How to Get Back Into Strength Training After A Long Break From Lifting | Powerlifting for Beginners

With news of gyms re-opening in certain locations, you may be wondering, “what should be my plan of attack when I finally get back to my powerlifting training routine?”

While many of us want to immediately jump back into the heavy weights, we know that this isn’t the smartest route to take.

Before we can figure out our plan of attack, we need to first get a better idea of what has been going on with our bodies since we’ve stopped lifting as heavy.

How long does it take to lose Strength & Muscle?

Depending on what you’ve been doing from home, its likely that there is both strength and muscle loss.

While there aren’t many studies out there that revolve around powerlifting, there are a few studies we can look at to get a better idea of what to expect.

For the most part, it looks as if it takes about ~4 weeks of time away from the gym to lose muscle. The good news is that if you’ve kept your activity levels high with at-home workouts, its likely you have held onto a decent amount of muscle. Our biggest concern now is whether we’ve lost strength.

As we know, strength and muscle involve two different training concepts. With that being said, if we’re maintaining stimulus on our muscles, but not necessarily training for strength, it’s likely we’ve still lost strength. This study on Rugby players shows the effects inactivity has on our strength and power. In this study, they found that it took ~3 weeks to begin losing strength.

It’s been longer than 3 weeks for most of us, so if you don’t have a barbell and weights at home, it’s likely strength has been lost. Essentially what this means is that we’re starting to see the effects of detraining.

what does detraining look like for powerlifters?

Detraining for a strength or power athlete may look different than it does for the average gym-goer (which typically considers cardiovascular health as well).

Some of these signs of detraining for powerlifters are:

• Decreased performance

• Strength loss

• Muscle loss

• Inactivity

• Increase in body fat

• Increase in resting heart rate

These are things we need to be aware of when going back to our training. These same signs are also what may end up happening if you overtrain (keep this in mind for later).

Understanding General Training Concepts

Most understand that its not a great idea to go back to hitting 95% of your 1RM’s right off the bat. The reason for this is because of how we know our bodies to adapt and recover.

When considering general training concepts (graphic 1), we understand that there’s only a certain level of training volume that we can hit before we reach overtraining — aka we can no longer recover from our workouts.

If we’ve truly become detrained and lost strength, this means that the amount of volume we can handle when going back to the gym has also decreased (graphic 2). Therefore, if we go too heavy too quickly, this will work against us.

What Does Our Central Nervous System Have to Do with Powerlifting?

Our Central Nervous System (CNS) is often talked about in powerlifting when it comes to overtraining; it plays a big role in our recovery as athletes.

It plays a role for all of us in training, but we focus on it more specifically with athletes because they tend to tax their system more than the average gym-goer due to the effort that is required to be at the level they’re at or the level they want to be at.

More on the role of our CNS— it determines how quickly and effectively we will move the weight on the bar. This means that if we immediately load up heavy weight when getting back to the gym, even if we are technically “strong enough” to lift it, our CNS isn’t prepared to handle this weight after a long hiatus.

Doing this, at minimum, may mean failing lifts, but it’s also very likely you’ll end up injured as well due to the lack of preparation that the CNS had in handling that weight.

Getting Back Into Powerlifting after Quarantine— The Game Plan

The most effective way to get back into powerlifting after quarantine is to start back in a hypertrophy phase with a moderate to heavy weight (70-85%). This allows our body and CNS to adapt to the stimulus and relearn this weight, while also slowing leading back into higher volume.

If we haven’t lost muscle, we won’t necessarily need to stay in a hypertrophy phase for too long. For most people, 5-7 weeks may be all it takes.  The easiest way to recognize whether your body is adapting well is to train with percentages, but also gauge these percentages with RPE. If you’re doing hypertrophy sets at 75%, but it feels like RPE 10, then your body is still adjusting to the stimulus and volume. This is to be expected.

Once the RPE’s and percentages start to better align, it’s a sign that your body has better adapted from the two months or so off from training. The good news is that muscle memory will likely allow us to bounce back relatively quickly, especially if you’ve been in the game for awhile.

From there, you can likely ease back into whichever periodization or programming structure you had already been working with prior to quarantine. 

Keep in mind, whatever programming your body is most familiar with is what will likely work best to ease into coming out of this.

For example, if you started working with daily undulating periodization (DUP) two months before quarantine, but had been doing linear periodization (LP) for much longer- easing back into LP will likely be more effective than what your body is less familiar with.

What If You Stopped Training Completely? What Can You Do Right Now to Prepare?

If you’re someone who isn’t getting back into the gym yet due to personal preference or maybe you’re still stuck in quarantine (like me), there are still actions you can take in quarantine if you haven’t already.

Focus points in quarantine include:

• Providing stimulus to the muscles with whichever tools you may have (bodyweight, TRX, bands, light weights, etc) and with a higher rep range, more weekly sessions, more sets, etc.

• Spend more time working on mobility drills and exercise correction 

• Keep protein high to help preserve muscle

• Keep activity levels up in general, such as walking to avoid the effects of gaining weight from detraining

Final Notes

Getting back into our powerlifting routine is something all of us are going to have to get used to. This is the best way, in my opinion, to get your strength back up effectively (and relatively quickly) while also avoiding injury.