Name: You Stopped Exercising. The Gains That Stuck Around Might Surprise You.
Uploaded: 2026-01-28T10:19:34.000Z
Duration: 9 min 24 s
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You and I both know that I am not a fitness influencer.

So I am here with the relatable fitness content, the guidance for the average person who tries to be a little healthier by making a resolution to go to the gym every January and never makes it through the whole year.

When you perhaps inevitably stop exercising, it can feel like all of that effort was for nothing.

Like you lose the gains that you worked so hard for.

But there's research out there telling a different story.

Studies suggest that even if you give up exercising after only weeks of sticking to your your goal, you keep some of the improvements.

You could pick up that good habit months or even years later and still benefit from the work you put in before.

As it turns out, your burst of motivation can help you out for longer than you might think.

You know exercise is good for you, and so do I.

That's why every year around January, we spend just enough time using that gym membership to justify keeping it.

Many people quit after a matter of weeks.

So many that there's a name for this time.

After a new year, when your gym empties out, it's called Quitter's Day.

So if you're thinking about dialing the exercise back right around now, you're not alone.

Whenever your own personal Quitter's Day is, that's when you begin the long process of detraining.

This results in your body slowly losing the gains you made during your temporary training regimen.

And luckily, it doesn't all happen immediately.

In fact, some of those gains stick with you for long enough that your next gym attempt is more effective.

Now, perhaps you are watching this video from a treadmill, still going strong with your New Year's resolution.

But if your resolve is starting to waver, whatever time you've already spent working on yourself has been worth it.

Let's say you stick it out for 16 weeks of exercise this year.

If you start in January, that would bring you to April.

Maybe you quit at that point and take the next 10 weeks off.

You might think that your resolution training was all for nothing.

This exact timeline was tested in people aged 60 and older, so the resilience that researchers found wasn't just a matter of being young.

Study participants started out completing a circuit of either strength training exercises, like what you might do at physical therapy, or moderate cardiovascular exercises, like biking for 20 minutes three times per week.

As the study went on, they ramped up the workouts from all that hard work.

Participants improved both their cardiovascular endurance and their muscle strength.

Then when they stopped, some of the gains were lost.

It's when the researchers looked at which gains stuck around that things got interesting.

After weeks of detraining, the participants.

Participants didn't all end up back at their baseline from before training.

They held onto a significant amount of cardio fitness.

Their recently acquired muscle strength, on the other hand, went away faster.

So over 10 weeks, they were definitely in a period of detraining.

But it didn't completely demolish their progress, particularly for the cardio group.

In fact, when they started retraining again after 10 weeks of break, the effects of the two training sessions were additive growth in metrics, like how efficiently their body took in oxygen built up on top of progress made during the first training session.

So by the end of the second training session, they had made cumulative improvements despite substantial time away from the gym.

The effects were strong enough for the researchers to conclude that training is easier when you have trained before, even if it's been a while now.

That's a lot to promise for you, the New Year's resolution exerciser, especially because you've probably been there before.

I doubt this is your first year staring down Quitters day and feeling feeling a bit less motivated than you were on January 1st.

But one thing research tells us is that the results can vary depending on the kind of exercise you do.

In this study, the participants that focused on strength training lost more of their gains than those that honed their aerobic fitness.

And even within the aerobic exercises, the treadmill warriors had more cumulative payoff than the cyclists superstars, which is a shame because I do not want to run.

So gains from different exercises last for different amounts of time, but

even gains from the same exercise can wear off sooner or later depending on the intensity of your training.

Another study tested this in a group of older men described as healthy but inactive.

These participants trained on either a low or high intensity exercise program for 24 weeks.

Both programs involved strength, power and mobility exercises like cycling and weight machines, three times per week.

The difference between high and low intensity training was the number of reps, resistance and, you know, intensity of those exercises.

Once again, nobody's surprised that the high intensity group had greater gains from that training schedule than the low intensity group.

The interesting thing was how they compared after months of detraining.

At that point, the high intensity group still had their improved strength and mobility, but

The low intensity participants kept almost half of their strength after four months of detraining, but

four months after that they were back to baseline.

So after completing low intensity exercise, 8 months of inactivity will put you back to where you started, but

if you pick things up sooner than that, you can start back in better shape than you might think.

Also, if you completed high intensity exercise, then your gains will decline from inactivity, but

you won't go all the way back to baseline, even a full year after stopping, which means that more intense exercise seems to stick with you for longer.

But before I get to the data on the kind of really intense exercise that competitive athletes are familiar with, we need to pause for an ad break.

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Some of the most intense training sessions happen in the context of athletic competition, and

even elite athletes build their detraining periods into their annual exercise plans.

They wouldn't do that if it were a total loss of all the progress they made until then, and

One small study assessed this pattern in adolescent swimmers.

These volunteers each had at least five years of competitive experience and had been training six or seven times per week.

They were serious athletes, and even they took four weeks off.

After those four weeks, their overall performance dipped a bit.

They came back with a slower stroke rate and reduced aerobic performance.

But that aerobic reduction was only by a factor of 1.8% and and many other metrics were statistically unchanged.

1.8% matters in a competition that decides winners and losers over fractions of a second.

But thinking about the bigger picture of how many adaptations your body keeps despite stopping your regular training, 1.8% deterioration over a month is impressively minimal.

But that's what happens when you're still competing and just took an off season to recover.

The impression we get from our average viewer is that if you competed when you were a student that might have been years ago.

The good news is there could still be some leftover benefits sticking around from your glory days.

Depending on your physical condition at the start of detraining, you could take years off and still have physiological adaptations from that time in your life when you regularly exercised.

One longitudinal study checked up on high school hockey players over time to see how long they retained their athletic adaptations while training players who exercised more gained more bone mineral density.

So the researchers assessed the player's bones using X rays in almost six years.

Years of follow ups after high school, half the athletes stopped playing hockey and lost some bone mineral density, but

it was still significantly higher than non athletes three years later at the final follow up assessment.

A similar yet small study tested female gymnasts and found that they also had more bone mineral density than their non athletic peers even four years after they stopped competing.

At this point, both former gymnasts and non gymnasts in the study were exercising less than four hours per week on average, but

the gymnasts still had greater bone mineral density than the non gymnasts.

All these studies concluded that it takes time for the benefits of exercise to wear off.