A question I am often asked is what happens to your muscles when you stop working out for a long period of time? The answer depends on quite a few things such as age, your current training ability your current level of strength, and what was the reason you stopped training was. If you stopped from a lack of motivation then you can regain your strength much faster than if it was from a serious injury or disease that left you immobilized. In a perfect world you will never stop strength training for it is so hard to rebuild than it is to maintain muscles but sometimes things happen that are out of your control that force you to stop. This is why I always say one of the most important things you can ever do for your health is remain consistent with strength training for a long time to build up a high reserve for the speed at which you can lose muscle is astonishingly fast. It is quite unfair really, for it can take months to build muscle but sometimes as little as 10 days to lose significant strength as I will show you. Females, and the older population will lose muscle even faster and the implications to the health of their body is significant once they have lost too much.
Why You Should Never Stop Strength Training
From the time you are born to around the time you turn 30, your muscles grow larger and stronger. But at some point in your 30s, you start to lose muscle mass and strength. You keep losing muscle as you age. If you lose so much strength and muscle mass that you struggle with basic daily activities, you may be diagnosed with sarcopenia.
Everyone loses muscle with age, typically about 3%-5% each decade after age 30. Inactive people will lose the most and the lack of muscle will become more noticeable with daily activities and start to speed up at around age 60. After age 80, studies suggest somewhere between 11% and 50% of people have sarcopenia.
Sarcopenia can be a serious problem. Once you’ve lost a lot of muscle and strength, you may struggle to do things such as getting out of chairs, opening jars, or carrying groceries. You also can become frail and have a higher risk of falls, broken bones, disability, and death.
The people who started early and maintained their muscle mass all throughout their life will find it much easier to maintain not just their strength but also fitness and a healthy weight range.
If you are one of those people that still think strength training is just for young people who want to bulk up and look good in a mirror, then this article is for you as you will see there is so much more to muscle than you thought.
Its Not Just The Muscles That Suffer
What many people fail to see is how many health factors are affected when they stop strength training.
The table below which I found in a great article from InbodyUSA gives a good summary on the impact to various health factors when you stop training and the speed in which they change. Keep in mind that these are generalized timelines and they can vary a lot from person to person but they do give you a guide as to what happens.
As you can clearly see there are several important health factors that are greatly affected when you stop training. Metabolism, fat mass, blood sugar and gylcogen sensitivity is something you do not see immediately but will see over the coming months and this can be very difficult and time consuming to reverse. What this table does not show is how long it can take to get back to normal or good levels again. Always remember it is so much easier to maintain than rebuild.
A few weeks break from training to go on holidays is great for your body will be able to catch up on recovery and allow you to come back refreshed and be able to train better than ever. Also you tend to move around more than normal with walking and doing different activities than when at work in your normal routine so while you may not be training as intensely you are not completely inactive.
Problems arise when a few week’s turns into a few months, or worse longer.
How Fast Can You Lose Muscle?
If you have ever been hospitalized for a long period of time, maybe broken your arm or leg and had it wrapped in plaster you will know exactly what it feels like to lose serious amount of muscle (known as ATROPHY) in just the space of a few weeks.
I have broken so many bones I have lost count, but the one that really sticks out in my mind to how quickly atrophy takes place was with my right arm. I have broken my radius in my right arm twice requiring plaster for 4 weeks to let the bone heal. The last time this happened was back in 2007 when I fell off my mountain bike in a cross country triathlon. At that time I was 33 and close to the peak of my fitness ability.
I had been training like a beast with the weights and was lifting loads I had never done before in my life. It took me a good 2-3 years of solid strength training to get to that high level of training but it only took 4 weeks to lose it all!
For example, I went from lifting 37.5kg dumbbells on a chest press to just 15-17.5kg for the first few weeks after while my muscles regained their strength. And it took me close to 6 months to get back to those huge loads again! It took over a year before I could do a push-up with my hands flat on the floor again as my wrist did not like being flexed like that.
It seems so unfair that it takes so long to get it, but hardly any time at all to lose it.
While this is an extreme example this lesson proved to me that it is so important to find ways to keep moving no matter how bad things get and continue working on things you can do. At least I could still use my legs and I was able to run and do some strength work like lunges, stair climbs with my legs while my arm was out of action.
Where I found it harder was when I tore my ACL in my knee in 2016 and I could barely walk without limping for 6 weeks. Once again I lost all the strength in my legs almost immediately and I had to find a way to keep moving with my upper body. While it was difficult I was able to restore strength back to where I was in about 3-4 months.
My stories give you a good indication of how quickly you can lose muscle to a small area like your arm or my knee but this does not relate to what happens if you are completely bed ridden. At least I could still retain a fairly good amount of muscle mass which kept other more serious complications at bay.
Results From Scientific Studies About The Speed Of Atrophy
There has been studies completed by many researchers and one from Luc van Loon, a professor of exercise and nutrition at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
The researchers found that otherwise healthy young male subjects in their 20’s lost 3.1 pounds of muscle mass in a single week of bed rest! And while the bed rest was completely necessary for recovery from illness or injury, they found the significant muscle loss lead to various other negative health consequences such as insulin sensitivity.
This is something we have seen many times before with Cancer patients receiving chemotherapy or radiotherapy.
When someone has just been diagnosed with Cancer they think it would be wise to rest and do nothing to allow the body to save it’s energy for fighting the disease. It sounds logical right?
Unfortunately this is not true and is the worst thing you can do for Cancer loves the peace and quiet and thrives on the lack of activity. For without the activity from exercise the body is unable to complete many of the functions needed to sustain optimal health with our essential organs.
The muscles of active people absorb blood sugar in response to insulin much more effectively helping the pancreas to secrete lower amounts of this hormone and reduce its harmful effect on the growth of cancer cells. Lack of muscle has been shown to be a powerful contributing factor to getting the disease in the first place.
When we exercise the effect on the heart creates a series of changes to the system that increase oxygen absorption and energy production, lower blood pressure and improve cholesterol levels, resulting in less inflammation and significant efficiency of the body as a whole. Exercise is so important because it creates a series of biochemical and physiological changes that make it very difficult for precancerous cells to survive and prevent them from developing into a more adult growth.
You can read more about this in our article – Exercise benefits for Cancer patients
Another great study from “Extreme Physiology & Medicine” research showed similar results. It found you can lose 2.5% of your muscle mass in the first two weeks of bed rest and by day 23, you can have lost up to 10% of your quadriceps muscle mass.
Why Older Adults & Females Are More At Risk
I mentioned in the introduction that certain people are more at risk of severe health problems than others and there are three groups.
These three groups of people who are most likely to find it hard to regain strength are people with injury, females, and older adults. They are the same population that must make strength training a high priority. If you are an older female with an injury then you are most at risk. This does not gives men a free pass but they will find it easier to maintain and build muscle at any age.
For the older adult this is a potential disaster as this quickly leads to disability, and even worse a fatal fall!
The risk of falls from muscle loss is very common and this is something that begins earlier than many think. It begins at a time when you could do something about it.
Statistics in the US show that one adult over the age of 65 is treated in the emergency room for a fall every 18 seconds (Center for Disease Control and Prevention). Quite an alarming statistic and even more scary when you consider that hip fractures are the most common injury from a fall and the number one cause of nursing home admission. Approximately 50% of those who suffer a hip fracture never fully regain their mobility and independence, and 50% of those die within the first year!
There has been many studies completed showing how leg-strength is associated with the ability to rise from a chair, walking speed, and the risk of falling. These studies also show that deteriorating leg strength is a good predictor of frailty and mortality with older adults. Due to the cumulative effects of aging and physical inactivity a certain percentage of older adults struggle with performing many basic functional tasks such as walking and climbing stairs both requiring a fair degree of leg strength.
Females have a much harder time building muscle than males for the simple reason they lack the most important ingredient for this which is – TESTOSTERONE!
Women only have 1/10th the testosterone levels of a male. For this reason women are more likely to develop osteoporosis than men due mainly to a lack of muscle mass to begin with.
Stronger muscles create stronger bones.
Women who have gone through menopause are at the highest risk of osteoporosis as their bodies can no longer absorb calcium as well as it did when they were younger.
When the thoracic vertebrae are softened, there can be a gradual collapse of the vertebrae. This results in kyphosis, an excessive curvature of the thoracic region.
This causes what is known as a Dowagers Hump!
Not very attractive, but even worse than how it looks is the damage it creates to rest of the body. Multiple injuries begin to surface when this poor posture is left untreated. It is a very long slow process to correct this condition, it is so much easier to prevent it from happening.
This type of posture is often associated with headaches and migraines.
The prevalence of headaches, migraines, and neck pain in women is significantly greater than men. In the book “Managing your Migraine” by Katy Munro statistics show that one in seven people will suffer from migraines with women three times as likely as men to have regular episodes. However, it is not just migraines that women are more likely to suffer with as the incidence of TMJ disorder (Jaw pain) along with neck and shoulder injuries are also significantly higher.
Following on from our last point with osteoporosis and bone density the postural problems combined with a lack of strength to support and stabilize the joints of the shoulder and neck it is no wonder many women suffer with neck stiffness and pain.
Women tend to have longer hair than men which makes their head weigh more. This extra weight adds more strain to the muscles of the neck and shoulder region, and if weakness already exists they will inevitably experience problems.
Men have much stronger muscles to support the neck and shoulder and have much lower rates of injury compared to women even though they are more likely to participate in jobs and sports that expose this area to injury more regularly than women.
Take a look at the statistics below and you can see females are much greater across all ages.
To see more about the other health factors affecting females read this article – 7 Reasons Why Strength Training Is Essential For Women
Injury, Muscle Imbalance & Compensation Creating Muscle Atrophy
There is no doubt that injury can derail your muscle really fast as I explained with my own story earlier. Where big problems can develop is when the pain is no longer present as the inflammation has settled but the weakness to surrounding muscles remains. This is when the body learns to compensate and it slowly destroys movement patterns and efficiency with daily activities.
Sometimes there is nothing structurally wrong or even any pain but the fear or getting injured again keeps people away from completing the movement their body really needs. The end result is that the muscles become weaker and weaker. I have discussed this several times in previous articles and it is difficult to overcome injury as you often make a lot of mistakes and need help to work things out. The worst thing you can do is nothing.
We tend to treat symptoms of pain instead of addressing the areas of weakness. Our instincts are wired to find ways to avoid the pain and in the initial stages of an injury this is essential so the body can have time to initiate the healing process. Instead of pain relief we should focus on fixing the source of the pain.
See the article about Joint inflammation and chronic pain for more information on this.
The most common types of pain that so many people deal with are back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, knee pain. At first it is only mild symptoms that come and go, and most of us think it will go away. But if left unchecked the symptoms become more acute and more often until they eventually become chronic.
Rest in many cases now will make matters worse. The longer you stay inactive the weaker the body will become and the worse things will get making it harder to regain stability of joints and restore the lost strength. The body will be forced to use stiffness as a protective mechanism to hold the joints together for it has lost so much strength. Stiffness as a by-product creates significant weakness which is known as muscle inhibition.
Dr Stuart McGill has proven that back pain is significantly worse with too much bed rest or lying on your back. This is due to the swelling of the discs with fluid from horizontal lying for long periods which can push the vertebrae away from each other and touch the nerve.
This is something I have discussed in great detail in the article – Why good pain is needed to get rid of bad pain.
Inactivity Ruins Muscle Strength & Overall Health Fast!
This is where poor daily habits of becoming less active will creep up on you over time, and it is not a broken bone or serious illness forcing bed rest that will cause severe muscle atrophy to happen, but your long periods of inactivity. It is so easy to fall into this trap of sitting all day behind computer screens and TV’s. Unknowingly many people will be rapidly losing muscle that will show no immediate concern but huge consequences in years to come. Remember once it is gone it is a long road back to getting your strength so it makes sense to never lose it in the first place.
Most recommendations are to do 30-45 minutes or physical activity per day which is a great start for preventing obesity and something we all should do. But, if that is all you do for the entire day you are still exposing your body to a host of problems.
If you worked out for 30 minutes per day and the rest of your day you sat down, your total activity percentage of available time to move might be only 4% at best! In this example, the 30 minute workout while it is great to do and has some amazingly positive aspects, is pretty much cancelled out by the negative impact on the metabolism by the 96% of sedentary activity the rest of the day.
You would have got more benefit from 3 x 20 minute workouts spread out across the day. Even better than that you would be achieve much greater rewards by finding ways to incorporate many short walks and accumulating incidental movement as much as possible.
Use of stand-up desks, taking the stairs instead of the lift, parking your car in the furthest car space instead of the closest one are other great examples of maintaining more movement. Using Fit-bits or smartwatches with pedometer tracking are great tools to help motivate you to move.
Small amounts of regular activity, even just standing and moving around throughout the day is enough to bring the increased levels back down. And those small amounts of activity add up – scientists have suggested that 30 minutes of light activity in two or three-minute bursts could be just as effective as a half-hour block of exercise.
You can read more about this in the article – Why the obesity crisis is getting worse
The other factor contributing to muscle atrophy is poor nutrition and more specifically the lack of PROTEIN in our diet.
Make Sure You Eat Good Quality Protein
When we consume a single meal-like amount of quality protein, 55% of the protein derived amino acids are circulated around the body and taken up in skeletal muscle tissue. This stimulates muscle protein synthesis rates and allows for your body to build muscle tissue more effectively from exercise and movement.
The take-home message here is that protein is an essential dietary component for building muscle. But………. make sure you exercise.
Inactivity desensitizes protein signalling meaning your muscles lose their sensitivity to protein signalling from inactivity. It is not just about eating more protein and hoping your muscles get stronger. That is a nearly worthless strategy for muscle building if you fail to integrate the exercise element.
Read this article to see more – How much protein do you need for a healthy body?
Do You Need More Help?
There are some great specialized reports you can download from the online shop that are specific to injury or health needs. The report below provides stacks of strength training programs and an entire chapter on functional movement for you to execute perfectly.
CLICK HERE to get your copy.
Summary
I hope this article gives you some additional knowledge to share with others as to the true benefits of strength training exercise and why we should be looking at it as much more than something to make us look good in a mirror. If used wisely it is as powerful a drug to our health as any medicine ever invented.
Always remember it is much easier to maintain muscles and strength than it is to build or rebuild. The worst thing you can do is nothing.
About The Author
Nick Jack is owner of No Regrets Personal Training and has over 20 years’ experience as a qualified Personal Trainer, Level 2 Rehabilitation trainer, CHEK practitioner, and Level 2 Sports conditioning Coach. Based in Melbourne Australia he specializes in providing solutions to injury and health problems for people of all ages using the latest methods of assessing movement and corrective exercise.
References
•Movement – By Gray Cook
•Corrective Exercise Solutions – by Evan Osar
•Athletic Body Balance by Gray Cook
•Diagnosis & Treatment Of Movement Impairment Syndromes – By Shirley Sahrman
•Bending The Aging Curve – by Joseph Signorile
•Back Pain Mechanic – by Stuart McGill
•Built From Broken – by Scott Hogan
•Motor Learning and Performance – By Richard A Schmidt and Timothy D Lee
•Assessment & Treatment Of Muscle Imbalance – By Vladimir Janda
•How To Eat, Move & Be Healthy by Paul Chek
•Scientific Core Conditioning Correspondence Course – By Paul Chek
•Advanced Program Design – By Paul Chek