Sometimes an injury or unforeseen family issues force us to stay away from the gyms. It is therefore not uncommon to have to resume training after weeks or months of inactivity.
The problem, very often, when you do not keep a minimum of training, is that you generally tend to drop good dietary resolutions. Consequently, the loss of muscle mass due to inactivity often combines with fat gain due to dietary deviations.
It is true that when you do not have a particular goal and life is putting your feet on the wheel, you have difficulties to keep an exemplary course of action.
So what can we do to limit the damage?
If you are injured, it all depends on the type of injury. If you are on a hospital bed, there is not much else to do but be pampered by the nurses. You are also much less likely to make mistakes in nutrition, given the food which is offered in hospitals. On the other hand, if you have only one partial wound, you can take advantage of it to work on muscles you sometimes neglect. I see too many people who are spraining their ankles and completely stopping the training so they can take advantage of it to work twice, some of the upper muscles or do a little more of their forearms! I had the opportunity to have practitioners in my gym who had lost the use of their legs but were fully engaged for all their able muscles. So having a pain on the foot should not block you.
Others have a shoulder pain and could work a little more their legs. In short, it is easy to find an excuse to have a rest. There is also an excuse for overtraining. Believe me, throughout my career, I have not seen many people overtraining. Most indoor practitioners do not go far enough in their training to risk any overtraining.
So, do not hesitate to always keep in touch with your gym, with your workout. It's not because you do not know how to do a perfect workout that you cannot progress. You can also simply keep track of your gains until you can start making progress. You will not have to start from scratch.
I think that in difficult times for whatever reason, you can retain much of your learning with one session per week!
If you need to start again after a stop, forget your past performance and take the time to let your body return to its best level gradually. The longer the downtime, the more likely your performance will disappoint.
Also, if you work as a powerlifter or as a weightlifter, you will be very disappointed. I often hear clients tell me that they do not take half the weights of their last workout. If they give me a good phony excuse, I often tell them they should not have stopped. But I also remind them that weight is not always the right measure of the quality of a workout. In my opinion, to restart after a stop, you have to concentrate on the muscle with light weights because even if you had kept the strength, your recovery will certainly not be adapted and especially your joints and tendons will not have the same resistance. Do not forget to spare your body if you want to keep it performing as long as possible. So rather than want to impress the girls in the gym or show your friends that you are an indestructible beast, stay focused on the basics: keep an evolutionary performance.
Psychologically, it is also always better, because you will never be disappointed with your workout if you have concentrated on your muscle: It will be well congested, you will feel like you have done an effective workout. While if you are aiming to take heavy, you will never attain the maximum level of performance you are used to; you will always be disappointed.
Concentration is the secret of volume. Arnold used to say that when he was doing the biceps, he visualized them, closed his eyes and imagined them as tall as mountains. So eliminate what keeps you from focusing or learn to focus on the muscle you want to work on. I often see people training by focusing on music in the room or worse with an mp3 headset. For me, it is interesting when you do cardio or when you want to perform some performance. But do you think this will help you focus more on the muscle you want to feel? Do you think you can imagine your biceps as a mountain listening to the tempo or the lyrics of a song? But maybe Arnold and I do not know anything about it. For you it is surely different. Moreover your measures are surely there to prove it? No? You do not measure yourself? You do not need to know if you are progressing? Maybe that's why you do not have to concentrate, you're just talking. So that's fine, you're right.
Try to stay logical and listen to those who know how to make you progress. Since I started practicing, I have always heard specialists in gyms, they talk more than they train. This will not change, let alone with low-cost gyms where there is no qualified instructor. And so where everyone can improvise monitoring.
Try to listen to the logic, start again gently, take advantage of this feeling of swelling and appreciate it. You can always increase your weights later and even anticipate periods of performance. But do not forget that if an injury can only stop you, a second injury will not accelerate you in your progression. Let the wounds stop you, but do not stop!
Do not forget to feed yourself properly, to take a supplement of vitamins and minerals, you ask for more effort to your body, it will tend to produce more waste, it must be allowed to better fight the free radicals and therefore Vitamins will help you. Glucosamine will also allow you to keep your joints in better condition. Do not hesitate to foresee it in your diet, it can allow you to avoid some injuries. To nourish your muscles, on the other hand, do not forget the proteins. To start over, it is important to properly feed your body according to the efforts it produces or must produce.