What will happen if you stop strength training for a month

All your efforts will not be wasted, but there is a high probability that strength will decline, muscle dimensions will shrink, and metabolism will drop slightly. How much you will lose and how quickly you will recover will all depend on your previous training foundation and your state during the period of stopping training.

A male student I coached last year who had been training for two years stopped training for 30 days when he got erect at the end of last year. He could do 3 sets of 8 deadlifts at 160kg. On the first day of resuming training, he felt his waist and back were tight when he pulled 120kg. In fact, what he lost was more the ability of nerves to recruit muscles, not the actual loss of muscle fibers. Many people think that all muscles will be lost after stopping training for a month. This is not true. The field of exercise physiology currently has no unified conclusion on the rate of muscle loss when training is stopped. Some studies say that novices who have trained for less than 1 year may lose 3%-7% of their muscle mass after stopping training for one month, while veteran players with more than 3 years of systematic training experience will lose muscle mass. The failure rate is even less than 2%. Most of the shrinking girth seems to be caused by the loss of glycogen and water in the muscle plasma. Just like if you leave a water-saturated sponge to dry for a few days, the size will shrink, but the sponge itself has many pores, and it will swell back as soon as it is soaked in water.

Of course, don’t think that stopping training has no impact at all. If you stop training for a month and you stay up until two or three o’clock with high fat and sugar, it is normal for your body fat to increase by two or three pounds and your strength to drop by 20%-30%. I used to know a bodybuilding enthusiast who had been training for 4 years. He went to Southeast Asia for a month during his annual leave, barbecuing beer every day until midnight. When he came back, his body fat increased by 4 points. He used to press 120kg on the bench press, but when he came back he was shaking when he pressed 90. It took almost two months to recover before he returned to his original state.

Many coaches now advocate deliberately arranging 1-2 active pauses of 2-4 weeks each year, saying that it can help the body eliminate accumulated chronic fatigue and get out of the bottleneck period. Many professional powerlifters will also arrange to not touch iron at all for three or four weeks after the competition. On the contrary, subsequent muscle building and strength increase will be more efficient. In this case, stopping training for a month is a good thing to adjust the state.

In fact, there is no need to be anxious about stopping training for a month. You have accumulated training traces for several years. How could they disappear in 30 days? You are really afraid of losing a lot. During the period of stopping training, eating two more bites of protein every day and taking half an hour to walk and climb stairs can also help you minimize the loss rate and recover much faster.