Detraining - Overcoming Yourself

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Many of you may be taking a break for the holiday season.  Or maybe you just fought a rigorous battle at the races and need to recover. Or maybe you just need a day off each week.  We are not and will never be robots. Our bodies need recovery. Despite the fact that artificial intelligence is enhancing the efficiency and productivity of just about everything, running is and always will be self-propelled. Either way, recovery is eventually necessary. And when it comes eventually the question becomes – at what cost to that hard earned fitness?

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Summary Outline:

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• Defining Your Fitness
• Losing Your Fitness
• Understanding Your Detrained Fitness
• Recovering Your Fitness
• Enjoying The Process

Defining Your Fitness

One of the most beautiful things that comes from running is that compared to many things in life you get what you put into it. Regardless of genetic talent, if you work hard enough improvement is in fact inevitable compared to baseline.  This also means that the principle of “Use It Or Lose It” applies.  To best understand what you are using or losing, we will define what impacts that precious fitness we all work so hard for.
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Characteristics of Training

• VO2max - Think of VO2max like the maximum amount of air your lungs can use when you're running or playing as hard as you can. It's like how much wind you can catch in your sail when you're sailing super fast!
  
  VO2max = Cardiac Output x a-VO2 difference (the difference between oxygenated blood in the arteries and the oxygenated blood in the veins; a reflection of how much oxygen was pulled from the arteries)
  
  Training Impact: Interval training is great for this. It's like doing a series of short, super-fast runs or activities with little breaks in between. It's like sprinting, then walking, then sprinting again, which really helps your lungs get better at using air! Long endurance exercise at a slower pace can also help impact your VO2max..
  
  
• Exercise Stroke Volume - Imagine your heart is a water pump. Every time it beats, it pumps out a squirt of blood. Exercise Stroke Volume is how big that squirt is when you're running around or exercising. The stronger your heart, the more juice it can pump with each beat!
  
  Training Impact: Endurance training, like going for long jogs or bike rides, is really good for this. When you exercise for a long time, it helps your heart get stronger and pump more blood each time it beats. It is improved most at ~60-70% of Maximal Heartrate.
  
  
• Maximal Heartrate - This is the fastest your heart can beat when you're exercising really, really hard. It's like the top speed of your heart, kind of like how fast a race car can go on a track.
  
  Training Impact: High-intensity activities, like running really fast for a short time, can help you reach your maximum heart rate. It's like doing a quick race to see how fast your heart can beat. Whie you cannot change this number directly, you can expect this number to change as your training status changes – more on that later!
  
  
• Exercise Maximal Cardiac Output - This is all about how much blood your heart can pump out when you're exercising as hard as you can. If your heart is the pump and your blood is the water, this is like measuring how much water your heart can pump in a minute when you're running at full speed.  Cardiac Output = Stroke Volume x Heart Rate
  
  Training Impact: A mix of endurance and high-intensity training works best. It's like combining long, steady runs with some short, fast sprints. This helps your heart get really good at pumping a lot of blood when you're exercising hard.
  
  

• Respiratory Enzyme Activity - Think of respiratory enzymes like tiny helpers in your body that help you use the air you breathe to make energy. When you exercise, these tiny helpers work faster to make sure you have enough energy to play and run.
  
  Training Impact: Aerobic exercises like swimming, cycling, or dancing are great. These activities make you breathe a lot and help those tiny helpers in your body get better at turning air into energy.
  
  
• Muscle Capillary Density - Capillaries are super tiny blood vessels in your muscles. Muscle Capillary Density is like counting how many tiny straws you have in your muscles to suck up blood. The more straws you have, the better your muscles can get the blood they need to keep you moving and playing.
  
  Training Impact: Endurance training, like long-distance running or cycling, is really effective. It helps increase the number of tiny straws (capillaries) in your muscles, so your muscles get all the blood they need during exercise.
  
  

You’ll probably notice that all of your training impacts one or many of these training characteristics.

Losing Your Fitness

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Now that we have defined what is at work with the fitness you are building, it becomes more important to look at exactly how that fitness comes apart when you take a break and for how long. 

Since the physiology of the human body continues to be the same, we take a look back at a study on detraining of highly trained individuals from Dr. Ed Coyle’s Human Performance Laboratory published in the Journal of Applied Physiology in 1990. These highly trained individuals underwent 10-12 months of standardized training to eliminate confounding variables for comparison (Coyle et al. 1990). For this study in particular they detrained for 12-weeks to create a comprehensive picture of detraining characteristics which can be found in the table below.

Impacts To Training Characteristics From 12-Weeks Of Detraining

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As you can hopefully see, most things are impacted but others not – let’s dive in!

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Understanding Your Detrained Fitness

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The biggest takeaway that I hope you take from anything you read in this article is that recovering from your training is not going to hurt you though training clearly is important. Let’s take a look at the key takeaways for each characteristic more specifically:
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Characteristics of Training With Detraining

• VO2max - Taking a week off can result in a loss of fitness. However a day off is unlikely to make much of an impact on your VO2max.  Taking 8-weeks off results in double the loss on average compared to 1-week suggesting that most of the damage is done in the first week which is under 10%, a value that is recoverable over a short few weeks of training well before your next big race!
  
  
• Exercise Stroke Volume - Most of this loss happens in the first week because you lose the blood volume from more fluids in your body. This training attribute comes back almost as fast as it was lost which is good news for you!
  
  
• Maximal Heartrate - Blood volume is another reason that this can fluctuate during training as well as your nervous system getting a little boost of sympathetic activity.
  
  
• Exercise Maximal Cardiac Output - Since cardiac output is stroke volume x heart rate it should make sense that if your stroke volume goes down the maximal output will also go down.
  
  
• Respiratory Enzyme Activity - These see a decrease pretty quickly but much like your blood volume comes back pretty quickly too. You may feel like you’re a little more sluggish when you restart specifically because of this attribute decreasing a bit, at least when you’re only taking a week or two off.
  
  
• Muscle Capillary Density - The beautiful thing about training is that when they say muscle memory exists, capillary retention is a part of it. Kind of like how the plumbing pipes stay in the ground when a city gets abandoned, your capillaries stay, though you may need to fire the engines a little bit when you start back up to have them working optimally. This is a large part of why it gets easier to come back to training even if you do opt to take a longer than 12-week break off for either injury or lifestyle choices

Recovering Your Fitness

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The next question you’re probably asking is ‘How long does it take to get back what I lost?’ which is a great question that we will explore in more detail in future articles. For now, think of recovering your fitness as a matter of where you started compared to where you are going. 

If you just started your fitness journey let's think of it as a points awarded and points taken system. During your last training cycle you started at 0 points and received 100 points. You took 2 weeks off and lost 15 points so now only have 85 points. When you go back to restart your training now your new baseline is 85 points which is still much much closer to 100 points than where you started at 0.

While this point system oversimplifies how fitness works, hopefully you can see that even if you take 3-months off completely you are still doing a lot better than if you never started at all and the next time you get to training, you are better set up for success.

Enjoying The Process

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You often hear that running is a metaphor for life if you stick with the sport long enough. Nothing is guaranteed but the general principle is that if you stick around long enough and find joy in how you do it, the journey becomes more rewarding than anything accomplishment on its own – that all becomes the icing on the cake.

If you’re looking to find love with the process time and time again stay subscribed to our newsletter and reach out to us for coaching and your free 15-minute consultation. At RunByRyan we enjoy your process as much as you.