How Much Training Volume is Required to Maintain Progress?

Building muscle, improving your endurance, and working on your flexibility all takes a ton of time, and a lot of hard work. Even the smallest amount of perceivable change in any of these areas can often take weeks or even months to occur. This is why it’s not uncommon for some folks to feel a tad overwhelmed by the idea of what it takes to maintain their progress. To them, they may think, “if it took this much effort to get here, then what do I need to do to stay here?” If it took me months of being diligent with my diet, tracking everything meticulously, and never missing a workout to lose those 45lbs, then do I need to keep doing all that in order to maintain my progress??

The short answer…No

From a weight management standpoint, that’s all gonna come from your nutrition. And luckily, you don’t have to go the rest of your life tracking everything down to the very last gram - I have a whole article going over exactly how to move away from tracking in case you’re interested. But from a physiological perspective, the amount of effort needed to maintain progress is actually far less than what’s required to build. In order for the body to adapt, you first need to put it under short bouts of stress (lifting weights, training mobility, doing cardio). And over time, the body will change in order to meet the demands and make these activities less stressful. Larger/stronger muscles make lifting heavy weights easier, greater range of motion reduces excess tension on certain joints and allows for more freedom of movement, and greater aerobic capacity allows your body to move longer without getting tired. 

So before we answer the main question, let’s first explore how much work is required to make gains.

From both a muscle and endurance standpoint, it’s important to note that beginners will always see the biggest jump in progress, mainly due to the novel stimulus they’ll receive. But for the average gym goer, 10-20 working sets per week is what’s generally deemed as “optimal” for building muscle, with 2-5 sessions per week of between 15 or more minutes being the recommendation for cardio endurance. 

And I promise I’m not just pulling these numbers out of my butt. These numbers are reflected off of both research and personal anecdotes from other trainers, trainees, and various gym goers over the years. But as I alluded to earlier, these numbers are not the end all be all; there is a HUGE individual variance when it comes to how much volume is required to make gains, as I’ve seen people build muscle off of as little as 3-6 working sets per week. One of the  most important factors is having the right level of intensity. A “working set” is where you’re pushing your muscles close to their limit - putting them to work. If your workout calls for 3 sets of 10 reps (3x10), those are 3 working sets. Now, you can do as many warm up sets as you’d like, but don’t make the mistake of mixing those up with your work sets. If sets 1 and 2 barely felt like a challenge, but set 3 did, then that would mean you really only technically did 1 working set.

• Though on a side note: a complete beginner will see some level of gains even with subpar intensity. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn't stand to make greater progress by ramping up their efforts closer to failure.

What you’re looking for is something around a 7-8/10 on the difficulty scale. The very last rep should be slow, and it should be a bit of a struggle to get up. And the reason why I just went on that tangent is because intensity will determine how little volume you’ll need in order to maintain your progress. 

• To maintain strength, young adults may be able to sustain strength levels for up to 32 weeks with just 1 workout per week with as little as 1 set per exercise (given each set was at least 80% maximum effort). Whereas older adults may require slightly higher volumes, closer to 2 sessions per week with 2-3 sets per exercise. (University of Alabama Study)

• Meta-analysis covering the minimum effective dose for increasing maximal strength. Based on limited data, 1 high effort set per exercise, once per week, can both maintain and even in some cases, increase strength levels. (Unfortunately, the full text is locked behind a paywall)

• Even for cardio, so long as the effort remains high, you can sustain endurance on lowered volumes. This study looking over session frequency found that vo2 max can be maintained on as little as 2 sessions per week while keeping the sessions around 40 minutes in length and at an intensity of around 90% max heart rate.

• While this study covering session duration found that a cardio session’s time can be reduced by as much as 66% while keeping the normal weekly frequency. This maintained vo2 max and short-term endurance for about 15 weeks, though long term endurance did suffer a bit with a 10% drop in the group only training for 13 minutes.

• And from my own personal anecdote, I’ve found that I can maintain my levels of endurance on just 2 hard cardio sessions per week, each lasting roughly 20 minutes in length.

So to wrap it all up: the amount of effort needed to maintain progress is much less than what’s needed to build. This is great news, as if you’re taking a vacation or need to go on a business trip, you can feel rest assured that you won’t lose any progress. And in some cases, you might actually return stronger than where you left off! 

The only real caveats you’d encounter would be a temporary decrease in strength levels, and possibly looking a little “flat. When you don’t train your muscles for a couple weeks, your nervous system may become temporarily less efficient in signaling to the muscles to generate force/power. And when you stop training muscle, its glycogen stores become depleted which in turn, reduces its stored water content. This reduces the muscle’s overall volume/size, making it seem as if you’ve lost all of your precious gains. 

But both of these are temporary - after a session or two, you’ll be right where you left off. But in the event you need to take some time away from the gym, for whatever reason, you don’t need to stress about losing all your progress. Apart from losing some stored water within the muscle, it’s actually pretty hard for the body to lose muscle. It takes weeks and weeks of no physical activity for the body to even start the process of pairing muscle down, and that’s under the assumption you’re consuming next to no protein. If you’re still moving around throughout the day, occasionally picking up objects, drinking water, and are consuming carbohydrates and protein, it’s gonna be quite a bit before you start losing any muscle.

So please, if you’re going on vacation, enjoy it. Don’t worry about losing your gains, it’s not gonna happen. Hope this helps!

Talk soon,

-R