End of season break / Longer breaks

[faivala]

@NFS

I’ve been told that the body holds water when you train (hard) and if you take a longer break (2+ weeks) it will get rid of the water and toxic waste with it.

I’ve also read an interesting study on pubmed which found that after a long break (2+ weeks) the fast twitch type muscles (Type IIx or Type IIb I don’t remember) will increase.
However, when the test subjects got back into training again the fast twitch muscles decrease and the more enduring muscle (Type IIa) increased.

What happened with Jonathan Edwards? He took like 4-6 months off, continued training and improved massively. Perhaps the absolute amount of IIb increases? If he had reverted again to IIa then he wouldn’t be able to jump as massively as he did.