I’ll never forget walking into a gym for a workout and seeing a heavily muscled man doing squats. He wasn’t the biggest or strongest lifter I had ever seen, but he was definitely one of the most muscular men that I had seen in that particular gym. When I finished my workout and went back to the locker room, there he was getting dressed right next to my locker. We struck up a conversation and I learned that his name was John. I found out that he had hurt his shoulder and had decided to quit training for a while. He said this was his first workout in nine months. I was shocked by this and said to myself, “If this is what you look like without working out for nine months, I wonder what you looked like when you were working out.”
I had a similar experience with a personal trainer who trained people at the gym where I worked out. He had been training people there for several months. I had seen him instructing clients and helping other people exercise, but I had never seen him working out himself. One day I was conversing with him and he told me that he had trained seriously in the past, and had been a competitive bodybuilder, but he hadn’t worked out in two years. What baffled me was that he was still built like a competitive bodybuilder and had an amazing physique. I remember telling the guy that he had a lot left over from his previous workouts.
Why would I bother to tell you this? Because in this article I am addressing the topic of Retention, which is the second R in the SRRR profile. When it comes to retention, I am amazed by some people’s ability to retain strength and muscle between workouts. The two examples that I described previously in this article are examples of people who have tremendous ability in the area of retention. Of all of the SRRR factors, retention is my absolute worst. If I don’t work out, the little bit of muscle I’ve developed quickly evaporates and my strength plummets.
What exactly is retention? The way I’m defining it is the length of time a person can maintain full strength and muscle mass after full recovery is completed. In the last article I discussed that some people can stay in a state of anabolic recovery for a longer period of time than others. In other words, some lifters may be able to stay in an anabolic or adaptive state of recovery where they are still gaining muscle mass or strength for 72 hours or more after a workout. Having a long anabolic recovery time is different than retention. Retention doesn’t begin until strength has peaked at full recovery. If a lifter can continue to maintain their strength level after full recovery even though they aren’t working out, they have good retention ability. Some seem to have remarkable retention, while others don’t retain at all and need to work out as soon as full recovery has been reached.
One thing that is important to consider is that retention may vary from one body part to another. For me the first thing to go during a layoff is my bench, the last thing to go is my squat. Perhaps you have had times when you had to take a layoff and observed a difference in how much strength was lost when comparing one exercise to another.
There’s no way to know what kind of ability you have to retain strength and muscle mass after you have recovered from a workout unless you learn from experience. Having the ability to retain strength is a definite advantage. The longer you can wait between workouts, the less likely it is that your muscles will become desensitized to workouts. Increased muscle sensitivity to workouts makes them more likely to respond without running into the pattern that kills progress (please refer to the basics of PPT page if you don’t know what the pattern that kills progress is). Being a good retainer also gives you a lot more room for error in terms of how many days of rest you can take between workouts compared to someone who has poor retention ability. A final benefit is that if your training is starting to wear you down, being a good retainer gives you the advantage of being able to back off on your training frequency without any loss.
The other side of the coin is that you may not have good retention. Even some of the best lifters and bodybuilders who are able to get bigger and stronger than almost everyone else have poor retention and quickly lose significant strength and muscle mass when they quit working out. The first Mr. Olympia ever was Larry Scott. He claimed that when he quit training, he atrophied down to a small size that bore little resemblance to a Mr. Olympia body. He said that when he lost all of his size, people would occasionally recognize him and ask, “Weren’t you Larry Scott?”
The lesson from all of this is to train according to the qualities of your own body. If you are not a retainer, then don’t be tempted to imitate someone else who may be blessed with excellent retention ability. Train the best way for your body and let your own body do the talking in regard to what is best. Best of training to you.