Dosing and scheduling
Maintenance Phase
Last updated
The ongoing part of a programme after any opening phase, using the amount intended to hold a result in place rather than to produce it. What counts as maintenance is set by the plan, not by anything measurable in the body. A programme with no loading or titration step is maintenance from the first dose onwards.
Why it matters here
Claims about long-term effects usually rest on the maintenance amount, which is often lower than the amount that produced the initial change. Reading a headline result that came from an early, heavier phase and assuming it holds through maintenance is a jump the record generally does not support.
What it is not
Maintenance is not steady state. Maintenance is a decision about what you keep taking; steady state is a physical condition in which intake and clearance have balanced out, and you can sit at a maintenance amount for a long time before your body reaches it.
Also called
- maintenance phase
- maintenance
- maintenence
- maintainance
- maintenance dose
- maintaining
- holding dose
- upkeep
- cruise
- cruising
- steady phase
Cruise and cruising come from anabolic steroid vocabulary, where they describe the lighter stretch between heavier blocks. The word carries assumptions from that setting which may not apply to anything here.
Compounds carrying this term
None on file yet. This term is in the controlled vocabulary but no compound record currently uses it — which is a statement about our coverage, not about the term.