How Much to Lift to Maintain Strength
Simple strategies to keep your hard-won gains when you’re on vacation, strapped for time, or can’t get to the gym as often as usual.
When the pandemic hit, Barry Spiering, PhD, research physiologist, decided to tackle a question he’d been thinking about since the early 2000s, when he was working at the NASA Johnson Space Center:
What is the minimal dose of exercise needed to maintain fitness over time?
He partnered with a few colleagues to dive into the scientific literature for a review published by the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in May 2021. What the research showed blew him away.
While endurance fitness can be maintained for 15 weeks with two hard weekly sessions, just one strength training session per week (and one hard set per exercise) is enough to maintain strength in younger populations1 for up to 32 weeks — or more than 7 months.
The key? Making sure those sets matched the intensity of a typical training day.
“Some people feel obligated [to] do three workouts a week, every week,” Spiering told me, “but what the science says is a little bit of exercise once a week can help you maintain for a little while. … It gives you permission to take it easy on yourself.”
In one study, professional soccer players who completed one weekly strength training session over 12 weeks maintained their established weight for a one-rep max in the squat, while those who only lifted every other week lost squat strength. Another study showed that younger participants could even increase their strength with a single weekly session, but that finding may be more relevant to beginners than to seasoned lifters.
None of the studies observed powerlifters or elite strength athletes and most of the studies only looked at one aspect of strength, such as squat strength, so it’s not clear whether the once-a-week finding holds true across the board. But it’s likely that a high-intensity (here meaning heavy weight) session per week over several months would at least reduce strength loss, if not prevent it altogether. For those of us who have a modest amount of strength, one session per week at a high intensity should be enough to maintain our strength over a few months.
What to Do in Your Weekly Strength Session
This will partially depend on your goals. Are you mainly looking to maintain squat or pullup strength, or do you want to maintain full-body strength? Your ideal weekly session should emphasize the things that are important to you. You’ll want to prep your body as you would for a regular workout and do one high-quality set of each priority exercise at a challenging weight.
Here’s what we recommend for full-body strength:
1. Prioritize compound movements.
Think: squat, deadlift, row, overhead press. These lifts engage the whole body and cover more ground than, say, a bicep curl or reps on a quad extension machine, helping you achieve greater exercise volume and intensity in less time.
“I would recommend at least one movement that’s a lower-body pushing movement, an upper-body pushing movement, and an upper-body pulling movement,” Spiering said. “At the very least, I would want to do either squats or deadlift, or maybe both, and then I’d do at least one set of bench and at least one set of either pullups or rows.”
2. Do your usual rep range at a weight you typically lift but find challenging.
If you usually lift in the 8- to 12-rep range, do the same thing here. Load up a weight that you would normally move. We’re looking for something heavier than your warmup weight that won’t push you to failure but will require you to lock in. This might look like 50–65% of your one-rep max if you’re lifting 8–12 reps or 70–85% for 3–5 reps (just examples, not prescriptions).
“The science says just choose the same weight, the same number of repetitions [that you normally do],” Spiering says. “The practical part of me says, just make sure that you’re choosing a heavy enough weight that requires a high enough degree of mental effort.”
You shouldn’t load up extra weight to make up for doing less sets. Just load up the amount that you would typically do toward the beginning of a challenging lifting session, and make sure you’re properly warmed up before executing the lift.
3. If you don’t have access to a full gym, get creative to keep intensity up.
The most important factor of the once-a-week session is intensity. Drop the intensity and you will lose strength. But maybe you don’t have access to a full gym for a while and that’s why you’re concerned about losing strength — what should you do then?
Brennan Thompson, PhD, Associate Professor of Kinesiology and Health Science at Utah State University, recommends integrating eccentric and unilateral movements.
“Eccentric training focuses on the lowering phase of a movement, the part where your muscles lengthen under tension. Think about lowering a dumbbell in a bicep curl or descending into a squat,” Thompson said. “Slowing down that lowering phase — say, taking four to six seconds instead of one to two — can make a light weight feel much heavier.”
Try slowly descending into the squat or slowly lowering the barbell back to the floor after a deadlift. You can apply this to pushups: take five seconds to lower yourself to the floor. “This increases the time that the muscles are under tension and the overall effort without needing more weight,” Thompson said.
Unilateral, or single-arm and single-leg movements, can also increase intensity when only light loads are available. Try pistol squats, lunges, single-leg Romanian deadlifts. You can use slow eccentrics to make these more challenging or do higher reps and a greater number of sets. It won’t be quite the same as moving a heavy weight in your usual mode, but it should still help offset strength loss.
4. Don’t just do nothing outside of your workout.
Whatever your reason for only being able to work out one time per week, you’ll still want to incorporate movement into your day-to-day. This might look like swimming or playing volleyball at the beach. Playing tag with the kids at a family gathering. Opting to walk from dinner to a show during your trip to a new city.
“Walking, hiking, or short mobility sessions help keep your body primed,” Thompson said. “This general activity helps keep the body from tilting too far into a catabolic (muscle losing) state and will help with maintenance to some degree.”
Previously in Women’s Barbell Club
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Young meaning 20–35 years old. Older populations (60–75 years old) may need two sessions per week and two or three sets per exercise.
Thank you so much for sharing! Excellent writing on top of super insightful content! The intersection of female physiology, strength science, and cultural criticism? Chef’s kiss!