Last week, I discussed the importance of taking time off early if you feel something that might be an impending injury.
You might have left that asking how much am I going to lose? How much is that going to set me back?
Well, hopefully it goes without saying that a few days off before something is bad is far better than taking weeks or month off after it got bad but here are some details on what you lose and how much time it takes to get it back.
First, a lot of this information is pulled from a very good discussion with sports scientist Ross Tucker on the Science of Sport Podcast. If you want details or references, I strongly encourage you to listen to that episode and check the show notes.
So, what do you lose if you stop working out cold turkey? Interestingly, whether we’re talking about low end aerobic fitness, high end aerobic fitness or strength, you lose fitness at about the same rate: 2-4% of fitness per week.
Even better, it takes only about 20% of your former training load to cut this loss in half if you can maintain your intensity.
So what does this mean?
First of all, if you can catch an injury early and can limit your time off to a week or less, you’re losing very little fitness. If you can do a minimal amount of training, you’ll maintain a lot more but don’t do that at the cost of extending your recovery time. Three days completely off would be better than six days at a significantly reduced volume because you lose about the same amount of fitness but can start building it back up sooner.
Second, it means you don’t want to let an injury go on and get so much worse that you need a significant amount of time off. Losing about 3% with one week off isn’t that big of a deal. Compounding that 3% per week over the course of a month means you’re losing over 10%. Two or three months? Let’s try to avoid that.
But how long does it take to get the fitness back? More good news if you catch something early. Whatever you lose from no training takes about 1/2 the time after resuming training to get back. So, if you have to take a week off, give yourself 3-4 days to return to normal and you’re back at your starting point in a week and a half.
Obviously, this is some bad news again if you wait and need more time off. Do you have to take a month completely off? Well, you’re going to be looking at another half month to get back to where you were. That’s a month and a half of lost time. Do you have to take even more time off? Well, you could lose a whole season’s worth of fitness gains pretty quickly.
So do what you can to avoid long layoffs by taking a shorter amount of time off when you first notice a problem. You’ll lose less and require less time to get back to where you were. Losing a week or a week and a half of progress is a lot better than six weeks or three months.