How Little Strength Training Runners Need to Maintain Muscle

You're listening to the Restoring Human Movement podcast, where movement experts discuss the latest evidence-based practices to help you and your clients move with mastery. Hey everybody, it's your co-host Sebastian with the Restoring Human Movement podcast. Thanks for joining the show. Over the next few episodes, we're going to do some special topics or some research updates that we periodically do here at Performance Place to make sure that our virtual telehealth sessions and our in-person ones are the most efficient they can possibly be when we're working with people with knee conditions and hips and low backs and feet and so on.

Now, I can tell you right now that I was actually surprised by some of the findings in these research papers from the Journal of Strength and Conditioning, so I'm going to give you some of the updates and bullet points as I find them. If you guys ever want to work with us, we do have virtual and consultation options, and you just need to call us at 714-502-4243 or email us info at p2sportscare.com. Let's get into the show. Life throws you curveballs and sometimes our carefully planned fitness routines can take a backseat. But what if maintaining your hard-earned fitness didn't require endless hours at the gym or on the road?

Today, we're going to deep dive into the science of minimal effective dose, which is one of my favorite topics. I'll tell you why in a moment. And how little exercise you can get away with, with maintaining your endurance and your strength. We'll explore some critical roles of frequency, volume, and intensity. And we'll figure out maybe what's best for the busy professional individual versus the competitive athlete. The reason why I really like this topic is because I know over the years, so I'm 42 at the time of this recording, And I feel like life is pretty busy. There's a lot of things that are drawing my attention.

And I feel like the time spent at the gym or doing cardiovascular fitness is less than it's been when I was in my 20s and 30s. And it's not to say I can't get some of it back, and it doesn't mean I can't reorganize my life, but do I want to? So what do I need to do to decrease the amount of time spent in the gym, but still really not lose what I have? I like what I have, but I don't really need to or want to have more. So for those of you out there listening, this may look like you want to keep running at the amount and intensity that you have been and not have extra time at the gym. You may feel like you want to offset potential of injuries, but it seems like a daunting task to do all of the stuff, all of the stretching, all of the weight training, just to do the stuff that you've been doing you can get away with in your 20s.

So I personally think that there is a minimal effective dose, and I didn't really look at this paper until recently. So this is one from the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. I will put a link in the description for the podcast. And this is from 2021. It's called Maintaining Physical Performance, the Minimal Dose of Exercise Needed to Preserve Strength. And sorry, let me read that one more time for you. It's the minimal dose of exercise needed to preserve endurance and strength over time. So this is, again, a topic that's been near or dear to my heart, but I feel like I've had the logical approach of thinking back in the day.

I remember when I was trying to get bigger or larger, I would spend more time in the gym, but I would also spend more time eating, right? So you need to make sure you're getting all the parts in to accomplish the goal. But also, it was a lot of work to do a little bit more time and get a little bit more food in. It was more expensive, and I would really gain about 10 to 20 more pounds. So what is kind of a happy medium where your body spends most of its, we'll call it homeostasis. It's just kind of happy there, right? It's easy to maintain. You're happy with your physical endeavors. You're running as much as you want.

You're working out as much as you want, and you're playing as many sports as you want to. So in this, we're going to deep dive a little bit more into some of the things that we can potentially skim back on. Now, the variables that we're interested in is frequency, volume, and intensity of exercise. With respect to endurance training, this is for you runners out there, frequency refers to the number of training sessions per week that endurance exercise was performed. For example, three sessions per week, volume refers to the amount of time spent exercising, example, 30 minutes per session. And intensity refers to the percent of maximum capacity sustained during the exercise, such as percent maximum heart rate.

Example, 80% of heart rate max. Regarding strength training, remember, now that was endurance. This is strength training. Frequency refers to the number of sessions per week that strength exercises were performed. For example, two days a week. I went to the gym two days this week. Although if we were speaking in specifics for strength training, volume of strength training essentially means the number of sets multiplied by the number of reps. The study refers to volume as altering the numbers of sets, keeping the numbers of reps the same per set. And thus, it's more like the exercise load. Finally, although methods existed for defining intensity in strength training, the study referred to intensity as defined as the load used relative to the individual's maximum ability.

More specifically, intensity was prescribed either as a percent of one rep max, for example, 80% of one rep max, or as a maximal load that could be lifted for a given number of reps. For example, the maximum load that can be lifted for 10 reps or 10 rep max. Now that we have all the particulars and definitions aside, let's get into actually what changing those variables did and see where we can potentially skim on things. Now, if we're going to reduce frequency, reduced exercise frequency has received considerable attention in strength training research over the years. So, for example, when we're going to reduce exercise frequency, we're going to reduce exercise frequency.

We're going to reduce exercise frequency to one session per week. So, it looks like one time a week was the bare minimum over the course of eight to 32 weeks. For muscle size, the minimum frequency of exercise necessary to maintain adaptations may depend upon the age of the subject. So, younger individuals, such as ranging from the age of 20 to 35, as little as one session of strength training per week, seems like it may be sufficient enough to maintain muscle size. Whereas older individuals from 60 to 75, one strength training session wasn't always good enough to cut it. So, therefore, older individuals, we conservatively recommend that performing two days a week of resistance training is enough to maintain muscle size.

And I think that would just keep it more on the safe side. Now, when it comes to reduced volume, there's not really any research that isolates that variable. But there are some papers that help us understand reduced frequency and volume at the same time. So, I'll cover those just a little bit here. There were a few papers in this bracket here. And again, go to the article if you want to read a little bit more in detail. But generally, they found that strength and muscle size were fully maintained for about eight weeks. We can perform as little as about one session per week. And especially in younger individuals, but the older seem to respond to this as well.

The muscle size was mainly maintained with a single training session with younger individuals up to 32 weeks. But again, just like reducing the amount of frequency, it seemed like going towards two sessions a week was enough to hold strength and muscle size, even though we are reducing frequency and volume with older individuals. Remember, if you're reducing frequency and volume, you still have to keep intensity about the same. If we're going to talk about reducing intensity, they mentioned that one study investigated the effects of reduced intensity on the maintenance of muscle strength. They published a report where subjects trained isometrically for nine weeks at 100% of maximum voluntary contraction and then reduced the frequency and volume and intensity of the astrometrics for about eight weeks.

They found that repetitions performed at 100% of maximum voluntary contraction effectively maintains strength, whereas repetitions performed around 50% were insufficient to maintain strength. So what they recommended was that the intensity should be able to stay high near maximum intensity levels to maintain strength. But you can also do that isometrically. It doesn't have to necessarily be with high amount of load or one rep maxes. So as you guys can see, as you can see, you can decrease the amount of intensity, frequency, and volume a little bit if you're trying to do more of a maintenance phase.

It seemed like for older individuals, two days a week and incorporated in some 100% muscle contraction was going to be important, while younger individuals can get away with one day a week, but still keeping some maximum voluntary muscle contraction in there, even if in the form of isometrics. So personally, I think this is nice because what we at least have seen with some of our clients who have had injuries is that they tend to have an injury more so associated to having large fluctuations in intensity, frequency, and volume. So to give an example, they are having problems getting four days a week of resistance training or with running or with sprinting.

And they do it for a few weeks and then they drop off for a month or so and then they go back to it again. And so there's a lot of spikes and valleys in their program, in their exercise, frequency, intensity, and volume. And that provides more of a stage for an injury because there can be a lack of preparedness. As you can see, there is a minimum level that the person can keep around to keep some of their gains and not go back to zero. But the big danger is that if all that is really high and they go to zero. And I think what we find a lot of people are doing is that when they have their first injury occur, they go to the, well, I'm going to shut it down type of mode.

And they end up doing nothing, which deloads all of these factors. Like they can't, you can't deload all these, like you got to keep something around. And I have known from some of the rehabilitation that I've done with my knee is we did 100% maximum contraction within the first week to keep that tissue online and make it so I wasn't losing any of my quad strength. So that was really nice because one of the risk factors associated to more knee injuries is a lack of quad strength. So making sure that you're programming yourself or having someone program you appropriately based upon your availability is important, but also helping you find out what's safe when you're working around other injuries is important too, because you can't completely deload.

I hope this was helpful to everybody. It gives you some insight of some exercise changes that you can do, at least to keep some of your maintenance around. If you guys are looking for program design from us, we do have lots of videos on YouTube, which help give you exercise variations that may be more appropriate to your aches and pains and discomforts. Great. Thanks for hanging around for the show. I hope you guys learned as much as I did by doing some of these research papers. Remember, if you want help with digesting down what your condition may need to get better and how you can get back to physical activity, just call us or email us for a consultation, which is super affordable.

At this point in time, it's $29 for 30 minutes. That's with me, Mandy or Dawne Costantino. And I can't guarantee you to be that price forever, but I think right now it is. So call us 714-502-4243 or email us info at p2sportscare.com. Make sure you go into the description for the show for the links that I talked about in the podcast and subscribe and like the show if you learned anything at all. See you guys next time.