You spend countless hours in the gym building strength. It’s reasonable that you wouldn’t want to lose any of that progress, but sometimes life happens and you have to take some time off. Let’s take a look at how long it might take to start losing gains and what you can do to stop or slow the strength decrease.
Some of us go crazy if we miss a day or two at the gym because we absolutely don’t want to lose progress towards our strength goals. But that panic isn’t necessarily warranted. You can easily take 1-3 weeks off without losing much – if any – progress towards your goals. According to research, it actually looks like you would have to take off a month or more before you’d start losing significant strength.
You may notice quicker and more significant strength loss with more complicated lifts like snatches, squats, cleans, and deadlifts, because these lifts require a level of technique that can deteriorate much quicker compared to more simple movements like bicep curls, or leg extensions.
If you are worried about maintaining your strength gains, you can increase your protein. Adequate protein intake can help slow the rate of degeneration a little bit. But the best thing you can do to maintain your strength is to do smaller workouts. You can maintain your progress with less than half of the training volume you normally do. You can also let your mind rest because even if you do experience minor strength losses, you are likely to gain them back fairly quickly when you return to normal training.
So unless you’re taking major time off, you are probably going to be okay when it comes to building your strength. Make sure to focus on nutrition and get smaller workouts in when you can.