DrAlexHarrison wrote:
Northy wrote:
Don't fret, just remember all the work you have in the bank (e.g.
this).
This is gold. And training adaptations while they certainly feel transient, absolutely are not. Once you've been fit, you will always be MUCH closer to that level of fitness than you were at any point before you achieved that level of fitness.
I had a striking example of this which really reinforced my professional learning in the area.
Example:
I had a 19" vertical jump around age 17
I worked for 13 years, training like a professional (better actually... most non-endurance sport pro athletes' training is a joke compared to the lengths FOP athletes will go to). I accumulated 13 years of almost nothing but heavy/explosive lifting, plyos, and sprints, and improved my vertical to 40" at age 30.
Now, approaching age 34, I have done virtually everything in my power to reduce my vertical jump (haphazard tri training, reduced protein consumption, no longer taking creatine, muscle loss, the whole 9 yards).
I still have at least a 32" vert. I'll pull a quad muscle if I go outside and test this any further today ;)
Interestingly, I lost almost all that vertical jump ability in the first year off from power sport training. And, I suspect I'd get most of it back quite quickly with a couple months of reasonable power training.
Much like gains are exponential for the unfit, losses are most pronounced early-on in detraining, but the decay slows enormously over time. Further, the re-gain rate is potentially even faster than the loss rate, which is super fun. Trust me, I've detrained what little aerobic fitness I'd developed several times in the last 4 yrs. (See 'haphazard')
I want to push back slightly on why that not might be gold, not the least of which is that I have no idea who the person who wrote that is, even though it was me.
I feel like I'm realizing that I'm spiritually unfit, not aerobically. And yes, while my aerobic gains are all in there somewhere, and will come back, I'm not so sure about the spiritual side. I don't know that I've got the reps. The person who wrote that year-old post seems unrecognizable to me, despite the fact that physically I look the same for the most part. People say, "don't worry, it will come back", or "don't worry, you look great", or "don't worry, you're so much faster than most people" but that doesn't encapsulate what I'm feeling.
My argument is that it would be cosmically negligent of me to just go back to my old ways, get my fitness back, as if that's what's missing. I feel like there's more work to be done than that. Ironically, in doing that work, I'm sure my aerobic fitness will come back eventually, so there's that.
E
Eric Reid
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