More often than not, our lives inside the gym and outside of it exist on somewhat different wavelengths. To ourselves, our training lives are often idealized visualizations of what could be, given mostly favorable circumstances. Although many of these circumstances may exist within our own minds (discipline, effort, focus, etc.), there are just as many circumstances from the real world outside the gym that pry their way into our training lives, devouring the amounts of valuable resources related to time, recovery, and stress management.
This is, in my opinion, a reasonable thing to expect from any of us who have meaningful obligations outside of training, such as family, a house, work, hobbies, our own acute health concerns, etc. I don’t think that I’d be stepping too far out on a limb here by assuming that this includes most of us folks occupying the vast middle of the population bell curve.
In fact, this is one main reason why I don’t schedule in full deload weeks for some clients ahead of time, because life inevitably schedules their deload for them once every 4-6 weeks, whether it be in the form of an emergency home repair, a sick child, work travel, a scheduled family vacation, etc. This is usually never a big deal, as most people can recover their progress just fine as long as their training around the time off is kept consistent.
What does pose an issue though, is when this brief deloading speed bump is extended. Maybe the family vacation goes well, but then work sends you on the road for 5 days on your return week. With this unexpected extended length of time off from the gym, you can not only expect a deloading effect to have taken place, but likely a significant detraining effect as well, meaning that any prior progress is probably going in reverse. Which begs the question, how do I approach resuming training when I finally get back to the gym?
Although I’ve tackled this issue countless times in the past with myself and my clients (prodding me to eventually sit down and come up with a set strategy), I’ve chosen to write about it now because most of us currently find ourselves in the same big boat as a result of the recent COVID-19 pandemic.
Now I’m not here to make a long post about the virus, act like an expert virologist, decipher news sources’ integrity, or debate over or under-reaction to the situation. The fact of the matter is, executive decisions have been made, mandates have been enacted, and concerning the subject of this post, most of us find ourselves unable to go to any gym or training facility due to mandatory closures and quarantine procedures… for at least a couple weeks.
That’s the situation we all must deal with. Now, given that you are (hopefully) keeping yourself and your family healthy as well as limiting exposure to large groups of potentially contagious individuals as your foremost priority, a secondary, less concerning reality is the disruption of your training.
A little disclaimer… if you’re someone fortunate enough to have outfitted part of your home with adequate equipment that allows you to continue your training without skipping a beat, then I’m not talking to you here… although I do envy you.
As for the majority of us who don’t have access to this kind of equipment during this time, our options are quite limited. Social media has been erupting recently with ideas for at-home, no-equipment workouts, although most of these workouts are carbon copies of each other. I’m not faulting anyone for this, it’s just the cold hard truth – if you’re used to participating in intense strength and resistance training that involves the use of relatively heavy loads, there’s really not much you can do to to replicate that stimulus at home besides doing excessive volumes of bodyweight exercises like pushups and lunges.
Even then, the adaptive carryover may be minimal at best depending on your training demands and level of training experience. If your level of strength dictates that you consistently squat with weights between 300-400 pounds just to maintain that strength, how many bodyweight squats do you think you’ll have to do just to keep from regressing? In this kind of situation, a more realistic expectation is that the bodyweight squats will prevent lower body muscle loss, or at least slow the muscle loss process down.
I’m not going to write out any home workout examples for any others that find themselves in this situation… as I said, it’s been listed a hundred different ways – huge volumes of bodyweight exercises in any order will at least help minimize muscle loss. But then the question starts to become what to do when you that glorious day arrives when your gym opens its doors again and you can finally train with some normalcy again.
Enter: my (Not-So-Patented) “Layoff Linear Progression.”
Everyone who has been training for some time is probably warmed with nostalgia when they see or hear the term “linear progression.” Who could forget the good ol’ days of being a beginner when progressing was as simple as adding weight every week? Other periodization variables? Don’t even look at them. Showing up every workout and scaling your numbers up gradually is all you needed to expect results. Sadly, the reality is that after plateauing at the end of a linear progression, most of us say our farewells to it and never truly return.
Well, here’s the good news: after a long layoff and its accompanying detraining, you can use the same principle (with a few tweaks) to regain your results efficiently. The goal is to at least get back to where you were relatively quickly, letting you pick your training back up sooner than you would if you just started from scratch again or spent a week or two wallowing around in your self-pity.
So where do you start a Layoff Linear Progression? With a beginner linear progression, I like to recommend starting very conservatively, working up to a weight on each exercise that leaves maybe 4 or even 5 reps left in the tank at the end of each set. This is because as a true rank beginner, you can still harvest a good training stimulus from an intensity that low. However, as a more seasoned trainee, training with an intensity that low for all your sets is likely sub-optimal and just not much of a stimulus. Therefore, you need to work up to a weight that raises the intensity a bit – perhaps leaving 2 reps in the tank at the end of the set (think around an 8 RPE).
After you’ve found that weight, we’ll still play the conservative route by doing a load-drop for the following set(s). I’ve found a good value for this decrease to be about 90% of the top set’s weight – so a 10% drop in load.
On your first week back, I would recommend capping the backdown sets at just one or two sets. It’s not going to take a ton of volume to create a lot of stress after coming off a layoff from training, so hit your top set, take some weight off, hit one or two sets and be done. You’ll be adding backdown sets week to week anyway. It’s also worth noting that it seems more logical to keep the amount of backdown sets lower for exercises that are inherently more stressful, like a deadlift or a low-bar squat. This setup works best for compound lifts that can be loaded in even increments, but if you want to do any “odds and ends” isolation exercises like abs, delt raises, or band pushdowns, just keep the volume and overall stress of each exercise to a minimum.
During your second week, you’ll keep the intensity and rep ranges the same for each exercise, but add a backdown set across the board. In fact, you’ll do the same for each week thereafter until you’ve approached the training loads you were using previous to your layoff. Even though the intensity level of each lift is constant, your top weight will end up increasing each week as your body begins to “re-train.” The increase may be a little different week to week, but it should at least continuously trend upward in a linear fashion. I would recommend keeping the volumes for those “odds and ends” exercises the same from week to week, you can slowly add weight to each if you can.
What this process ends up accomplishing is a strategic way to put weight back on the bar over time while simultaneously moving from a minimum effective dose of volume back up to a considerable dose that you can still tolerate. And because the top sets are never pushed all the way to failure, you’re likely to stay in a favorable stimulus-to-fatigue ratio for most of your work, including the subsequent backdown sets.
What I (along with most clients) have been surprised to find with this strategy is just how fast you can recover gains. The first week is often very humbling, but it’s assuring when just a few weeks later, you’re basically doing 5 sets or so with weights that are pretty close to what you were handling before your layoff.
Here’s an example of what a Layoff Linear Progression might look like:
Previous training: 5×3 with 300 lbs
Week 1 of Layoff Linear Progression: 1×3 @ 275 lbs, 1×3 @ 225 lbs
Week 2: 1×3 @ 285, 2×3 @ 255
Week 3: 1×3 @ 300, 3×3 @ 270
Week 4: 1×3 @ 310, 4×3 @ 280
Week 5: Resume Training!
Clearly, this setup can vary quite a bit depending on your training goals, rep ranges, numbers, etc. Thus, I don’t really have a patented, set-in-stone template for a Layoff Linear Progression, but more of systemized approach to recovering all that precious progress that you may have felt was lost forever when you were torn from that sanctuary of yours known commonly as a gym. The underlying key is not to panic or pity yourself – have a plan and a little patience, trust the process, and execute.
Strength Scrolls 