With the New Year, we continue our quest to answer the internet’s most popular questions about fitness. Coach Jess picks it up with, “Why do I lose fitness so easily?”
Much like many other skills and abilities in life, fitness fits into the “use it or lose it” bucket. Of course, missing a few days in a row here and there won’t kill those gains you’ve been chasing. But after a couple of weeks of inactivity our bodies start to decondition and various components of our fitness will suffer.
Our cardiovascular fitness (aka “cardio”) feels the impact first. Ever miss a week at the gym and then notice that a few flights of stairs leaves you winded? That’s because your heart is working harder than usual to get oxygenated blood to those deconditioned muscles. The good news? Our cardio can pretty significantly improve over the course of just a few weeks with consistent training.
Musculoskeletal fitness (yup, strength!) doesn’t slip away from us as quickly as cardio. Over a period of inactivity, our muscle fibers change and essentially weaken (bye bye, gains!). Three months of no training will erase much of the strength you’d worked so hard to build up. And, just as we lose strength more slowly than cardio, we’re also much slower to gain it back.
So get moving and stay moving!
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