Gyms are slowly starting to reopen. Those amongst you who've been equipped with a respectable home gym, barbells, dumbbells, benches, and the like are excited at the prospect to get back into the old stomping ground. But those whose training for the last 2-3 months with only some bands and bodyweight methods are chomping at the bit.
Lack of training equipment, (likely) smaller exposure to movement patterns, lack of intense loading, lower volume threshold and now a thirst to get back and lift heavy to make up for lost time/muscle/strength may hardly make for the most prudent approach to training.
Accept the tough to swallow pill that you're not the same person you were 3 months ago.
You'll have lost some strength. You'll have lost some size.
Avoiding a 0 to 100 mindset is going to do you the world of favours upon your return to the gym, and to the style of training you're accustomed to, if you want to set yourself up for long term progress with gaining size and strength and minimising risk of injury.
My approach to resuming training after extended periods of inactivity, holidays with no gym, injuries, or in this case a global pandemic draws heavily from my own experiences. A bit of context for you before I tell you what you came here to read!
In 2018 I discovered an inguinal hernia in my left groin. I won't get into the probable causes as that's a topic for another article. After months of trying to ignore it as it prevented me from doing heavy compound training without serious discomfort, I had laparoscopic surgery, and then complete rest for 4 weeks (that's no training whatsoever). I came back too soon however and was back to doing weight training after a month. Trying to lift weights I was used to, that felt "easy", pushing myself too hard in an attempt to make up for the lost time. Naturally, in 2019 I found out I had 2 hernias! One in my right groin and one in my umbilicus. Surgery in July of 2019, and then I took the doctor's advice and my own and didn't touch a weight for 12 weeks (only steady-state cardio a few times per week after the first 4 weeks). This time I came back gradually, set myself a game plan, and didn't succumb to my ego even though I was impatient to get back to my former strength and size.
The tips I share below are based on my first post-surgery rodeo that failed, and my 2nd, more prudent return that I consider a success.
Training for Hypertrophy?
Your primary goal is size. Becoming a brick shit house. You've lost some thickness in your erectors (no heavy deadlifts), quads and hamstrings don't pop quite as much (no hack squats, leg presses, and squats) and your arms don't quite fill the sleeves anymore.
The main driver of hypertrophy in my opinion is volume. Total weight lifted, which has been in shorter supply for the last 3 months. Naturally, your tolerance for volume will be lower, and the requirements for you to induce hypertrophy will also as a consequence be lower. This presents an opportunity to exploit. It's not enough to just lift a weight to force growth, you need to also create tension in the muscle through sufficient load and muscular contraction. Applying a minimal dose method, in this case, can work well.
Following my 2nd surgery rest, I could probably have taken the 34kgs for a spin after 3 months and squeezed 8 reps out on incline press. But my technique would have been sub-par. I wouldn't have been able to control the weight sufficiently to create a good amount of tension and take the momentum out of each rep. I would also have run into problems in a couple of sessions as my starting point would have been too high, and it would have been very tough to progressively overload each week.
I started with 16kgs (you're probably reading this going "why the hell would you do that if you could lift more than twice that?"), and each week I progressed to a heavier set of dumbbells while keeping my reps the same. I ensured that I was in full control of the weight, able to create tension, didn't cheat tempo, and made sure I gave myself plenty of room in the future to progress. Not only did I look at this as a chance for my joints to become accustomed to lifting heavier, but I also used this time as extra healing for my scar tissue in order to minimise tears or reoccurring hernias.
While others were lifting heavier around me but staying at the same weight for weeks with shitty technique, I stayed in my lane, upped weight by a couple of KGs each week (a great psychological booster by the way) and within 10 weeks I was already up to 30kg dumbbells with great technique and tempo. The resulting improvement in muscle size in my chest was also significant. But most importantly, I set myself up for success by starting from lower, honing my technique, and reaping the hypertrophy gains from each incremental increase.
The rationale is simple. Your tolerance for volume is lower. So will you make more progress from lifting a weight that's 90% of your max in week 1 and then going in circles for the next 4 weeks because you can't progress in reps or weight, or starting with maybe 50% of your max, increasing that by 5-10% each week and consistently hitting heavier weights under control? My answer would be the latter.
It may be helpful in looking at a fairly common (and quite likely) scenario if you were to return to training at nearly full speed from the get-go.
Weeks 1 & 2: lift HEAVY, feel good about yourself and ignore the little twinge you feel in your knee/shoulder/lower back
Week 3: tweak the aforementioned knee/shoulder/lower back trying to lift heavier than the previous week
Week 4-7: take time off from the lift that did it (it wasn't the lift, it was you) and maybe the body part altogether
Week 8: get back to training the lift or the body part
Week 9-11: Get back to the level you were at pre-injury
Week 12: Making progress
Out of the timeframe above, 2 weeks were spent making progress, while the other 10 were spent resting and trying to make up the ground that was lost due to the injury. It probably would have made sense to start a little more conservatively and make progress for 12/12 weeks instead. While that might seem extreme, and you may be thinking "it won't happen to me", the reality is no one plans for injuries, they just happen when you least expect it.
The focus upon your return should be one of accumulation. A gradual build-up of workload over the next few weeks to get you moving better, shifting some weight, and re-training movement patterns with a moderate load that will challenge you. In essence, treating it almost like a GPP phase where you bring up different attributes of your fitness in preparation for the subsequent harder blocks of training.
Though earlier I mentioned that I added weight in very small increments each week, this doesn't need to be the only way to increase your session volume. You can also start with a higher initial weight, still well below your max, and aim to hit 6-8 reps. The following week, keeping the weight the same you might now shoot for 8-10 reps, and the week after 10-12 reps after which you would increase the weight and start again. This way the intensity of the sessions isn't pushed too hard, but the volume goes up. There are many ways to skin a cat, but the take-home message is to give yourself plenty of room to progress, add volume and recover so that you're physically and mentally ready to drop into a higher gear when the time comes.
Training for Strength?
Training for strength differs in that our focus becomes on driving intensity up as volume comes down. But similarly, and perhaps even more importantly, the importance of a preparatory training cycle will be hugely important if you've lifted nothing heavier than 20kg dumbbells for the last few months.
Your current deadlift max is going to be lower. No doubt about it. Strength is specific and while you'll have maintained a based level, not training the deadlift will have meant some loss of neuromuscular and muscular coordination, and the lift won't feel as technically sound. During sub-maximal and maximal effort lifts, there will be some technique breakdown. We're moving things from A to B, and it's heavy, so while good form is still important, some technical breakdown is expected, which is fine. But this should only be the case if you're a lifter with good technique, and can "safely" allow technique to suffer as you're moving heavier loads. If you haven't trained with heavy dumbbells or a barbell for a while, you're probably not in a position to throw such caution to the winds just yet. I'll give you an example that relates to unsafe technique breakdown.
In 2018 I'd had a period of probably 4 months of not training the conventional deadlift. I'd spent 4 months leading up to that doing 12-6 rep pyramid sets of deadlifts with a colleague at the gym, which in hindsight was a real dumbass idea. We got strong, but we also beat our bodies into the ground. I didn't want to go near a deadlift for a long time. When I did, I worked up to 150kg but my grip wasn't coping very well. I'd never used lifting straps before as I didn't believe in them, so I thought this would be a perfect time to try them out. I thought to myself: I'd lifted more a few months back, 150 is a walk in the park if only my damn grip wasn't acting up. Straps on, bar up, and my lower back tweaked. I spent the next 6 months doing the McGill Big 3 every day. My rationale was that I hadn't built up my grip strength by deadlifting regularly, which meant my joints and muscles hadn't been exposed to the loads and given time to adapt and strengthen alongside my grip. When I pulled that bar up, it was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak.
Back to getting strong. So, assuming our starting intensities (loads) will be lower to bring up the Big 3 or 4 or any of your primary output exercises, this opens up some possibilities in terms of frequency. As volume and intensity are down, the frequency can be brought up, which is useful for skill acquisition. Training lifts more than once per week will keep movement patterns fresh and enable you to hone in on technique, which can form the basis of your preparatory training phase. Following the preparatory phase, it's up to you then to determine if you want to follow the traditional strength model of training lifts once per week or go with a more undulating programme, max effort method, or any of the myriad of ways to structure a strength training programme. This will largely come down to requirements, the goal, individuality, and compatibility, as well as recoverability.
Once you've spent a few weeks ironing out technique kinks, accumulating some training volume with lower intensities, you're in a much better and safer position to start building up strength. But it's important to also keep in mind, that many will read the term 'preparatory phase' as it pertains to training and look at it like 3-4 weeks that they could spend on getting jacked and strong. The thing is, what you'll be doing during the prep phase is still going to be so much more than what you've been doing up until recently - size, strength, and improved work capacity are going to be an obvious byproduct. Change your mindset to how you approach your training in the early stages.
Live strong and prosper.
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