GETTING INJURED IS every sportsman’s nightmare. Training all year for an event you targeted only to break down at a crucial time is a huge setback and the resulting spell on the side-lines is hard to take.
Even the most minor injury could rule a person out for two weeks of full training and what’s worse is that depending on how advanced in the season you are, this is quite a bit of time.
And if you cannot exercise at all, there will be a noticeable drop-off in your fitness.
Fitness, by the way, is comprised of several elements with strength, power, endurance and speed among them.
Wanna know exactly what happens our endurance in this two-week spell? Here’s what…
Days zero to three
In the opening days you won’t notice any discernible difference in your fitness level, good or bad. In fact,if you had been training hard prior to the day you got injured, after three days of rest, your fitness is now probably enhanced.
This is because in the three days you’ve been doing nothing your body has had a chance to restore and replenish its stores of glycogen and repair any muscle damage.
This is why most coaches won’t advise strenuous exercise in the 72 hours prior to competition.
Day seven
The most accurate measure of how naturally fit we are is our Vo2 max. This is the rate at which the heart, lungs, and muscles can effectively use oxygen during exercise. The fitter we are, the higher our Vo2 max will be. Research has shown that Vo2 max can only be increased by around 8-10% with training.
Fully-trained but inactive, it is around the end of week one where we start to notice a real difference in our fitness and what’s worse is that the fittest athletes experience the most rapid losses of fitness.
The biggest difference, physiologically, is the amount of blood in our system is reduced, meaning for a given intensity, our heart has to work harder to service the working muscles.
Another change is that we become less efficient at flushing toxic waste products of exercise. For example, if you were to exercise intensely after seven days out injured you’d find it harder to recover from an effort, be it a sprint in a race or a jump in basketball.
That burning feeling and laboured breathing is your body’s way of telling you you have lost fitness.
Day 14
By now there will be significant reductions in our Vo2 max and our heart has to work even harder to pump enough blood around our body to meet the demands of our muscles.
This pumping of blood is known as cardiac output. The world’s fittest athletes have huge cardiac outputs.
A study titled the ‘Effects of detraining on cardiovascular responses to exercise: role of blood volume’ byCoyle, Hemmert, and Coggan showed that Vo2 max decreases by around 5% in two weeks.
Also, what seems apparent is that maintenance of fitness requires at least three sessions per week of at least 70% intensity. Note, this only maintains our fitness, not develops it.
In terms of strength, our muscles will also atrophy (or shrink) in this two-week spell, meaning there is less of a demand for blood from the heart. So as well as feeling less fit, we’ll also get weaker.
How grim is that?
