Research
Energy balance
Metabolic and fitness adaptations gained from exercise are rapidly lost within days to weeks of inactivity, but can be restored upon resuming normal activity.
If you stop exercising, you will lose your fitness quickly. However, when you start exercising again, your fitness will return to where it was. Try to maintain some level of activity to avoid the loss.
GoodQualifiesHIGH confidence
Unfortunately, it requires only a period of a few days to reverse these adaptations, and the body returns to a physiological situation similar to baseline or even worse... In two of these studies, nevertheless, it was found that VO2max returned to baseline after normal physical activity was resumed.
Why this rating
Supported by multiple studies showing reversibility of VO2max and other metrics.
Source
Metabolic Impacts of Confinement during the COVID-19 Pandemic Due to Modified Diet and Physical Activity Habits
María Martínez‐Ferrán et al. · Nutrients · 2020
DOI 10.3390/nu12061549
narrative_reviewCited 378×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
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