How much training is necessary to maintain strength and tone?

To maintain your strength and toning you probably don’t need to train as much as you might think. That’s not to say that you should train less. If you’re trying to improve your strength, or get more toned, you will need to train more than the bare minimum required just to maintain.

If you just want to maintain where you are right now – perhaps because you’re very busy and don’t have much time for the gym, or maybe you’re satisfied with your current position – you can do that with just 1-2 training sessions per week.

It takes your muscles 2-3 days to recover from a typical training session, and takes around 10-14 days before you start losing strength.

That means you can get 1-2 workouts per week and as long as you are training your full body at least once each week, you won’t be in too much danger of losing strength.

You probably won’t get any stronger, because you’re not giving the body enough stimulus to grow, but at least you’re not going backwards. If you do want to continue making progress you probably need to up the training sessions a bit.

We’re not trying to encourage you to do less, but instead giving you the confidence that if you’re really busy or struggling to get into the gym for a period, that all is not lost. Keep your head up and do enough to maintain your strength, until you have the capacity to get more training time in your schedule.