How Long Does Your Fitness Last?
How to maintain your fitness goals whilst at home. Do you have to train harder and more regularly?
You may have been training for your first marathon, aiming for you personal best or rehabilitating from an injury or surgery. Whatever your goals were the new social distancing guidelines have changed all of our plans and routines for the coming weeks. So, how do you continue to move forwards?
Firstly, you need to understand the effects reduced training loads or no training at all have:
Your strength can be maintained for 3-4 weeks before decline and your muscles will start to reduce in size after 2-3 weeks
Endurance decreases by 4-25% after 3-4 weeks
VO2 max declines by 6-20% at around 4-weeks
(Data based on no training)
Guidelines for maintenance of fitness:
To maintain strength and size of a muscle during 4+ weeks off, you need to train once per week
To maintain endurance during 4+ weeks off, you can lower the volume by 60-90% and frequency by 20-30%. The intensity of the training should remain the same.
Examples of maintenance strategies:
If you trained 3x a week lifting heavy weights in the gym (a mixture of free weights and Olympic lifts) this could be reduced to 1x week to maintain your current condition
If you attend 3x HIIT classes a week this could be reduced to 1x home HIIT session to maintain your current level of fitness
If you ran on average 3-4x a week with a weekly distance of 15km, a rough estimation would be to run 2x4km a week at the same intensity. Intensity could be determined as perceived effort/Heart Rate or speed)
There are a lot of variables linked to the figures above including training ages, novice athletes, time and duration of training etc., there is no one size fits all. As we are all in uncertain times with regards to our routines and access to gyms and exercise classes, the data highlights there are opportunities to maintain our levels of fitness and strength in the short term without the need to train harder or more regularly.
References
McMaster et al 2013, Costa et al 2016, McMahon et al 2014, Fisher et al 2013, Mujika et al 2000, 2001