Taking Time Off from Training
I’ve mentioned before that after you strain/stretch/tear your muscles, they grow in proportion to the damage, but after about 4-5 days, that growth starts to diminish, because your body doesn’t think it will be needed. So you want to work each muscle group every 3-4 days, and you don’t want to miss your window of opportunity to build on previous gains.
But.
According to Mike Israetel, the body is very good at regaining recent gains. Your body can remember that it was recently bigger and catch up quickly. So if you work out in the gym for five months and gain five pounds, then you take an entire month off, you’ll gain even more over the next five months than if you hadn’t taken the month off. This is counter-intuitive, but we can build it into our schedule. Here’s what Mike recommends:
Build muscle using a regular weekly routine for five weeks, then take a week off. You may focus on other sports, work on stretching, work on some smaller muscles you haven’t engaged recently, etc. But nothing on your main muscles. Then go back to your routine for the next five weeks. After the next five weeks, your body won’t notice the week off. Think of this like eating a square of chocolate every day – if you take a week off, that next week of chocolate will be so much better than if you didn’t, right?
After five months of training, take two weeks of very reduced volume in the gym, just going through the motions but not gaining any muscle, then take two weeks of no training in the gym. Take a vacation. Go camping. Hike. Play fun sports, learn a new skill, do fun activities, but take a full two weeks off. Use a schedule to manage your time. Over the next five months, your gains will be bigger than if you hadn’t.
This is all pretty good news. We don’t need to overdo it, but we can see that a ratio of about five to one is beneficial and gives our bodies time to heal better than if we kept up the hard work continuously.
Years two and three of my program are about getting the most gains in the gym possible, and this tells us we can do it more easily than we thought. Later, we’ll learn more about maintenance.
Are you ready for year one? Sign up for your onboarding session with me and let’s get started.