Every night, I do the dishes. And every night, I think about the Sisyphean nature of the task: no matter how well I scrub the current pile, by tomorrow a whole new stack will have accumulated nonetheless.

A lot of things in life have that ‘treading water’ quality. You do them consistently, in part to make things better, but in equal part just to keep them from getting worse. And, indeed, working out sometimes feels that way. Even as you hit a consistent streak of attendance, start to see real results, you know it’s just a matter of time until life and work and family and whatever else rages out of control, forcing you to take weeks or months off, backsliding to where you started.

Except that’s incorrect. According to some awesome new scientific findings, coming back to the gym after a hiatus is far easier than starting from scratch. Working out generates new nuclei in your muscles (called myonuclei) that help coordinate repair and growth. The new research indicates that, even if those muscles atrophy, the new myonuclei stick around for an extended period. So when you do return to the gym, you can regain strength faster than when you started out, back when you had fewer myonuclei.

Combine that with what we already know about the durability of neurologically-driven strength gains, and you have a pretty good argument for hitting the gym, as hard and as consistently as you can, even if you know you might end up with unexpected breaks in your future.