Congratulations! You achieved your fitness goal and you want to take a break from training, or you want to go on vacation, recover from overtraining... In this blog, I will mention two types of rests, short-term (up to a month) and long-term also known as maintenance.
Before anything else, it is important to mention that if you completely stop exercising for longer periods (more than a month), you will experience muscle loss due to inactivity.
Short-term rest is needed after every 2-4 months of intense training, but do not think that we are talking about doing nothing, although you won't lose any significant muscle. Ideally, you should perform stretching exercises to improve circulation and recovery, this is very important for those of you who overtrain. After 2-4 weeks of rest, you can resume your normal exercise routine.
Long-term rest is a period longer than two months and there are two types: active (maintenance mode) and passive (atrophy mode).
Atrophy mode as I like to call it means rest without any exercise. After 2 months, you can expect atrophy to kick in (muscle loss due to inactivity). Also, no worries here because when you, say, after a year decide to return to your exercise routine, it will take about 2 months of high-calorie diet and intense exercise to gain what you lost (muscles remember their good old days).
Maintenance mode is simply that, maintenance of your physique. Here you need to perform at least one full-body workout per week and at least two cardio sessions. That is all it takes for maintaining your hard-earned muscle mass.