How quickly does cardiovascular fitness dissipate?

[Blarg]

This is just my experience from playing soccer, running, and from martial arts, which I used to do as a teenager and young adult, at various stages of my life, pretty full-out, daily or near there for years. My friends all noticed the same thing and agreed; we could tell a marked difference in how winded we would get if we hadn't done any hard running or heavily aerobic work-outs for 2 to 3 days. Your mileage my vary, but this was pretty consistent with us when we were at the peak of our abilities. I think if we were at less than our peak, it probably wouldn't have been so easy to notice how quickly we could drop down from our usual performance. But the standard you set when you're at your best is very unforgiving.

I'm not saying we were suddenly in bad shape, or anything, by far. But there was no getting around our disappointment at how quickly we could come off our peak.

[cbloom]

Pro cyclists around race time ride absolutely every day, if you take even one day off your body goes into a weird shut down mode and the muscles tighten up. There's this weird way that as long as you do it every day, your lungs are "open" and your muscles are "loose" and if you stop for even one day, it can take a long time to get back to that "warm" state.

(heavy use of quotes because this is very unscientific)

[deaders]

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noticable dropoffs occur after about 2 weeks

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wow I just tried to brush your avatar off my monitor.

In my experience fitness falls off very quickly. Ive played soccer 2-3 times a week for the last 3 years as well as surfing at least every week. I injured my ankle about 4 months ago and couldnt play any sport at all. After finally being able to run again the last few weeks I feel so out of shape its ridiculous. I expect to take at least 2-3 months to get back to where I was, and probably longer to lose all the fat I put on sitting around eating crap.