The physiology of an Olympic rowing champion

🚣 Cool case study elegantly showing how unbelievably ‘plastic’ the human body is.

💦 An elite Olympic heavyweight rower was tested via a maximal ramp test to exhaustion at different times during an Olympic year.

📉📈 From peak fitness at the Olympic games, he lost 8.9% of VO2peak and 22% of power at threshold just by not training for 8 weeks. It took 20 full weeks of training to regain his fitness.

🤷‍♂️ Unfortunate caveat, not everyone is this adaptable to training. There is a reason why he was one of the best of the world.

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Full reference: Godfrey et al., PMID: 16248472

https://www.jsams.org/article/S1440-2440(05)80042-8/pdf

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