First off, I would have to say that I am pretty happy to be making a post about what to do when the quarantine ends as compared to a month ago when I was writing about what to do during quarantine. This means that we are almost out of the gate in getting back to a seemingly normal.
Most people have probably dropped off when it comes to their training compared to when the quarantine started. If you are a strength athlete you might not have had access to a barbell for over a month, if you are just training for general fitness the only thing you may be doing now is going for walks, and some may have dropped off completely. These things aren’t all that bad. It’s probably good for a strength athlete to work on developing and tuning in other qualities once in a while, walks pose an insane benefit to overall health, and shit, some people probably could use some time off.
The key aspect to focus on here is that there is probably some sort of detraining going on. Performance in relation to specific outcomes will tend to drop off as soon as your overall training volume starts to drop. And that’s what we’re seeing right now. Covid-19, for most people has caused overall training volume to drop.
When quarantine is over, and everyone can go back to the gym I am willing to assume most people are going to want to go in guns blazing because they haven’t had the same enthusiasm and access to equipment the last month or so. Now, I respect this mindset and understand where it’s coming from, but it will be very important to your overall success to be a bit more cautious.
Performance and training volume are two variables that show positive correlation for the most part. When training volume increases so does performance, up to a point. And, vice versa. So, if overall training volume has been significantly dropped over the last month, the next not best thing to do would be to spike it way back up. To make a long story short, your body is just not going to know how to handle it because it’s been getting used to this lower or nonexistent amount of training volume.
The best approach when gyms open back up is to gradually increase training volume from your NEW baseline level, and NOT where your baseline was before quarantine. If this is your approach, your body should respond quite well to this gradual increase in dosage of training volume and you should get back to your previous baseline fairly quick.
It is important to remember that we’ve only been under quarantine for a hair over a month, which is really not that long in the grand scheme of things. There is no need to be on a mission to make up all the gains you missed during quarantine, because in all reality it wasn’t that much time for you to get THAT detrained. With smart training you can get back to where you were in no time and you will look back a year from now and forget this all even happened.