start to see the adaptations that they’ll get. And they start to realize that actually, they’ve put themselves on an upward trajectory in their health. And that this is something that, to some extent, just needs to be sustained with some degree of regularity to continue making those health improvements and to sustain their good health, you know, through middle age and through older age. So yeah, I’m afraid I would say, well, that’s great, let’s try it for the first month, but then I’m gonna try and keep them in the gym and try and keep them doing everything they can to maintain their health.

Absolutely, and we meet clients all the time who come to us because they have been frustrated with, with getting fit in the past. They felt like their efforts haven’t worked for them. And most of the time, the reason why that they haven’t seen a lot of momentum is because they weren’t exercising at the appropriate level of effort to see the change they were looking for. But by their first, second, and third workout with us, our full session with a trainer, not only do they feel it the difference during the workout itself, but after that third session they’re noticing the changes in their lifestyle, how their body feels different. You know, that things are already starting to feel easier for them to do in their everyday life. And that is super motivating, because it’s a signal that what you’re doing is paying off. And everybody wants to know that what they’re doing is working and it’s accomplishing something, right. And it’s very rewarding to get that instant feedback, that very quick feedback of even after three 20 minute sessions, people feel that difference and see that difference. And so, um, we hope that, you know, it’s a self-reinforcing good habit. Let’s put it that way.

Yeah.

Uh, and, and just thinking back to this, this, uh this hypothetical, somebody who’s gonna engage in the gym for a month. Well, the problem is if they don’t see the adaptations that they hope to see in a month, then they might be more inclined to stop exercising. But sustaining this habit, continuation of this habit is really the key to healthy aging.

Absolutely.

Okay, well thank you for guiding us through the answer to this question and we hope you’re encouraged and convicted about the importance of keeping it up. We will see you next week. We hope you remember strength changes everything. We hope you remember strength changes everything. Thanks for listening.