HOW TO GET YOUR GAINS BACK ?

I’m sure that by now you’ve been away from the gym long enough and are pumped to get back at it. Transitions sometimes feel awkward and there is a vagueness in fitness circles when it comes to getting back on track. I want to help you with this goal by laying out four steps for getting back to the gym after a layoff. The idea is to strategically rebuild all the muscle and strength you lost as quickly as possible, without setting yourself up for injury or overtraining. 

I’ve found that after a training break, most people just don’t want to hear the standard ‘slow and steady’ advice. Chances are, you want to know, “How do I get my gains back quickly? – and I don’t want it to take another year before I’m back to where I left off.”

You can expect to grow like a new lifter (if you have a plan).

Other than taking steroids, which I don’t recommend, the only other way to experience newbie gains twice, is to stop lifting for a while and then start again. Keep in mind, you’ll experience newbie gains again in the sense that you’ll quickly get back to where you were, not in the sense that it’ll somehow “slingshot” you past where you were before (although, given the motivation that comes with speedy progress that may be something to speculate on, but not in this article). 

This is because of the very powerful muscle memory effect that I talked about in my last blog post: research repeatedly shows that it’s much easier to rebuild lost muscle than it is to build new muscle from scratch.1,2 So, in this sense, you might even consider yourself more supercharged than a newbie, depending on just how much muscle you lost.

Considering the need for a plan, it’s fair to say that your comeback begins before you even walk through the gym doors. If you want to get your gains back as fast as possible, it’s absolutely imperative that you have a structured comeback plan written down, before you set foot in the gym. If you freestyle it, you will be very tempted to overdo it and, as a result, throw off the delicate balance between stimulus and recovery.

If you are new to pin squats and doing them to parallel, I would recommend starting with something around 65-75 percent of your one rep max for four-six reps. If you set the pins higher, you can load much closer to your max. As you get used to the movement, you can progressively lower the pins from there.

 If your lack of confidence in your squat is holding you back, it will help to pick one of these priming drills and do it once every couple of weeks.