Most fitness advice teaches you how to start. How to start running, how to start lifting weights, change your diet or build a new routine.
When you are starting something new, that advice can be useful.
Then life happens. Work gets busy. Someone gets ill. Your knee starts hurting. The school holidays arrive. Sometimes you pick up your phone and an hour disappears. You miss one session, then another, and eventually realise you have stopped.
You can usually explain why you stopped.
Then you have to decide what counts as starting again.
You remember your best
Once you have been away for a while, you start comparing what you can do now with what you could do before.
You remember your furthest or fastest run, lifting your personal best, the ten-mile hike or the period when you trained consistently without having to think about it very much. Against that, a ten-minute walk can feel pointless. One light session does not seem serious enough to make a difference.
The comparison makes the smaller return to doing something feel pointless because you are measuring it against the best version of yourself you can remember.
When you first started, you did not have that record. You were allowed to begin at the beginning. A short walk counted because it was more than you had been doing. The first trip to the gym counted because you went.
After an interruption, the same effort can feel like nothing. It may be more than you did on the day you originally started, but now it is being compared with you at your best.
Your capacity has gone backwards, but your standard has not.
This is one reason restarting can feel harder than starting. You have something a beginner does not have: a previous record to measure against.
Andre Agassi lived an unusually public version of this. He had been the best tennis player in the world, then fell to number 141 in November 1997 and finished the year playing two events on the lower-level Challenger Tour. He later recalled an official comparing it with Bruce Springsteen playing at the local bar. By 1999, Agassi was number one again.[1]
He began his return on the smaller stage that was available to him. Most of us are not attempting to recover a world ranking fortunately, but the awkward feeling it can induce is similar. You have to do something that feels below you before you can get back to the level you remember.
Sometimes something needs to change
An interruption can reveal a real problem.
Pain may mean you need to change what you are doing. A routine that made you miserable may not be worth returning to. Work or family life may have changed enough that the old arrangement no longer fits.
It is worth paying attention when the same obstacle keeps appearing because the plan may need adjusting.
Plenty of interruptions are a normal part of life. You travelled, got ill, had a difficult month at work or simply stopped making the time. If what you were doing still makes sense, you do not need to let the interruption define you before you begin again.
You can return first and see what needs attention once you are moving.
How the gap grows
People often wait to restart because they want to restart properly.
They wait for more time, more energy, a quieter week, or for enough motivation to return at something close to their old level. While they wait, their capacity may continue to fall and the amount they are willing to accept as a proper return continues to rise.
Three missed sessions become a new programme starting next Monday. Three months becomes a new six-week plan, new shoes and a date in the diary when life is supposedly going to be less busy.
Meanwhile, the walk you could do today feels too small to count.
That is how the gap between goes grows. The longer you have been away, the bigger you make the restart, and the size of the restart gives you another reason to wait.
Starting from your current capacity is how you begin rebuilding. If all you can sensibly manage is a short walk, the walk is enough. The longer session can come later, once there is something for it to follow.
Return to the practice
Picking up where you left off means returning to the same practice at a level you can manage now.
If you used to run 10K, your return might be a walk around the block. If you trained for an hour, it might be twenty minutes. If getting to the gym has become the obstacle, a few squats and push-ups at home may be what gets you moving again.
That can be difficult to accept because you remember what used to count.
The old standard is still sitting there while your current ability, confidence and tolerance may have changed.
However, some of your previous work may have survived.
A 2022 systematic review looked at what happened to strength and muscle-size gains during periods without resistance training. Across the individual studies in its qualitative analysis, gains were generally not completely lost and remained at least slightly above pre-training levels after the non-training periods.[2]
The research cannot tell you exactly what remains after your particular break, but it does give us some reason to avoid treating every interruption as a complete return to the beginning.
The first session back has a simpler purpose anyway. It gets you going again and gives the next session somewhere to build.
Let the first week be ordinary
There is a temptation to make the return prove something to you.
You have been away for two months, so the first week back becomes four sessions and a promise to be good from now on. Tuesday goes well, you add more, and by Thursday your legs hurt every time you sit down.
This enthusiasm is understandable because you want to close the whole gap at once. It can make the second week less likely because the first one asked too much from a body and routine that were only just getting going again.
Give the return some space. A couple of short sessions may be enough for the first week. You can leave a little in the tank, see how you feel and add more next time.
You are rebuilding a pattern, which takes more than one impressive session.
The number worth counting
Fitness apps like streaks because streaks are easy to display. They tell you how long you went without being interrupted.
Everyone gets interrupted eventually, so the useful number is the time between stopping and starting again.
Perhaps the last gap was six months. The next one lasts six weeks, then ten days. Eventually you miss Thursday and return on Monday.
Nothing about the Monday session has to be remarkable. The progress is that Monday happened.
Over a lifetime, consistency will include quite a few of those returns. You still stop occasionally because work, illness, holidays and normal lapses have not gone anywhere. You get better at noticing the gap and coming back before the return becomes a major event.
Keep starting
You will have to start again countless times.
The reasons will vary and some will be better than others. Each time, you can return at the level you can easily do now and let the rest rebuild from there.
Eventually an interruption becomes something that happened between two periods of doing. It takes up less brain space because the next go arrives sooner.
That is what keeping starting looks like and is a skill to learn for life.
References
[1] ATP Tour. On This Day: Andre Agassi caps comeback from World No. 141 to No. 1 in 1999.
[2] Encarnação, I. G. A., Viana, R. B., Soares, S. R. S., Freitas, E. D. S., de Lira, C. A. B., and Ferreira-Junior, J. B. (2022). Effects of Detraining on Muscle Strength and Hypertrophy Induced by Resistance Training: A Systematic Review. Muscles, 1(1), 1 to 15.