The Unbelievable Things That Happen When You Stop Working Out

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3. Your Cardiovascular Fitness Goes in the Toilet after Just One Week

The ability of the body to transport and utilize the oxygen from the blood in your muscles is called aerobic fitness. This measure lessens after missing just as few as one or two weeks of inactivity. The overall functional capacity of your heart also falls down. Blood volume decreases by five percent within just 24 hours and a whopping 20 percent after two weeks. Your resting heart rate will also increase by four to 15 beats per minute.

4. How Far Back Will One Week Off Set You?

Even taking just one week off will take you three weeks of work to gain it back. After spending some time couch surfing, your nervous system loses its ability to fire up the same way it did before you took that little vacation. This is because the neural stimuli which allow you to lift heavy objects with the same amount of effort diminish just the same way your muscles do. When you return to lifting weights, you will still be able to lift them, but you will need to work above what your normal capacity had been. In other works, it takes greater effort to do what you used to do. You will need to take more rest in-between sets and extra days in order to recover. If you are a novice who decided to take a break over the winter holidays, you will find yourself, basically, starting from scratch. If you are an experienced lifter or athlete, you can expect to take a month to get back on the same level you were before.

5. Your Age Also Affects You

You will lose your strength and overall fitness levels twice as quickly as you age. This is primarily due to hormone levels. Our bodies produce less of the human growth hormone as we age, which influences such a difficult recovery. We also make more of other hormones, such as cortisol, the stress hormone. That also means that we lose our ability to handle stressful situations, such as injuries or illness. These same mechanisms can also be interpreted in the way that we feel more fatigue after we workout. The Journal of Aging and Physical Activity published a 2008 study, which has concurred with other studies, showed that older athletes take longer to recover from workouts or injuries, overall.

Well, let’s face it. It is not easy to get regular exercise; it is a commitment. Not many people become obsessed with running marathons or turn into real gym junkies. Even those who do end up being gym rats, at some point in their lives, will end up forgoing exercise for periods of time.

Don’t let these statistics get you down. You will regain your strength and cardiovascular fitness. The benefits of exercise far outweigh any of the inconvenience or pain that might be involved. If you have fallen off the exercise train, don’t despair! Get right back on. In the long run, you will be glad you did!

References:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov