Newbie gains again??

[Scott Stevenson]

Ok, here comes a long tangential story (from 21 years of bodybuilding training experience):

After the first 10 years or so of progressive training, almost NOTHING I ever did afterwards constituted almost any additional hypertrophy.

Regarding training breaks for resensitization:
Not only have I utilized the original HST-style "SD" breaks of 9-12 days once or twice a year, but last year when I hit 20 years in the gym (and 10 years of really no progress), I actually took 6 weeks off training (still went to the gym 2-3 times a week to stretch, foam roll, etc).

After returning to training there was a period of 2-3 months when even much lighter training "felt" overloading, but eventually I reached my previous workload levels. There was NO ADDITIONAL growth whatsoever from any of this. Also, it was funny to note that I really didn't lose almost any muscle mass over the 6 weeks of no training. I kept an isocaloric diet and did lots of recovery stuff, but no training of any kind.

So after the 6 week break, I was practically the same size as before, but much weaker in the gym. Then I slowly built strength back up over 2-3 months of training.

I would say that 6 weeks of no training was a bit too long. I probably would have recovered chemical messengers, CNS and connective tissues in 3-4 weeks.
Didn't lose any appreciable muscle mass (after 20 years of training naturally), but strength obviously went down because of the neural detraining effect.
My semi-arthritic joints actually got WORSE during the break (less movement and blood flow around them), but tendons and soft tissue injuries got much better.
Psychologically it was EXTREMELY difficult to commit to the 6 weeks of no training, but once I started the recovery period, it went by surprisingly smoothly.
In the future I will definitely take one 2-week break from the gym every year. So far I've only done the 9-10 day Strategic Deconditioning breaks, usually just once a year because I love training too much.

For context, I'm 6'2" and have competed around 200-205 lbs since my first show in 2006. Lifetime natural, done over 20 shows.

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So like Scott and some others in this thread have already speculated, after one has got close to their "genetic ceiling", I don't think any amount of time off will lead to additional hypertrophy beyond that genetic limit. However, the 9-14 day breaks can have a myriad of other benefits, mostly injury healing, CNS and chemical messenger recovery, rebuilding the crazy motivation to train we all had when we first started, etc.

This is a great post, man. THANK YOU for sharing.

Have you interacted with others who have done HST enough to get an idea of any consensus as far as the effectiveness of strategic deconditioning?... I'm guessing those who think it works would continue to do the program and thus be overly represented on his board, etc.

(Very interesting stuff about not losing any size, too, after all those years of training. I don't doubt that one bit. )

-S