Adam C. Stewart
Returning to training after a break can be intimidating. In this article you will learn practical tips on managing the training load and choosing exercises for the first weeks or months in the gym.
Since I started hosting the Stronger Dad Collective Podcast, I have become more aware of the effects of the seasons of life. We are going through stages: you can study for several years, work in a certain industry for a while, live in different places or raise young children. Each of them represents a different stage of life and has a direct impact on the things we prioritize and the decisions we make, including our exercise habits.
It is not uncommon for someone who has already devoted a lot of time and effort to their strength training to immediately drag it down or even completely off their priority list. I have heard such stories from a number of guests on the Podcast, as well as through conversations with friends and colleagues.
Sometimes life forces its hand on you, or maybe the Motivation to work out decreases, and the next thing you know, you haven’t exercised in a few months, or even years.
If this sounds like you, I hope you can take encouragement from this article. The main objective is to give you practical strategies that can help you resume weight training effectively. So let’s go.
Keep the enthusiasm at bay
If you are still reading this article after The Introduction, it probably means that you want to resume training. So this first section may seem a little counterintuitive. But it is important that your Motivation does not decrease quickly because you are too zealous at first. If you exercise wisdom in the first few weeks, I think you will be more successful in the long run.
Most of us have felt the pain caused by executing a new training plan or performing unfamiliar exercises for high volumes. I have experienced this myself many times, usually when I go straight back to work at a higher volume in the first weeks after the competition; the muscle pain can be quite debilitating. Fortunately, there is a better way.
This path involves a week of introduction-or even a few weeks. The purpose of this introductory training is to take advantage of the repetition effect, thus relieving the pain and fatigue that can occur after an not-known workout. This is an effect that has been regularly demonstrated in the literature.
For example, Nosaka et al. (2001) found that groups of participants who performed initial workouts with only two or six maximum eccentric biceps contractions experienced less muscle pain than a group that performed 24 maximum eccentric biceps contractions… not surprising. But even the group that performed only two maximum eccentric biceps contractions –and felt minimal pain during this training session -received enough Stimulus that the pain was reduced when they performed an strike of 24 maximum eccentric biceps contractions two weeks later (see Figure 1 below). Interestingly, the group that performed an initial action of only six repetitions actually achieved as great a protective effect against sore muscles as the group that performed 24 repetitions in its first session – showing that it does not need a large dose of training to get the benefit of the repeated action effect
Similar protective effects have been demonstrated for low-intensity exercise. In: Huang et al. (2019) found that performing eccentric contractions using loads as low as 10% of the maximum isometric contraction force could induce protective effects on high-intensity eccentric contractions subsequent to 80% of the maximum isometric contraction force. In this study, the experimental group performed 50 eccentric contractions of low intensity.
With a high number of repetitions, he did not cause muscle pain. The low-intensity contractions were performed by the experimental group two days before 50 high-intensity eccentric contractions, while the control group did not perform any previous activities. Nine different muscles were tested and protective effects were detected in all muscle groups – although the magnitude of these effects varies. For comparison with Nosaka et al. (2001), the results of elbow flexor pain are included in Figure 2 below. Together, these results show that the repeated action effect can be achieved with low-volume and low-intensity approaches.
