If you're a young person who regularly lifts weights, keeping up your workouts for 9 weeks might make you feel a little more mentally ready to train than if you took a full week off—but it's not a huge difference, and we're not sure if it really matters in real life.

If you take a one-week break from lifting weights halfway through a 9-week workout plan, you might lose a little bit of your strength gains in your legs, but your muscles won’t shrink any more than if you kept going, and your endurance and power won’t be affected.

If you take a one-week break from your heavy leg workouts, your leg strength and ability to keep going during exercises won’t drop in any meaningful way — at least not if you’re already trained.

We don’t really know if variable resistance training works well for athletes or over long periods—most studies have only looked at beginners and for a few months at most.

No matter the order of exercises, people who were already trained got much stronger after 12 weeks of lifting — all groups improved a lot.