What Happens To Your Body When You Stop Exercising?

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Go and work out, they say, and the benefits will be well worth it.

Because you know they’re right, you stop dilly-dallying and finally start making time for it. In no time, you get fit. Ripped, even. But eventually, you find yourself unable to maintain your exercise program, so you stop. What happens to your body then?

When this happens, you become what exercise scientists call an “apparently healthy but deconditioned individual.” And being one comes with these alarming downsides.

Your blood sugar shoots up: A study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise reports that your blood glucose levels spike after just 5 days of inactivity. And then there’s the most obvious effect: Your belly grows.

That’s because your muscles lose some of their fat-burning potential and your metabolism slows down, says Paul Arciero, D.P.E., an exercise science professor at Skidmore College.

Your endurance wanes: With the onset of “detraining” or the sudden cessation of exercise, among the first to suffer would be your VO2max.

Together with a decrease in muscle power, this leads to compromised cardio. Scary stuff, especially if you’re an endurance athlete.

Adds Harry Pino, a senior exercise physiologist at the Sports Performance Center at New York University Langone Medical Center, “The fitter you are, the harder you fall.”

An athlete can observe a drop in VO2max by 12% in 14 to 30 days. And at the 60 day mark, it can reach up to 26%, explains Pino.

Your BP rises: According to a study in the journal PLoS, as your body experiences these declines, your arteries and veins stiffen—causing your heart rate to increase, and your blood pressure to rise.

Your muscles shrink: Loss in muscle mass comes next. Although you may still feel strong, your quads and biceps may start to shrink relatively quickly. The rate varies with age: the older you are, the faster you lose your gains.

“Basically, the aging effect is the same as what will happen during detraining,” says Andreas Bergdahl, an assistant professor in cardiovascular physiology at Concordia University in Montreal. The amount of your slow twitch muscle fibers will decrease, and the ability of your cells to produce energy for your fast twitch muscle fibers will decline.

You become mentally weighed down: Psychological effects include depression and lower self-esteem—not just due to the now less-than-stellar functioning of your body and your appearance—but also as a result of inefficient oxygen delivery to the brain.

So how do you fix all this? Simple: You need to keep training.

But you don’t have to work as much or as hard as you used to. “This is what we call‘active recovery’,” says Pino. He recommends activities like stationary cycling and indoor rowing for athletes in between competitions or during their off season. Cross-training is another way of sticking to an active recovery plan.

“This gives the muscles that work hard a break,” says Pino, “but they won’t lose that much aerobic fitness.”

Via io9 and MensHealth.com.