If you take a one-week break from lifting weights—even if you’ve been training hard—you won’t lose or gain noticeable muscle in your legs, and taking short breaks like this won’t hurt or help your muscle growth.

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.

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.

Taking a one-week break from weightlifting won’t make your muscles grow bigger, even though some people think resting might help your muscles respond better to training again.

If you lift weights with either light weights and short breaks, or heavy weights and long breaks—but keep the total work the same—you’ll still build muscle in about 8 weeks. So, there’s more than one way to get stronger and bigger muscles.

If a young, healthy man lifts weights for 8 weeks, his muscles will likely get bigger—by about 6%, give or take a little.