Practical Guidelines for Retraining

What’s worse than being unable to train because you’re injured? When you’re unable to train even though you’re not.

Unfortunately, the reality is that there will come a point of time in life where you’re forced to take time away from the barbell due to circumstances outside of your control and this is especially relevant today when a pangolin, of all things, is the cause of your layoff. And for those of us with no access to a home gym, we are faced with 2 conundrums:

1. How can I keep my strength without a gym?

2. Can I max out again on the first day back to the gym? *cough* I mean

2. How do I return to training?

Since we have a team policy not to beat dead horses (and that our Coach Jonus has already spoken about it), we shall address the second conundrum in this article instead. First, we shall explore the relevant physiological changes that you might face after any period of no training. Then, we present a series of guidelines that you might find helpful in planning your return to the gym and discuss the mental or physical strategies behind these guidelines.

Detraining: Here today, gone tomorrow?

Nobody wants this D but we all have to learn to deal with it in our training careers. [1] defines detraining to be the “partial or total interruption of an exercise program or a partial or total loss of exercise benefits in response to insufficient training stimulus”, or in layman powerlifter terms: “no training, no gainz”.

The bad news for us is that, yes, unfortunately, we will definitely be de-trained after, at least, 4 weeks without the gym because lifting buckets and stepping on chairs barely qualify as sufficient training stimulus.

Effects of Cardiorespiratory Detraining

The first casualty of war is a reduction in blood volume as result of a loss in both red cell volume [3] of recently trained individuals and plasma volume [3] and this cascades to a reduction in Maximal Oxygen Uptake (VO2max) and Stroke Volume (mL of blood ejected from each ventricle due to contraction of heart muscle) and an increase in heart rate [1]. In short, endurance performance suffers during detraining.

But since we aren’t about that life, let’s move on to something more relevant.

Effects of Muscular Detraining

Surprisingly, training cessation for 2 weeks did not change muscle fibre distribution in strength-trained athletes[4]. Furthermore, in the same 2-week time period, strength-trained athletes showed slight but non significant reductions in the bench press, squat and vertical jump. However, there was a significant 8-13% decline in surface electromyographic (SEMG) activity of the vastus lateralis muscle (aka biggest quad muscle for the normies like me out there) [4]. To digress a little from here, SEMG techniques have been used to evaluate neural changes induced by strength training [5]. Hence the reduction in strength can be attributed to a reversal in neural adaptations.

Things get a little more painful as the length of training cessation carries on. A noticeable shift of fast twitch fibres to the more oxidative fast-oxidative-glycolytic fiber (intermediate fibres) was observed to the detriment of the strength athlete [6]. The force production however, has been shown to only decline by 7-12% during inactivity periods ranging from 8-12 weeks [7]-[9]. Once again, the force decline also appears to be correlated to decreased EMG activity in addition to reductions in fibre areas and muscle mass.

At this point I hope you’re coming to terms with the inevitable fact that you’re probably going to lose some size and strength so might as well step off that chair, drop the pink dumbbells and reach for that donut...

But there is some good news. The magnitude of performance decline appears to be related to your chosen training training during the period of detraining. What this means is that if you’ve simply reduced training and not come to a complete halt, chances are the decline wouldn’t be as bad as if training has come to a complete halt.

Guidelines to Retraining

Let me first begin by saying that trained individuals reacquire lost physiological function and performance after detraining FASTER than the untrained folk. Although this phenomena was once attributed to ‘cellular memory’, evidence by [10] suggests that any elevated myonuclear density acquired during training is lost during the period of detraining.

Then, in 2019, work done by [11] observed a 20% strength increase in the trained group vs a 5% increase in the untrained group after a period of training and detraining. In solidarity with [10], no differences in myonuclei density were observed.

However, this doesn’t mean you should hop right back on *insert meme program here* and use the same intensities and volumes, if not more, you were working with before the pangolin decided to take its revenge.

You. Need. A. Plan!

So here are some guidelines to help you build yourself back in a much more effective and practical way.

Lower the Volume.

We need to reiterate that you are definitely weaker now. You may think that if you try you might just match your all-time PR because 4 week deload amirite? Even if you can, that doesn’t mean you should. The last time someone followed this principle, it resulted in a couple of loose dinosaurs in a park.

Just because you feel strong doesn’t mean your body is primed to handle the same workloads. You need to accept this.

Furthermore, because you haven’t been practicing the movement patterns for a month, you will most likely have lost some proficiency with it which leads to less optimal movement patterns. The deficiency in technique will definitely put more unnecessary stress on your body which might lead to overuse or acute injury if you carry on with the same workloads immediately.

For those of you without a coach, cut your volume in half for the first block. There is no scientific importance or evidence to this number, only that it is a reasonable and sensible baseline to begin from.

Lower the Intensity.

A rule of thumb that works well with myself and my athletes is to keep at around RPE 6 for each session in the first week back after a layoff. In numerical terms, this might require you to reduce your training intensity by 40-50%. You might feel like the weights are too light but that’s the point. As mentioned above, you definitely won’t be as proficient with the different movement patterns as you were before the layoff and thus the immediate focus is to practice and refinement. Furthermore, the reduced intensity will also serve to slowly acclimate yourself to heavier loads in the future.

Coordinate, Practice, Refine

Proprioception is the perception or awareness of the position and movement of your body, and poor prioception has prospectively been identified as a factor for injuries. [13] studied the effects of a one-month postseason break on postural control in collegiate female volleyball athletes and reported that there was a significant decrease in postural control after the break. The exact significance of proprioception is inconclusive at best but one must undoubtedly be passably aware of how’s body is moving through the entire movement pattern.

Slow eccentric movements are a tool I like to employ here to help my athletes with this aspect of training, in order to more effectively re-introduce a lifter to the competition patterns. [12] presents a guideline for using a 4-0-1-0 tempo to learn the squat. An eccentric tempo of 3-6 counts would serve you well in this aspect. With that said, I believe in the principle of deploying the right tool for the right job so if something else serves you better, feel free to experiment.

Progression

This is where the importance of tracking your workouts come in. If you’ve decided to follow my recommendations for a block, the two key questions you should ask yourself is as follows:

1. Am I making progress?

2. Do I feel relatively recovered

If you’re making progress and you’re feeling good, then do consider increasing your volume by 20-25%. If you’re unsure about how ‘recovered’ you feel, you can take a look at your weekly RPEs to find a trend to training. What’s the average RPE per movement per session? Are you always in the #sub6 zone or are you constantly pushing into RPE 11? The former scenario might warrant an increase in workloads but the latter shows that you might just have overestimated yourself slightly. Cut back.

An analogy I would like to bring up is building a bridge. You’re stuck on one end of a gaping chasm and your former stronger self is stuck on the other end. You can choose to take the risk of death and jump the chasm or you can start slow, lay down the first block, see if it holds up, and proceed iteratively until you bridge the gap with consecutive blocks. There is nothing wrong with taking things slow but the risk is very real if you choose to jump right back into your former workloads.

- William @couch_potahto

[1] Luis Leitao, Ana Pereira, “Effects of Three Months of Detraining on the Health Profile of Older Women after a Multicomponent Exercise Program” Int J Environ Res Public Health 2019 Oct; 16(20): 3881. Doi 10.3390/ijerph16203881

[2] Iñigo Mujika and Sabino Padilla. “Detraining: Loss of Training-Induced Physiological and Performance Adaptations. Part I Short Term Insufficient Training Stimulus”. Sports Medicine 30. Pg 79-87. August 2000.

[3] Pivarnik JM, Senay Jr LC. “Effects of exercise detraining and deacclimation to the heat on plasma volume dynamics”. Eur J Appl Physiol 1986; 55: 222-8.

[4] Hortobágyi T, Houmard JA, Stevenson JR, et al. “The effects of detraining on power athletes.” Med Sci Sports Exerc 1993; 25 (8): 929-35.

[5] Gabriel DA, Kamen G, Frost G. “Neural adaptations to resistive exercise: mechanisms and recommendations for training practices.” Sports Med. 2006;36(2):133-49

[6] Iñigo Mujika and Sabino Padilla. “Muscular characteristics of detraining in humans”. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2001 Aug;33(8):1297-303.

[7] Häkkinen K, Komi PV, Tesch PA. “Effect of combined concentric and eccentric strength training and detraining on forcetime, muscle fiber and metabolic characteristics of leg extensor muscles.” Scand J Sports Sci 1981; 3 (2): 50-8

[8] Häkkinen K, Alén M, Komi PV. “Changes in isometric force and relaxation-time, electromyographic and muscle fibre characteristics of human skeletal muscle during strength training and detraining.” Acta Physiol Scand 1985; 125: 573-85

[9] Narici MV, Roi GS, Landoni L, et al. “Changes in force, cross-sectional area and neural activation during strength training and detraining of the human quadriceps.” Eur J Appl Physiol 1989; 59: 310-9

[10] Cory M. Dungan, Kevin A. Murach et al. “Elevated myonuclear density during skeletal muscle hypertrophy in response to training is reversed during detraining.” Cell Physiology Vol 316 Issue. 5 May 2019 Pg C649-C654

[11] Psilander et al. “Effects of training, detraining, and retraining on strength, hypertrophy, and myonuclear number in human skeletal muscle.” J Appl Phsiol. 1 June 2019 doi: 10.1152/japplphysiol.00917.2018.

[12] Gregory D. Myer, Adam M. Kushner, “The back squat: A proposed assessment of functional deficits and technical factors that limit performance”. Strength Cond J. 1 Dec 2014 36(6): 4-27. Doi: 10.1519/SSC.0000000000000103

[13]Boyi Dai, Christopher Sorensen, Jason C. Gillete, “The effect of postseason break on stabilometric performance in female volleyball players”. Sports Biomechanics. 9(2):115-22 June 2010 Doi:10.1080/14763141.2010.484505