How quickly does your fitness, which you’ve worked so hard and long to build up, decline?
It happens: you don’t train for a few weeks, and your fitness seems to be back to square one. This phenomenon is called detraining, which means your muscles and endurance decrease when there are no training stimuli.
If you stop training for more than a week, the effects of detraining start to become noticeable. Completely stopping training has little to no impact on the adaptations in bones and joints, even after many years. Other adaptations, such as those in your heart, take several years to fade. Improved blood flow (capillarization) in your muscles disappears after a few months. Strength and endurance decline more rapidly — often within just a few weeks.
Your level of training is a key factor: the more years of training you have behind you, the slower the decline and the quicker you’ll bounce back to your previous level.
It’s absolutely worth continuing to exercise in an alternative way. That way, you can prevent the major drop in fitness described above.