Do Strength and Muscle Decline When You Stop Resistance Exercise?

You’re reading a study summary from Foundation Chiropractic, the best Chiropractic clinic in Lutz, FL.

Original study:

Halonen, E. J., Gabriel, I., Kelahaara, M. M., Ahtiainen, J. P., & Hulmi, J. J. (2024). Does Taking a Break Matter-Adaptations in Muscle Strength and Size Between Continuous and Periodic Resistance Training. Scandinavian journal of medicine & science in sports, 34(10), e14739. https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.14739

At a Glance

A study looked at 42 adults who were new to weight training. It found that people who trained consistently for 20 weeks gained about the same muscle and strength as those who trained for 10 weeks, took a 10-week break, and then trained for another 10 weeks.

Main Points of the Study

The people in the study followed a consistent strength training routine, working out their entire body twice a week. These workouts were supervised by the research team to make sure everyone did the exercises correctly.

To check how strong the participants were, the researchers tested how much weight they could lift in a single effort using a leg press machine and a barbell curl. They also measured muscle growth by using ultrasound to look at the size of specific muscles in the thigh and upper arm.

The group included both men and women—about 55% were men and 45% were women—ranging in age from 18 to 40, with the average age being 32.

Researchers looked at how taking a break from weight training affects muscle size and strength — and whether taking a break could actually help your muscles grow faster afterward.

As you might expect, people who took a 10-week break from working out (called "periodic training") lost some muscle size and strength during that time. That’s pretty normal. Other research shows that if you stop training for 2 to 3 weeks, your muscles mostly stay the same. But if the break is longer, you do start to lose both size and strength — usually more size than strength.

In this particular study, here’s what happened during the 10-week break:

• Leg press strength dropped by 5.4%
• Biceps curl strength dropped by 3.6%
• Thigh muscle size (specifically, the vastus lateralis) shrank by 9.9%
• Biceps size shrank by 7.3%

Other studies have found similar things: after 7–8 weeks off, the size of leg muscles dropped around 5%, and in one case, leg strength dropped by more than 20%.

But here's where it gets interesting: when the participants started training again, the ones who had taken a break actually regained their strength and muscle size faster than those who trained straight through without stopping. After a few weeks of being back in the gym, both groups ended up at similar levels of strength and muscle size.

This "rebound effect" — where your muscles grow back faster after a break — has been seen in other studies too. For example, in one case, people who took 20 weeks off were able to regain what they lost in just 5 weeks of training.

This idea has led some people to wonder: could taking short breaks on purpose actually be a smart way to train? Maybe stepping back for a week or two could make your muscles more responsive when you return.

But the research doesn’t really back that up. Studies that compared people who trained straight through vs. those who took a 1–3 week break in the middle showed no real difference in long-term results. The short breaks didn’t seem to boost muscle growth or strength gains.

And even though those who took a long 10-week break in this study bounced back quickly, their rate of progress during retraining wasn’t actually better than their rate when they were first starting out. So the fast gains just helped them catch up — they weren’t building new muscle any faster than before.

So, what does this mean for the average person?

If you take a couple weeks off from lifting weights, it’s not a big deal — you might lose a little progress, but you’ll likely bounce back pretty quickly. Longer breaks (like 10 weeks) will cause noticeable losses, but again, most of it can be regained fairly fast.

That said, constantly starting and stopping probably isn’t ideal if your goal is long-term progress. Over the course of years, taking long breaks after every training period would likely hold you back.

If you know you’re going to have a busy period — traveling, on vacation, feeling unmotivated, whatever — it’s better to scale things back than to stop entirely. Just doing fewer sets (say, 3 to 5 sets per muscle group per week instead of 10) while keeping the weight challenging is usually enough to maintain your muscle and strength — and sometimes you might even make small gains.

What we think

The big idea from this study is that taking a longer break in the middle of a weight training program doesn’t really mess up your long-term muscle growth. But since the people in the study were new to lifting, the results—like how much muscle and strength they lost during the break and how fast they bounced back—might not apply to folks who’ve been training seriously for a long time.