What Is the Minimum Amount of Exercise Necessary to Maintain Your Fitness?

You can maintain your endurance for up to 15 weeks—nearly four months!—by doing just two-thirds of your usual volume (about five hours if you usually do eight) as long as you make those sessions count by hitting your usual target heart rate. You can maintain your VO2 max (the maximum amount of oxygen you can use during exercise; a hallmark of endurance performance) by doing half that amount, so long as you maintain the same frequency (days a week) and intensity of your usual exercise.

 

When it comes to keeping your muscles strong, you can squeak by with just one session of strength training per week and one set per exercise, again, as long as you’re lifting at least as much weight as you typically do, and the final rep requires close to your max effort.

 

The researchers based most of their endurance conclusions on a series of studies by the same team who put a group of volunteers through a rigorous routine of 40 minutes of cycling or running, including intensities that hit 90 to 100 percent of their maximum heart rate, six days a week for 10 weeks, and then spent 15 weeks testing the minimum amount of training frequency, duration, and intensity they could do to maintain their fitness gains.