In an ideal world, you would lift weights 3–5 times every week of the year. But sometimes life is designed to flood your days with unhappiness and for some reason — family, business, personal stuff, extended travel — you can’t devote much time to training until things get better. And so two options swim into your mind:
- You can either stop training and face the consequences of training cessation on muscle and strength loss or…
- You do the minimal amount of training necessary to preserve muscle and strength.
Obviously, the former is not particularly, or even fractionally, a capital idea. So you go with the latter and train only as much as necessary to maintain your current body composition and strength. But how much is that?
Well, Barry et al. (2021) conducted a brief review on how much training is necessary to preserve muscle and strength:
They looked at similar studies done on the topic and found that for the general population — you and me — very little training is needed to maintain your current size and strength:
