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What Is The Minimum Dose of Exercise to Maintain Gains?
This Week’s Research Highlight
Background
Every time you exercise, your body launches a cascade of physiological responses. Your heart rate increases, blood flow shifts to working muscles, and energy systems kick into high gear. These acute effects generally subside after a few hours. But it's what happens after you leave the gym that really matters — the adaptations your body makes to prepare for future challenges. Think stronger muscles, greater endurance, improved heart function. These develop over weeks and months of consistent training.
But of course, as you get fitter and stronger, it usually takes progressively more time and effort to continue to improve. This is even more true if you are trying to develop multiple pathways concurrently, like if you’re trying to enhance cardiorespiratory fitness and muscular strength at the same time. Trying to maximize both simultaneously, at this point, can become akin to a full-time job.
For elite athletes, spending hours per day training different fitness components may be feasible. After all, it is their job. For the rest of us, not so much. This balancing act gets even more difficult in November and December, when the holiday season gobbles up more of our precious time and energy.
This is where new research from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens offers some hope to time-crunched exercisers everywhere. Their study tackled a crucial question: once you've built strength and endurance, how little training can you get away with while maintaining these adaptations?
Experimental Approach
A team of Greek researchers recruited 34 healthy female college students who hadn't engaged in systematic exercise for at least 2 years.
After establishing baseline fitness and strength levels, the women (aside from seven controls) were put through a 12-week concurrent training program (combined resistance + aerobic exercise), in 1-hour sessions performed twice per week.
Each session consisted of:
- 10-minute warm-up
- 5 minutes of slow cycling
- 5 minutes of stretching
- Resistance training (leg press)
- 2 warm-up sets
- 4 work sets of 6 reps at 80-85% of one rep maximum
- Full recovery between sets
- Endurance training (HIIT cycling)
- 10 sets of 60-second cycling at 100% of maximal aerobic power
- 60 seconds passive recovery between each set
After completing this initial 12 week program, researchers documented the womens’ aerobic and muscular improvements. Since these women hadn’t really been doing anything previously, they saw substantial gains in response to the exercise regimen, including a 28.7% increase in leg strength, 20.4% improvement in aerobic power, and 13.1% increase in quadriceps size.
Next, the trained participants were randomly split into three groups. For another 12 weeks, they performed the same concurrent training workouts at the same intensity, but at a significantly reduced frequency:
- G7: Continued training, once per week
- G14: Continued training, once every two weeks
- GD: Complete detraining (no exercise)
To capture potential effects of detraining, the researchers measured:
- Muscle strength (leg press 1-RM)
- Muscle size (quadriceps cross-sectional area)
- Aerobic fitness (maximal aerobic power)
- Body composition
- Muscle architecture
From there, the researchers analyzed how the attenuated training frequencies affected the fitness and strength gains that the women had accrued through the initial concurrent training program.
Findings
After 12 weeks of the reduced training (or detraining) regimen, the researchers performed their final measurements and compared the groups.
Here is what they found for each group.
Once per week training (G7):
- Maintained 100% of strength gains
- Preserved all muscle mass gains
- Kept all aerobic fitness improvements
- No loss in performance measures
Once every two weeks training (G14):
- Maintained 95.6% of strength gains
- Preserved 94.1% of muscle mass
- Retained 91% of aerobic fitness
- Minor performance decrements
No training (GD):
- Lost most gains within 12 weeks
- Returned to baseline levels in most measures
These graphs show the trajectory of aerobic power and leg strength gains in the women after 12 weeks of systematic training and then 12 weeks of reduced frequency training/detraining. You can see that the initial progressive training routine, twice per week, led to steady gains in fitness and strength. Then, when they reduced their training to just once per week or once every two weeks, they stopped improving but at the same time their performance metrics didn’t get substantially worse, even over a three month period. Meanwhile, detraining caused the women’s strength and fitness to fall back nearly to where they started.
Key Takeaways
Once every two weeks appears to be a minimum effective dose.
Training just once every two weeks can maintain 90-95% of your fitness gains, as long as you maintain the same intensity during your workout. You won’t see continued improvement, but you’ll be able to largely keep the adaptations that you previously built from that training, i.e. speed, strength, endurance, etc.
This is incredibly useful knowledge if you’re an athlete who is trying to concentrate on building one training domain while maintaining another. For instance, if you’ve been working on building your maximum squat but now you need to improve your mile time, you can switch your programming to focus on running, while squatting at a much reduced volume. It’s also encouraging for regular exercisers, when life gets in the way and you can’t make it to the gym every day (like most of us around the holidays). Which brings me to the next point.
A little is far better than nothing at all.
If you’re someone who normally trains multiple days per week, you might assume that doing just one workout every two weeks would be insignificant, hardly worth the effort. But this study demonstrates that even just training every other week is vastly better than completely stopping exercise. Over a period of three months, it could be the difference between staying at the same level of fitness and strength, versus losing most of your hard-earned gains.
When you do work out, keep it hard.
The key to maintaining your gains with reduced frequency is keeping the workout intensity and duration the same. Don't reduce the weights or effort level just because you're training less often. Like, let’s say that you were previously building your stamina by running at 6 mph for 30 minutes twice per week. If you wanted to maintain that level of fitness on a less frequent schedule, you would want to run at 6 mph for 30 minutes once weekly or once every two weeks, rather than run at 5 mph for the same amount of time, or run at 6 mph for 15 minutes.
Cardio fades faster than strength and muscle mass.
Finally, one thing that jumped out at me is that aerobic fitness showed a greater decline in response to reduced training, and it fell off even more precipitously in response to detraining. This makes sense physiologically. Strength and muscle mass hinge on structural and neural adaptations that are relatively stable (“muscle memory” is a real thing!). In contrast, cardiovascular and metabolic adaptations associated with aerobic fitness are more fragile: plasma volume decreases within days of ceasing training, aerobic enzyme activity declines, mitochondrial density is reduced within weeks, etc.
With that in mind, you may want to invest more of your precious time in cardiovascular training during busy periods, while keeping some high-intensity strength work. Then, when you’re able to return to a regular schedule, you should expect strength to bounce back quickly, while cardio may require a little more work to restore.
Random Trivia & Weird News
🪖 Prior to the Battle of the Bulge, General Patton tried to clear up the terrible weather via prayer — and appears to have succeeded.
The winter of 1944 was among the coldest recorded in European history. At one point, there were 10-12 inches of snowfall in a single 24-hour period. Needless to say, not ideal conditions for a ground-based counteroffensive. In December, the Germans thought that they had the Allies in a tight spot.
General George Patton had other plans – and an unconventional meteorological strategy. Before leading the Third Army's dramatic push to relieve the besieged town of Bastogne, the colorful general decided that if nature wouldn't cooperate with his battle plans, he'd take it up with a higher authority.
He asked his chaplain, Colonel O'Neill, if there was a prayer for improving the weather prior to battle. Unable to find a suitable prayer for this very specific demand, the chaplain composed a spiritual requisition himself.
When the skies, sure enough, cleared shortly after, Patton awarded the chaplain a Bronze Star on the spot – possibly making it the first and only military decoration ever awarded for weather negotiation.
So great was his confidence in O’Neill’s prayer, Patton ordered 250,000 copies printed on cards such as this one
Podcasts We Loved This Week
- Jamil Zaki: The surprising science of cynicism. Via Plain English with Derek Thompson.
- Kevin Maki & Carol Kirkpatrick: Losing body fat and keeping it off. Via The Proof Podcast.
Products We Like
Venture Pal High Sodium Electrolyte Drink Mix
When it comes to athletic performance, sodium is paramount among electrolytes. But it’s not just about replacing what you lose in sweat during your workout — sodium is a crucial component in maintaining blood plasma volume.
Here’s why this matters. Sodium helps your body retain water in the bloodstream. More blood volume means improved oxygen delivery to your hard working muscles, better heat dissipation during exercise, and reduced cardiovascular strain during intense efforts.
The problem is that most electrolyte formulas that you see in stores don’t contain enough sodium to actually achieve this, especially through hard training bouts in the heat. Venture Pal, in contrast, has a full 1000 mg of sodium per packet, with no added sugar or other additives. It’s also very affordable, compared to similar products.
It comes in four mild flavors that effectively counterbalance the saltiness of the supplement. I’m a fan of the watermelon flavor, but all of them are pretty good — I’d recommend getting the variety pack and trying them before committing to a single type.
humanOS Catalog Feature of the Week
The How-to Guide to Ergogenic Aids
Searching for ways to optimize your athletic performance? Check out our guide to ergogenic aids.
Ergogenic aids are simply supplements or dietary compounds that can influence adaptations to training. They can achieve this in a couple of different ways. One is acute performance enhancement: boosting training capacity and/or lowering perceived exertion during workouts, which in turn enables you to get through harder training sessions. These substances can also improve gains by altering cellular responses to exercise-induced stress, affecting long-term training adaptations.
Here’s the dilemma: the relationship between performance enhancement and adaptation is more complicated than you might think. For instance, a supplement that makes your workout feel easier might have a negative impact on the long-term adaptive response to training. In other words, some common supplements could impede your progress despite immediate perceived benefits.
In this guide, we review some of the most rigorously researched supplements, discuss how best to use them, and talk about why some supplements that sound like a good idea may actually not be helpful at all. If you are looking to optimize your performance, dive into our comprehensive guide for some evidence-based recommendations.
Wishing you the best,
