Teenagers End Up in Intensive Care After Trying to Do '1,000-Squat Challenge'Two Chinese teenagers are lucky to have escaped serious injury after a video dare to push their bodies to the absolute limit ended them up in intensive care.
Nineteen-year-old student Xiao Tang and her friend were hospitalised after competing against one another in an intensive 1,000-squat challenge that turned out to have dangerous unexpected consequences.
In the dare, the sophomore from Chongqing challenged her friend during a video call to see who could perform the most squats in a row.
"We both did not want to lose and so we kept trying to beat each other, resulting in us completing 1,000 squats," Xiao told China Press.
While doing 1,000 squats in a row sounds like an impossible (or at least inadvisable) physical feat, it's actually a popular fad among exercise enthusiasts ...
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After the challenge, Xiao felt sore, which was only to be expected after such a gruelling session, but she still went to work the next day as per usual.
It was only when Xiao woke up the day after that that she realised something was seriously wrong.
"First of all, my leg was not only sore, but I couldn't bend it," she told China Press.
"Then I went to the bathroom and found that the urine was brown."
When Xiao went with her boyfriend to the emergency department, doctors found her myoglobin readings were through the roof.
Myoglobin is a protein that's produced when muscle breaks down. ...
The urine discolouration is called myoglobinuria, which is one of the most obvious signs of rhabdomyolysis, a serious syndrome in which, due to rapid breakdown of muscle, the kidneys can't process all the waste content floating in the blood.
In some cases, serious kidney damage can result from rhabdomyolysis, and the condition can even be fatal.
OK, I am nowhere NEAR this kind of fitness level. I could do 20 squats in a row without too much trouble, but I doubt I could do 50. As the article suggests, this is a situation of excessive exercise
for the capability of the one exercising. I'm not in the Crossfit world, but I have heard of this same kind of problem being experienced by a few Crossfitters who were trying to do more than they can do with their level of fitness.
Improving one's fitness is "walking" a path between doing enough of X to challenge and bring improvement and doing too much of X and hurting oneself.
