--- title: "This is what you need to do to not lose all your training" published: 2020-03-18 updated: 2026-08-04 source: "https://dev-abp.massivoai.com/en/articles/esto-es-lo-que-debes-hacer-para-no-perder-todo-lo-que-has-entrenado" --- # This is what you need to do to not lose all your training **So you busted your butt for months to knock out that marathon, or to raise your arms triumphantly at the finish line of your first—or your best— 10k or 21k, and suddenly everything has gone down the drain with coronavirus and your event being canceled. But does that mean everything you've done is lost?** Well, you won't run the event anymore, but all those early mornings, everything you suffered during training, and all the adaptations you achieved over these months don't have to end up in the trash, unless you decide they do. There are two crucial decisions you need to make to take advantage of your current fitness level: - **Don't stop training.** - **Define a new goal right away.**   It's okay if you already took a week off, discouraged by what happened, but you can't let more time pass. All the adaptations you've achieved during these months of preparation are still there, but they'll fade if you stay sedentary for longer. Although the rate at which physical adaptations are lost varies from person to person and their training history, we can generalize that performance drops 3-5% after 3 or 4 weeks of inactivity. This means that someone who ran 10k in 40 minutes would add 1-2 minutes to their time after just three weeks off. Maximum oxygen uptake—one of the most important variables that determines your performance—starts to decline approximately 10 days after you stop physical activity, and drops more drastically after 2 to 4 weeks of inactivity. After just two weeks of inactivity, blood volume and your heart's capacity to pump it throughout your body start to decrease, partly because the size of the heart muscle shrinks. One way to notice the loss of fitness is to measure your heart rate right when you wake up; as you lose fitness, you'll notice that your resting heart rate gets higher and higher (because your heart is weaker and has less blood to pump with each beat). And so a whole chain of events happens in your body when you stop training, and they happen in just a few days, getting much worse after 3-4 weeks of inactivity: - Maximum oxygen uptake decreases. - You'll have lower blood volume. - Fat metabolism capacity decreases. - Muscle glycogen stores decrease (less energy available to perform well). - Capillary density decreases (lower capacity to deliver oxygen to muscles). - You lose muscle mass. - Mitochondria produce less ATP (less energy available). - Aerobic enzyme activity decreases. - Heart rate increases (your heart is weaker and has less blood with each beat, so it must increase the frequency of beats to meet demand). **The good news is that you can preserve the adaptations** that you've worked so hard to achieve, and you don't even have to train as hard as you have been. If training volume goes down but intensity stays the same, adaptations are preserved surprisingly well, for up to 15 weeks or more. So during these days or weeks of transition, and perhaps discouragement, if you want to lower the volume a bit **but keep training at similar intensities to what you've been doing**, and you'll manage to stay in shape for… for what? Well, here comes the second crucial point: define a new goal right away. Okay, it won't be the April marathon or whatever you had planned for these months—we're all in the same boat. Let it go, get over it, and move forward.**Think and define a goal just as important to achieve in six or eight months**. Maybe the same marathon you were planning to run has been rescheduled for the end of the year and it works perfectly for you. If not, there are many more races that will excite you, or goals—not dependent on an event—that you can achieve on your own. But if you don't, if you don't define a new goal, you'll run into the question of what's the point of all this? sooner rather than later, and if you don't find an answer you'll abandon training and lose all the effort you've invested over these months. And eventually, when you feel motivated again, it could take you several months to get back to the level you'd already reached. A study they did with a rower who won Olympic gold found that 20 weeks later he hadn't recovered his level after taking 8 weeks off. That's almost half a year of training just to get back what he'd already gained! The key to preventing this from happening to you is to stay active, even if you're discouraged, with intense workouts—it doesn't matter if they're shorter and less frequent—but you must avoid at all costs a complete stop to physical activity. At the end of the day, it's important to remember why we run, and the answer is not a race. Running is a lifestyle. We are active people and therefore healthier simply by getting up to run again and again. If in the end there was no event, we gained so much during all this time, not just physically but mentally and socially. After all, the race is nothing more than an excuse, an added value that makes the whole thing more exciting, but the essence of running is not about hanging a medal around your neck, but about transforming ourselves into a better person, physically and mentally. So lift your head, define new horizons, and go for them. A Buen Paso uses [Massivo](https://massivoai.com), the event-registration platform that powers this article.