Gaining is hard. Maintaining is easy. But how little do you have to do to retain your hard-earned muscle mass?
DETRAINING
In our holiday article, you already read that your gains won’t disappear overnight if you don’t train for a week or two. Your body doesn’t simply break down muscle, even if you don’t train at all for a while. This is provided you continue to eat enough calories and protein.
According to an oft-cited study on detraining, you can safely take a two-week break from training.
The fact that your muscles can survive for a while with zero sets per week already shows that for maintenance, even in the long term, you don’t need to do nearly as many sets as you do for muscle growth.
TRAINING FREQUENCY
In a new study, researchers wanted to know how often you need to train to maintain your gains. After a 12-week training block, participants then trained either once a week or once every other week for 12 weeks.
What turned out? Training once a week was enough to prevent detraining, but training every two weeks was not enough and resulted in a gradual decline in strength and muscle mass gains.
The participants were female physical education students, but they were completely untrained.
TRAINING VOLUME
Training once a week doesn’t tell you much, but how many sets should you do per muscle group? Fortunately, more research has been conducted, including among advanced strength athletes.
A 2024 meta-analysis on training volume included 67 studies with over 2,000 participants. The minimum effective dose for muscle growth was found to be approximately 4 sets per muscle group per week.
From this, we can deduce that 3 sets per muscle group per week should be sufficient to maintain muscle mass. However, advanced and older strength athletes will likely need more sets.
Therefore, we state: to maintain muscle mass, you generally need about 3-6 working sets per muscle group per week, assuming you train the sets to near failure.
3-6 sets per muscle group can easily be done in one workout per week, if you cannot or do not want to train more often than that.
This just goes to show that training to maintain muscle doesn’t have to take a lot of time and effort.