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Deconditioning

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One of the main principles of physical conditioning is the principle of adaptation. In order for your body to become faster, stronger and leaner, it must learn to adapt to ever more challenging workouts.

And in order to do that, it must also be allowed to rest.

This concept of use/disuse or train/rest can also be referred to as the 'use it or lose it' concept. The main problem is to find the correct balance between stressing and resting the muscles.

However, sometimes you don't have a choice and have to stop exercising because of illness, injury or just simply a lack of time.

What happens then? How quickly you become deconditioned or lose fitness when you stop training depends on many variables such as how fit you are, your age and gender, how long you've been exercising and how long you intend to stop. Thanks to several recent studies on aerobic fitness, theories on what happens to the body during periods of deconditioning are becoming clearer. One study looked at very fit athletes who had trained non-stop for a year. After a three-month hiatus, where the subjects did no exercise, researchers found that the athletes had lost about half of their aerobic conditioning.

In another study, a group of sedentary people were trained on a stationary bicycle for two months. During this period they made enormous gains in their cardiovascular fitness levels and increased their aerobic capacity substantially. Following the conditioning phase, the subjects then quit exercising for two months.

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