Short Layoff, Long Comeback
By GINA KOLATA
New York Times
WHEN Helen Betancourt, an assistant coach at Princeton, was preparing for the World Championships in rowing in 1998, she suffered an overuse injury: stress fractures of her ribs. She competed anyway, but then had to take five months off.
Like most athletes, she did her best to maintain her fitness, spending hours cycling. Finally, she returned to her sport.
“I lost half my strength,” she said. And rowing just felt weird. “It was like I had stepped off another planet.”
Yet a couple of months later, much faster than it takes to get that strong to begin with, Ms. Betancourt felt like her old self on the water. Four months of rowing and she was in top form.
It shows, exercise physiologists say, that training is exquisitely specific: you can acquire and maintain cardiovascular fitness with many activities, but if you want to keep your ability to row, or run, or swim, you have to do that exact activity.
It also shows, they say, that people who work out sporadically, running on weekends, for instance, will never reach their potential.
This is a time of year when many people who exercised religiously for months cannot maintain their exercise schedules because they are traveling, or they have a severe cold, or simply because they are celebrating holidays with family.
That may not matter if you do not want to compete, and there is no reason why everyone who works out would want to race. But if competition or a new personal record is your goal, exercise physiologists have some lessons to impart.
(Continued here.)
New York Times
WHEN Helen Betancourt, an assistant coach at Princeton, was preparing for the World Championships in rowing in 1998, she suffered an overuse injury: stress fractures of her ribs. She competed anyway, but then had to take five months off.
Like most athletes, she did her best to maintain her fitness, spending hours cycling. Finally, she returned to her sport.
“I lost half my strength,” she said. And rowing just felt weird. “It was like I had stepped off another planet.”
Yet a couple of months later, much faster than it takes to get that strong to begin with, Ms. Betancourt felt like her old self on the water. Four months of rowing and she was in top form.
It shows, exercise physiologists say, that training is exquisitely specific: you can acquire and maintain cardiovascular fitness with many activities, but if you want to keep your ability to row, or run, or swim, you have to do that exact activity.
It also shows, they say, that people who work out sporadically, running on weekends, for instance, will never reach their potential.
This is a time of year when many people who exercised religiously for months cannot maintain their exercise schedules because they are traveling, or they have a severe cold, or simply because they are celebrating holidays with family.
That may not matter if you do not want to compete, and there is no reason why everyone who works out would want to race. But if competition or a new personal record is your goal, exercise physiologists have some lessons to impart.
(Continued here.)
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