All the things 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 little bit 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 power. 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 stunning analysis, as Ledecky revealed in her e book: She had a well being situation known as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS. POTS is a kind of dysautonomia, a dysfunction of your autonomic nervous system, which controls physique capabilities you don’t have to consider (like your blood strain and coronary heart price).

With POTS, signs happen while you change place, notably while 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 once 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 she or he’s continued to rack up the {hardware} (and make historical past) alongside the best way. At her fourth Olympic Video games in Paris, Ledecky took dwelling two extra golds, a silver, and a bronze. That gave her a grand whole of 14 Olympic medals, making her essentially the most embellished feminine Olymian ever from the US, in accordance with Crew USA. And when she earned her final gold of the Video games—within the 800-meter freestyle, which she’s gained 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 Fifties and ‘60s.

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

Ledecky retains constant along with her exercises.

Although it could typically really feel crappy, particularly at first, train on the whole—and swimming particularly—is definitely useful for POTS. Actually, whereas bodily exercise can set off signs, it’s really a confirmed remedy for POTS as properly, Benjamin Levine, MD, a professor of medication and cardiology and founding director of the Institute for Train and Environmental Drugs at UT Southwestern Medical Middle, informed SELF beforehand.

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

It’s possible 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 strain. All that swimming additionally builds a stronger coronary heart and all-over muscle, which might extra successfully pump that blood by means of her physique.

She stays on high of her hydration.

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