Every part Katie Ledecky Has Shared About Dwelling With the Well being Situation POTS

Whereas Katie Ledecky was on the 2015 world championships in Kazan, Russia, she began feeling a bit of bizarre. After dinner one night time, she started to get sizzling and lightheaded. Then, after returning to coaching when the competitors concluded, she’d have a day or two of feeling okay, adopted by a pair with zero vitality. Generally, as she detailed in her new memoir Simply Add Water: My Swimming Life, she’d get dizzy simply strolling round.

These signs led to a shocking prognosis, as Ledecky revealed in her e book: She had a well being situation referred to as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS. POTS is a kind of dysautonomia, a dysfunction of your autonomic nervous system, which controls physique features you don’t have to consider (like your blood stress and coronary heart fee).

With POTS, signs happen if you change place, significantly if you go from mendacity or sitting to standing. As Ledecky describes it in her e book, “I pool blood within the vessels under my coronary heart after I stand. My physique then releases additional norepinephrine or epinephrine, which provides extra stressors on my coronary heart, making it beat quicker. Which, in flip, brings on dizziness, fainting, and exhaustion.”

9 years later, she continues to stay with the situation. And he or she’s continued to rack up the {hardware} (and make historical past) alongside the way in which. At her fourth Olympic Video games in Paris, Ledecky took residence two extra golds, a silver, and a bronze. That gave her a grand whole of 14 Olympic medals, making her essentially the most adorned feminine Olymian ever from the US, in response to Crew USA. And when she earned her final gold of the Video games—within the 800-meter freestyle, which she’s received in each single Olympic Video games since 2012—it gave her 9 whole. That’s essentially the most Olympic golds for any feminine Olympic athlete from the US and tied her with Larisa Latynina, a Soviet gymnast from the Nineteen Fifties and ‘60s.

Learn on for extra on how the Olympic swimming star has managed the well being situation POTS whereas working towards large, history-making objectives.

Ledecky retains constant along with her exercises.

Although it may well typically really feel crappy, particularly at first, train normally—and swimming particularly—is definitely useful for POTS. The truth is, whereas bodily exercise can set off signs, it’s really a confirmed therapy for POTS as nicely, Benjamin Levine, MD, a professor of medication and cardiology and founding director of the Institute for Train and Environmental Drugs at UT Southwestern Medical Heart, informed SELF beforehand.

With swimming, you don’t change positions a lot, and water acts like a compression swimsuit to regulate blood stress. That’s excellent news for Ledecky, who writes: “What are the chances that the prescriptive train for my explicit illness can be…extra swimming?”

It’s doubtless that her constant coaching advantages her a ton, since cardio train boosts circulation and leads your physique to create extra blood over time, stabilizing blood stress. All that swimming additionally builds a stronger coronary heart and all-over muscle, which might extra successfully pump that blood by way of her physique.

She stays on prime of her hydration.

The title of Ledecky’s e book may additionally double as one in every of her therapy methods. Consuming loads of water retains her blood stress and blood quantity excessive sufficient, which helps scale back POTS signs. In keeping with Johns Hopkins Drugs, of us with POTS are usually suggested to drink not less than 2 to 2.5 liters of water a day.