how long does it take to get out of shape?

nastyElbows also avirgin

nastyElbows also avirgin

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lets say one is injured or mood is too bad to work out, how many days/weeks he can skip before he turns/looks like he doesn't lift.

also, do u believe in the muscle memory thing?
 
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depends on how trained you are to begin with before the hiatus...a novice to the barbell will experience more rapid fitness loss....a more advanced athlete will take a while

and yes i definitely believe in muscle memory
 
I need to move. I get restless. I hard surface welded a hand full of dozers 3 days ago. Ran 7.5 miles that evening. Tore a main and two porch roofs off the day after, before doing a 20 rep split on my snatch, clean and jerk, hanging cleans, and push ups.. 20 of each for about an hour and a half, in a cycle.. Weight fluctuating. I'm not even getting into all that.
But today I not only roughed in wired a 1200 ft. house, I did my 100 burpees. So, yeah.. Movement my man. One way or another.
 
Speaking from experience, it's not something that suddenly happens.

I am completely out of shape. It got this way gradually. I couple of days not training turned into a couple of weeks, that turns into a couple of years, that turned into a decade.

When you start to lose your fitness, it is even harder to get back in the gym because your previously level of exercise is harder to do and will be less enjoyable. Then when you're very out of shape, any exercise is a big challenge. Eventually you get to where I am; where any rigourous exercise leads to 4 days of DOMS.

So my advice is to never stop training even for a week. If you're injured, work around it. If you're depressed, at least go for long walks and keep active.
 
Cardio goes quick, strength takes a little longer. Say a week for cardio to start deteriorating, and more than two weeks for strength, give or take.
 
There's a certain level of strength that doesn't go away once attained IMO. This may be due to neurological adaptations, but I'm not sure. Having said that, it'd probably take 1-2 months to go back to wherever that baseline level is.

And yes, muscle memory is real thing(albeit a bit of a misnomer). When you perform a movement enough times, that motor pattern becomes ingrained into your nervous system, making you more efficient in the movement, and becoming more automatic. How else would someone know how to ride a bike, type, or swing a golf club, better than the first time they performed the movement?
 
Provided you keep up your diet you can go weeks before muscle starts to seriously degrade.

Yes, my buddy had a herniated disc repaired in his back and couldn't lift for three months. Within probably two months of lifting he was stronger than before his surgery.
 
gspieler said:
There's a certain level of strength that doesn't go away once attained IMO. This may be due to neurological adaptations, but I'm not sure. Having said that, it'd probably take 1-2 months to go back to wherever that baseline level is.

And yes, muscle memory is real thing(albeit a bit of a misnomer). When you perform a movement enough times, that motor pattern becomes ingrained into your nervous system, making you more efficient in the movement, and becoming more automatic. How else would someone know how to ride a bike, type, or swing a golf club, better than the first time they performed the movement?
Click to expand...


There's slightly more than that going on. Your muscles don't lose myonuclei when you de-adapt, and having more myonuclei makes hypertrophy easier. When you lose muscle mass, and try to re-acquire the amount of muscle mass that your previous level of mycuclei can support, it's quicker.
 
When I was in the military I heard ofthen that you didn't want to take more than 2 weeks off. It's been my experience that this holds true for cardio, but strength is a bit different. I don't think the neurological adaptations ever go, think old man strength. One thing I know for fact is muscle atrophy happens surprisingly fast. You can slow it down by remaining active but it happens incredibly fast if not active. When I hurt my shoulder my right arm was in sling for nearly a year, my arm shrunk from 17" to size of my forearm within a few months.

So with that said, just depends on what your doing with your time away. if you just become a sloth I think you'll be shocked at how fast your fitness goes.

For me muscle memory kind of falls along my thoughts that I don't feel you lose neurological adaptations.
 
I've actually noticed the opposite myself. If I'm just lifting and not doing any cardio/conditioning, I noticed my cardio/conditioning not slipping too much. If I don't lift for that same length of time, I come back quite a bit weaker.
 
JohnnyTowers said:
Genetics, I guess
Click to expand...

I think it is the fact that they train 6hrs a day and they eat insane amounts of food. Their muscles are used to being fatigued daily, when they don't get that stress they lose myofibrils fast. It's like the massive workload has a finely tuned catbolism-anabolism homeostasis but when workload ceases the anabolism slows down while the catabolism keeps going for a while. I wonder what the evolutionary biology is behind this.
 
It takes awhile. When I stopped running and focused on lifting, my "running cardio" got crap, but it was about a year lay off from it. I started back again recently for a few days a week, and its getting back, after nearly a month now.

Lifting, I did the mistake of stopping and at the time poor dieting advice where I was eating at starvation calories and became immensely weak. Anyways, I focused on a proper lean bulk and a high volume routine of PPLx2, and within a year I'm back to my old maxes, OHP is actually higher than my old max.

TLDR;
About a year
 
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