When You Have Little Interest In The Gym :
When you have little to no interest in the gym I say go with it.
You’re not going to wither away in a month or three. Or even longer.
Continue to eat well. I consider trips to the grocery store to be an anabolic activity.
You get your calories there. You’re doing it right when the cashiers know you as a regular, and know your hauls to be made up nearly to
entirety of muscle building foods.
Right now it’s fall. Apple cider and egg nog are on the shelves.
Drinking those and doing a few pushups means I’ll never drop below being more muscular than over 99% of the population.
Or use the period of disinterest as a time for fat loss. Fast, eat little.
Any stimuli = the body holds muscle.
Both approaches work.
There’s a school of powerlifting that teaches infrequent training.
World record superheavyweights have gotten that way on as little as one session a week.
The dude I knew who had a 500+ bench at under 21, he was eating up/growing into the superheavyweights, and in the low frequency school. He’d bench roughly every 5th day, squat twice a month and deadlift the same, sometimes only once a month.
Even without heavy lifting not much stimulus is needed to keep you muscular.
I’ve been doing my pushups daily, ranging between 50 and 125 a day.
About once a week I’ll hit one set of high rep overhead squats, and once or twice a week I’ll do a couple sets of 10 bodyweight squats consciously squeezing the musculature. I get a lot out of those. On the weekend I may hop on my bike and pedal to a playground for a handful of pullups. Before going to sleep I may squeeze a gripper a few times.
The pullups are the heaviest stimuli here. The rest are all light exercises, but here’s the key :
The body knows it’s still required to be capable of performing.
Light exercises keep the body “in training”, even while doing very few reps.
The body will always be stronger than the training stimuli.
Brief exercise, both throughout the day, and consistently over time keeps the body primed for performance, growth, strength increase.
While not going to the gym I’m still doing this with pushups, and the other exercises that I fit in naturally without changing my day.
The military forces this on one in boot camp via punishment reps. The jacked inmate in prison is related to the same phenomenon. And you experience the same working a manual labor job.
A bunch of light stimuli on a regular basis, coupled with occasional heavy stimuli makes very strong men.
Usually you carry 40lb boxes all the live long day, then next Tuesday you deliver a 600lb gunsafe, or a grand piano.
You do pushups every day, at 260lbs this is the equivalent of benching between 156 and 182lbs per rep. Occasionally you have someone (a middleweight) stand on your upper back for a rep or two, even with added dumbbell & plate weight. That I estimate as equivalent to a 365lb bench.
Homeboys can do THAT in prison.
If there’s ANY muscular stimuli present…
If the amounts going into your chewing hole neither resemble the pursuit of beached whale nor of skeleton rack status…
This experience also really drives home to me the power of food, and the amount of excuses related to training that grocery store access negates.
Who cares if you go to a gym or not. Gym visits end up inconsequential.
It’ll still be there when interest returns, and you will blow the minds of those who both noticed your absence, and that you not only didn’t regress, but progressed.
Eating well and training effectively is easy, so easy cavemen (well the modern equivalents) do it.
I’m gonna go do another 20-30 pushups, and then eat.