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: The point of this blogpost is not to get you to switch over to HIT or HDT, it’s to make you realize that if you ever find yourself overworked or simply drained of working out 3-6 days per week, there’s a viable alternative that can allow you to maintain (or even improve upon) your performance while only training once every five days or so. Many people are accustomed to multiple sets and can’t “get a lot” out of one set. As your physiology and coordination adapts, you get really good at doing one set to failure on this type of program. * Disclaimer: Obviously beginners respond best to more volume and frequency as they are weak and uncoordinated/neurally inefficient and don’t get taxed as much from a metabolic, muscular, neural, endocrine, and immune system perspective. 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: