Originally Posted by Knighty
You aren't suggesting that the entire training effect is lost after one week, are you?
No, not the entire training effect - but plasma volume will return to pre training values pretty rapidly, and detraining is fairly rapid in general (it's a pain!). However, plasma volume does return pretty rapidly with picking up training again, and in studies where they've infused a solution to bring it up to trained levels, VO2max returns to trained levels almost immediately.
of course there's a myriad of factors that are involved in training (and detraining) two review papers are
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q..._uids=11252068
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q..._uids=11474330
ric