Title: How Much Training is Necessary to Maintain Strength and Muscle? - Bret Contreras
Headings: How Much Training is Necessary to Maintain Strength and Muscle?
How Much Training is Necessary to Maintain Strength and Muscle?
How Low Can You Go
Exercise dosing to retain resistance training adaptations in young and older adults
Phase I
Phase II
Conclusion and Practical Applications

Content: So next time you feel overwhelmed and find yourself wanting to quit training, just remember that you can keep your hard earned gains by training very infrequently (albeit extremely intensively). So now you have a cool anecdote pertaining to strength and hypertrophy retention during times of reduced training frequency and volume. But is there any research to support this? You’re damn right there is. Check out this link to a 2011 PubMed abstract published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise – a highly reputable Sports Science journal: Exercise dosing to retain resistance training adaptations in young and older adults
Let me first commend the researchers on a badass study design. Having conducted studies myself, I can appreciate the amount of work that went into this study – they trained 70 subjects for 48 total weeks (almost an entire year!) and recorded numerous variables of interest throughout the entire study period. There are other studies too that examine detraining, but in this article I’m going to focus on this study simply because it’s the most comprehensive to date. Phase I
The researchers first took the 70 adult males (31 adults were age 60-75 and 39 adults were age 20-35) through a rigorous 16-week training regimen that had them performing the following workout 3 times per week: