Detraining – why a change really is better than a rest
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The old adage that ‘what goes up must come down’ applies just as much to fitness as to gravity. But although athletes have come to accept detraining as a depressing but inevitable consequence of an injury or illness, few are aware of just how profound and rapid these changes are. And according to Richard Godfrey, new evidence suggests that the magnitude of these changes means that elite athletes need to plan their return to full fitness after a lay-off very carefully indeed.
Detraining (often referred to as ‘reversibility’) reflects the fact that if a training stimulus is insufficient, or removed entirely, then the aspect of physiological conditioning to which it relates begins to decline. In other words, the individual begins to lose ‘fitness’. However, ‘fitness’ is a difficult term to define because we often find ourselves asking ‘fit for what?’ Better terms are ‘conditioning’, ‘level of conditioning’ or ‘conditioned state’ and so here these terms will be used interchangeably with ‘fitness’.
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 | Author: | whatsnew (whatsnew's profile, whatsnew's blog) |
 | Posted On: | Friday, 1st December '06, 4:54pm |
 | Tags: | Sports and Training Techniques |
 | Comments: | 0 comments, go to comments |
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