Will You Lose Progress From Skipping Workouts?

While I can’t sit here writing this and recommend skipping workouts, what I can tell you is this:

If you take some time away from lifting weights, you won’t really lose progress.

There have been a handful of times in the last 12 years where I stopped training for an extended period of time.

One of those times was 4 months when I injured my shoulder pretty bad, and I definitely lost considerable muscle tissue.

But the other times?

They were short-lived breaks of a couple weeks or less and when I got back to it…

The muscle that I seemed to lose came right back.

To back this up, several years back I listened to episode 185 of the Revive Stronger podcast where Steve Hall was talking with Cody Haun about re-sensitization phases for people who took breaks from working out.

In that episode, he referenced a couple studies where people took either 3 weeks off or 6 weeks off.

The findings?

The 3 week break didn’t cause any muscle loss for consistent lifters.

And even the 6 week break group didn’t lose as much muscle as they thought.