Tomorow I go down to Sloan Kettering for my semi-annual CAT scan. The next week I see the Lymphoma guru, Dr. Zelenetz.
I feel fine, no signs of any lumps or funny itching that might indicate the return of my mantle cell. So I expect a good report.
I have been going to the gym about six days a week. A few days ago there was a very good article in the NY Times on fitness and recovery after an injury, or layoff.
Short Layoff, Long Comeback – 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.
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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.
>>>>>>>>>>
But the good news is that it takes much less time to regain fitness for a specific sport than it did to become fit in the first place.
Even exercise physiologists are surprised at how quickly the body can readapt when training resumes. Almost immediately, blood volume goes up, heartbeats become more powerful, and muscle mitochondria come back.
Of course, researchers say, individuals respond differently and young people may bounce back faster than older athletes. But, they say, speed and strength and endurance do return, even in deconditioned athletes, some of whose lab test results look like those of a sedentary person.
Part of the reason, researchers say, is that training may elicit lasting effects that are very hard to measure, like changes in nerve-firing patterns and blood vessels. Dr. Coyle, who has measured muscle mitochondria, said that even though muscles lose mitochondria when athletes stop training, they retain more of them than are found in muscles of a person who has always been sedentary.
But another reason may be that athletes, unlike most inactive people, know how to train and how to push themselves.
Apropos to the article, I am almost back to my old bench press mark. As I posted previously, I’d stopped doing bench presses, and was just using a chest press machine. When I tried some benching a couple of months ago, I was pretty shocked at my poor performance, compared to the past. (Not that I was any great shakes!) Tom Faranda’s Folly: Health Update
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