Study examines the effects of skipping workouts.
By Muscle & Fitness Hers Staff
February 24, 2009
The reasons why you may not get to the gym are numerous, but what happens when a missed workout develops into an eight-week hiatus? Apparently a loss of cardio fitness and strength, finds a report in the International Journal of Sports Medicine. Spanish researchers followed a group of breast-cancer survivors who had previously trained before their treatment for 16 weeks - eight weeks of regular workouts and eight weeks of no workouts. At the end of the detraining period, scientists found that the improvements in strength endurance and muscle functional capacity subjects experienced during the training period did not significantly change, even though there were profound losses in muscle mass. So if you take a short break from the gym (3-4 weeks maximum), you'll still retain at least some of your training gains.
