A PE teacher once told me that your muscles start atrophying after only a week of not working out, and it's impossible to gain muscle if you don't work out every week. I'm not sure why it took me so long to question this, but my results from a somewhat-consistent but definitely-not-every-week workout plan made it really obvious that this is not true. Claude thinks that as long as you're not literally in a coma it's more like 3 weeks (with variation for age/protein/etc.).

This actually makes me more motivated, since "make sure to exercise every single muscle every single week" is not really an achievable target with the level of effort I want to put in, but "make sure to hit at least one muscle group once a week" is pretty easy.

(Obviously the target should be higher than this if I want to see gains in any reasonable amount of time, but it's nice to know that if I don't hit my actual target there's a lot more slack than I realized)