‘Shocked at her injuries’: What to know before high intensity workouts. We try 5 of them

SINGAPORE: She was about to cross the road when her legs gave way, and she fell. She got up but fell again on the way to the bus stop.

The 21-year-old had just come from a fitness studio, where she’d had an intensive 50-minute cycling workout in her very first Spinning class. What happened to her after that, however, was more than just a case of physical exertion.

Her legs were still painful the next day, so she went to a clinic. Following a blood test, the doctor told her it was a “muscle breakdown”.

Two days later, on Jan 26, the doctor did another test and found her muscle breakdown to be “so severe” that she was taken to hospital, recounted her father, Dominic Ang. His daughter was hospitalised for six days.

“We were shocked at the severity of her injuries,” he said. “Fortunately, she’s on the road to recovery.

“But she still has to make visits to the clinic for blood tests, to make sure that the breakdown of her muscle fibres has decreased. If it remains elevated, she has to be readmitted.”

Her condition, known as rhabdomyolysis, is less uncommon these days. In some cases, it may lead to kidney failure and even death — if the kidneys are not fast enough in removing the muscle proteins that were released into the bloodstream.

Three doctors from Changi General Hospital’s emergency department wrote last year to the Annals, the journal of the Academy of Medicine Singapore, to raise awareness of the “increasing number” of Spinning-induced cases they were seeing.

Renal medicine specialist Angeline Goh at Mount Elizabeth Hospital also cited the increasing popularity of CrossFit and Spinning classes when she warned of the danger of rhabdomyolysis in the health and wellness web resource, Health Plus.

For the Angs, it was a condition