How To Ease Back Into Gym Workouts

If you were one of the lucky people at the beginning of the stay-at-home orders that was able to purchase a variety of weights, dumbbells, and kettlebells, you may have been able to keep up with a pretty similar workout routine. If you were not in a position to purchase or borrow any resistance pieces and ended up doing a lot more bodyweight exercises, running or biking, and yoga, that’s great too! If the changes of quarantine and moving to online work and classes affected your mental health and you did not keep up as much of an exercise routine as you previously had done, I’m here to tell you THAT’S OKAY TOO!  

As the world begins to slowly re-open, no matter your circumstances during the quarantine, you may now be walking into a gym with a face mask and confusion as to how to re-start. My first and probably most important piece of advice in this entire blog post is to give yourself some grace and patience! It is completely okay if you feel a little more tired and cannot lift as much weight as you could when you did your last gym workout back in February or March.  

The good news is that our muscles and the nervous system connecting them to our brains are super smart and resilient. They can pick back up pretty quickly. You’ve heard of muscle memory with things like riding a bike, right? Well the same thing can be said for our leg muscles doing a weighted squat. This doesn’t mean that you will be lifting the same weight within a week that you did 10 weeks ago. I would say it will probably take anywhere from 4-6 weeks for you to gradually get back to the same weight you were previously lifting.  

Ok, so it will take six weeks for me to get back to my regular weight. So what do I do for my very first gym workout?? 

During the first two weeks, you’ll definitely want to be very conservative with the weights you choose. While I can’t tell you specifically how much weight to start with, or how much total volume (the sum of all the sets and reps you do in a total workout) to do, I can tell you that the “you-in-48-hours” will thank “current you” for not pushing as hard and heavy. It will not be worth it to push yourself too much and then be so sore that you can’t do another workout for another week. It’d be much better to be too conservative with weight and volume the first couple workouts, because that will make you feel more accomplished and ready to get back in for your subsequent workouts.  

This caution should also be given to any group fitness classes you start going back to. If you were beginning to feel very flexible from a regular yoga practice before the stay-at-home orders, don’t be frustrated if you feel a little tighter when you re-start your yoga practice in the studio. Sitting for long periods of time has a detrimental effect to our postures and joints, so ease back into your stretching and yoga practice as gently as you would weightlifting. 

A very rare side effect of jumping in too hard to a new or novel workout is a condition called rhabdomyolysis. Normally attributed to high intensity professions like football players and military members, in very rare cases, group fitness participants and regular exercisers can get rhabdomyolysis. This condition occurs when muscles are pushed too hard too fast and begin to leak protein and other materials into the blood stream, causing severe kidney problems and other symptoms like fatigue, fever, and muscle pain and tenderness. While it is extremely rare in the lay person, occurring only in 29.9 per 100,000 patient years, it is an important warning when jumping back into the gym.  

As long as you exercise with caution, and err on the side of lighter workouts as you gradually increase intensity, you should not have to worry about any adverse side effects other than muscle soreness. If that happens, take a few days off from the gym and go a little easier the next time to allow your body time to adapt. 

Tietze, D. C., & Borchers, J. (2014). Exertional rhabdomyolysis in the athlete: a clinical review. Sports health, 6(4), 336–339. https://doi.org/10.1177/1941738114523544 

 

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