Everything Katie Ledecky Has Shared About Living With the Health Condition POTS

Whereas Katie Ledecky was on the 2015 world championships in Kazan, Russia, she began feeling somewhat bizarre. After dinner one evening, 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 ebook: 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 price).

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

9 years later, she continues to dwell with the situation. And she or he’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 dwelling two extra golds, a silver, and a bronze. That gave her a grand whole of 14 Olympic medals, making her probably the most adorned feminine Olymian ever from the US, in response to Group 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 probably 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 massive, history-making targets.

Ledecky retains constant together with her exercises.

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

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

It’s probably 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 may extra successfully pump that blood by means of her physique.

She stays on prime of her hydration.

The title of Ledecky’s ebook may additionally double as one among her therapy methods. Ingesting loads of water retains her blood stress and blood quantity excessive sufficient, which helps scale back POTS signs. In line with Johns Hopkins Medication, people with POTS are typically suggested to drink at the very least 2 to 2.5 liters of water a day.