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Muscle and Strength - Deloads/Holidays

Method Health
Oct 28, 2024
6 min read

Updated: Oct 20

“Will I lose muscle during my holiday” or “Why do I feel so weak after coming back from my holiday”



If you are unable to get out of bed (ill or injured in hospital) or during a really sedentary holiday, you would first observe reductions in the “skill” of the movement, then your power, then strength, and then your muscle across time. Bone mineral density loss can also occur as soon as 1-week of complete bed rest (Physical exercise as prophylaxis against involutional vertebral bone loss) or 2% of your muscle mass reduction per day in this study of the critically ill people in hospital (The rate and assessment of muscle wasting during critical illness: a systematic review and meta-analysis). However, assuming you are not subjected to complete bed rest and really ill, and are just taking a break or going on a holiday, then your age, previous strength training experience and how active you are on your break dictate the extent of changes to your strength and muscle.


Participants of strength training who start training at an older age (the statistical cutoff for this in research on average is around 60 years old) have quicker losses than those the same age who have been strength training for a while. So “old adults should follow a long-term and systematic routine of exercise throughout life, in order to improve and maintain their physical functions and to ameliorate their life status” (Effects of resistance training and detraining on muscle strength and functional performance of older adults aged 80 to 88 years). However, this does not mean your age should be the first factor to blame if you feel any reductions in exercise tolerance. Your lifestyle changes, such as more time commitments for work or family or illness that occur over your life, have greater effects on reducing exercise tolerance than age itself. An “active” life can greatly reduce the loss of power and strength associated with aging and reduce the extent of change in exercise adaptations during breaks or holidays (Peak anaerobic power in master athletes). It is hard to separate the effects of age from the effects of a sedentary lifestyle in scientific studies so take that into account when an age as a statistical cutoff is mentioned as a mediator of changes throughout this article. 


Regardless of age, the smaller your total resistance training experience or the less time you have completed strength, muscle building or power training, the quicker you reduce these attributes in general. For example, if you have never completed resistance training and then start for 12 weeks and then rest for 12 weeks, you'll reduce about half of the strength and less than half of the muscle you have increased in size during the previous 12 weeks of strength training. However, you will regain all these attributes and more in half that time when you restart strength training again (The effect of resistance training, detraining and retraining on muscle strength and power, myofibre size, satellite cells and myonuclei in older men). Expect less changes if you have been strength training for longer than a year. So yes, the less time you have trained, the quicker your gains reduce, but it still takes many weeks to reduce appreciable strength and muscle, and you regain your lost gains faster when restarting than how long it took to develop them in the first place. An analogy for why regaining muscle and strength occurs more quickly after a rest than when improving them in the first place is thinking of scaffolding vs building materials when building a house. When a house is first being made, scaffolding is put up to make applying the building material easier. The longer you train, the more likely your muscles and nervous system will develop its kind of scaffolding (the muscle version of scaffolding is called the “myonuclear domain” (Human Skeletal Muscle Possesses an Epigenetic Memory of Hypertrophy). If rest occurs across weeks to months, the building material is removed (you might notice your muscles get smaller) as the body needs lots of energy to have muscle and the lack of signaling from resistance exercise causes your body to de-adapt to save energy. However, the muscle's scaffolding is left behind, so when returning to training, your body rebuilds quicker as scaffolding is already present (Effects of training, detraining, and retraining on strength, hypertrophy, and myonuclear number in human skeletal muscle).


So, if you have been training for longer than six months, an active holiday will likely not reduce your muscle significantly, apart from the reduction in skill and some strength required to complete a challenging strength exercise, and skill can be regained quickly (in weeks) when resuming regular practice again. The more active your holiday is, or if you can sneak in any bodyweight or hotel-based strength training, the fewer changes you will experience, but don’t be concerned about large changes.



What about planned rest periods or planned “deloads” from muscle and strength exercises?

You might think “I’ll take a rest week every 6-8 weeks of strength training, so what is the smallest amount of strength training I need to complete to maintain all my training strength and muscle gains?” Generally, 1-2 weeks of active rest away from the gym will not affect your gym gains (Does Taking a Break Matter—Adaptations in Muscle Strength and Size Between Continuous and Periodic Resistance Training). If life is crazy or mentally you need a break, have one. This can be called a “reactive deload” or a suddenly planned reduction in weekly total exercise volume that mostly offers a psychological break from the stressors of challenging but healthy exercise. Taking a break from monotony or re-establishing a sense of control over lifestyle factors outside of exercise that might affect your sense of recovery from the gym is a good reason to have a deload. There does not seem to be a predictable benefit from planned deloads, such as thinking, “I’ll take a rest week every 6 weeks of training,” unless you are trying to peak for a competitive performance. We used to believe “super-compensation” occurred after rest from non-sustainable weekly progressive exercise, and rest would allow this super-compensation to be realized. However, all that is occurring is general fatigue that accumulates during non-sustainable progressive weekly exercise, which reduces when we have a rest week, giving the perception that we have gotten stronger, but really, we have only just reduced fatigue that was hiding our ability to express our new adaptations from progressive exercise. If your exercise routine is sustainable and effective at promoting long-term exercise adaptations (fitness, strength, muscle), you should not need planned rest weeks. If your goal is general health or building tje most healthy amounts of aerobic fitness, strength, or muscle, you should not need to plan deloads but an occasional reactive deload is fine and will not harm your long term gains.


Reactive deloads are also helpful in physiotherapy, where a flare-up of a previous injury or new injury reduces current tolerance to normal amounts of exercise. Reducing exercise dosage without stopping everything supports the immune and nervous systems in doing their thing, calming the whole body down before building up tolerance to movement again. As said already, you do not need to be concerned about setbacks from 1-2 weeks of reduced exercise prior to building back up again.


Positively, you only need to do about a third of the previous weekly lifting dosages (or half if you are older) to maintain muscle mass and strength completely (No Time to Lift? Designing Time-Efficient Training Programs for Strength and Hypertrophy  + Long-Term Time-Course of Strength Adaptation to Minimal Dose Resistance Training). So if you do 10 sets of an exercise a week, being active outside the gym and completing 3 challenging sets (4-5 sets for over 60 year olds) of that strength exercise weekly is sufficient to maintain your gains (Exercise dosing to retain resistance training adaptations in young and older adults).



More info about planned versus reactive deloads for strength and muscle performance, see these links:

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