Your breathing and heart rate increase, pulling more oxygen into the bloodstream. As you exercise, the oxygen that reaches your muscles converts available glucose into ATP, providing your body with the energy it needs to complete your workout. This is when your performance weakens and you begin to feel fatigued during an intense workout or at the end of a workout--which is where electric muscle stimulation comes in to save the day.
Not only is oxygen crucial in supporting muscle performance during your workout, but it also aids in the muscle recovery process. Electric muscle stimulation technology offers added support, and can be used pre- during and post workout. Post workout, electric muscle stimulation helps strengthen and retrain muscles, lessen muscle spasms and increase your range of motion.
The electrical current that EMS runs through your muscles helps promote blood flow by sending oxygen to muscles while also flushing out lactic acid, which can cause muscle soreness. PowerDot EMS technology offers 4 different recovery programs : active recovery, light recovery, extended recovery and massage.
Some endurance athletes, such as marathon runners, use the unique conditions of high altitudes. Many of the world's best endurance athletes train at high altitudes — a long way above sea level — to improve their performance.
At high altitudes there is less oxygen in the air and it's believed that the body has to work harder to extract what little oxygen remains.
When the athlete returns to lower altitudes, their body retains the ability to use oxygen more efficiently and their performance will have improved. Think about the effects there might be from training at a high altitude, low oxygen environment.
Look at the possible responses below and note down the ones that you think might be true. We can use the knowledge we have gained in the previous sections to help us make a guess at what we might expect to happen. From the discussion, it appears that high altitude training has the potential to be beneficial. However, it is not as straightforward as it may seem.
The effect of high-altitude training on blood is well known. But some coaches believe, however, that the overall effect of living at high altitude is not beneficial because the positive effect on the blood or the lungs is balanced by less beneficial bodily reactions such as a decrease in muscle strength.
To get the benefits without the drawbacks, athletes can now train in altitude chambers, which are tents that have a reduced oxygen level, the kind of which you might expect at high altitudes. The athletes spend some of their time in the tent and some of the time outside.
This affects their blood but allows them to train the rest of their bodies in an environment in which they are likely to compete. Another way for an athlete to get the same advantage is for them to inject extra red blood cells into their own blood before a competition, or to use a drug that causes their own body to increase the number of red blood cells.
This is illegal, and anti-doping authorities test carefully for this. This final section has concentrated on the heart, the lungs and the blood — the body's cardio-respiratory system.
We saw briefly how the body takes oxygen in through the lungs, and discussed the importance of this for athletes in various sports. To understand the role of oxygen in the body and its importance to athletes, we had to draw on information that we had discussed in earlier sections about the way oxygen is carried in the blood and the way that the heart pumps blood to different parts of the body.
This highlights an important point that you should remember. As we've seen, most things that we talk about in the body are interlinked. So, in the activity about high-altitude training, we had to use our knowledge of the lungs and the blood to understand how this would affect the body. In order to provide a more complete response, we need to think about how the oxygen is used in the body, as well as how it is absorbed.
I hope it's becoming clear that we cannot really talk about the heart separately from the blood, or the blood separately from the lungs, or even the cardio-respiratory system separately from the digestive system or the muscular system.
You should have made notes for each section. Often, things that we write down as notes make sense to us when we write them but not so much sense a few weeks later. This is because when we write the notes, our heads are full of all the information in that section and so we just need one or two words to allow us to remember something. A few weeks later, though, all we have is those few words and sometimes that is not enough.
So take the chance to look again at your notes. If something is a little unclear or if you can't remember what something means, go back and look at the section again and make your notes a little clearer.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this course:. If reading this text has inspired you to learn more, you may be interested in joining the millions of people who discover our free learning resources and qualifications by visiting The Open University - www. Printable page generated Friday, 12 Nov , Use 'Print preview' to check the number of pages and printer settings. Print functionality varies between browsers. Printable page generated Friday, 12 Nov , Exploring sport online: Athletes and efficient hearts Introduction With the announcement of the summer Olympics coming to London in , fierce competition between football clubs in the domestic league, and developments in coaching and training throughout all areas of physical fitness, there has never been a better time to learn more about sport.
Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: understand how the body works in a scientific sense, and that a scientific view is necessary for us to study how performance in sport is linked to performance of the body explain the function of the heart briefly and looks at the importance of healthy hearts in sport, by looking at athletes and efficient hearts understand the topics of blood and blood flow understand the role of oxygen and the lungs and how they affect the sporting performance of an athlete, by looking at athletes, oxygen and the lung.
You will see that even a brief introduction to the science of the human body is enough to answer some basic questions about sporting activity such as: Why does the heart beat faster during sport? Why does intense activity make us red in the face?
This course provides an introduction to the fundamental biology of the human body and will give you an opportunity to: gain an overall appreciation of how the body works in a scientific sense, and understand that a scientific view is necessary for us to study how performance in sport is linked to performance of the body.
Figure 1 A car with a central engine and a body with a central heart. Figure 2 The body being fuelled and using energy. Activity 1: What you need to do Active content not displayed. This content requires JavaScript to be enabled. Animation 1. Interactive feature not available in single page view see it in standard view. Discussion Did you find this interesting?
Figure 3 Smallest to largest in scale. Activity 2: What I need to do Read the discussion below to find out about the different levels of focus. Discussion Atoms and molecules : These are the smallest things that we need to consider.
How did this compare as a different way of thinking about the body? Listen to what our fencer and runner have to say on this subject. Download this audio clip. Audio 1. Skip transcript: Audio 1 Transcript: Audio 1. Sophie Troiano. Nutrition's important in fencing in order to optimise performance.
You've got to have your body in the best condition possible in order to compete optimally; you have to supply it with all its calorific requirements. The main principles of fencing are endurance, speed, agility and well explosiveness really.
Diet is very important for this so, you have to eat a diet high in carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, and high protein, particularly after training it's important to rebuild possibly damaged muscle.
As an amateur myself no-one specifically tells me what I can and cannot eat however we are given guidelines by nutritionists especially when we go to training courses and they try and help us make the correct food choices. In terms of implementing my diet into everyday eating habits it is not that straightforward being a student.
You have to try and eat well at breakfast, particularly; you start with a good mixture of cereals, bread and try and take a relatively high intake of protein such as chicken and fish. Training is usually in the afternoons for me personally so I try and eat maybe a banana or a sandwich about an hour before training. In terms of competition, the night before is very important in terms of eating a large amount of complex carbs such as pasta, rice and in the morning of the competition again eating something with a mixture of complex and simple carbohydrates such as honey on toast, cereal, fruit, this kind of thing.
Foods to avoid are things which are high in fat and low in carbohydrate or other nutritional value, things such as cakes, chocolate obviously you can eat these in moderation but they shouldn't form a large part of your diet. It's important on a competition day to eat consistently throughout the day to keep energy levels up. In terms of eating before training, as long as you eat 20 minutes to an hour before you intend on commencing that's what's really important….
Not only for hydration but to ensure that your blood sugar levels are kept high enough in order to allow you to perform optimally. De-hydration can lead to a very poor performance so keeping optimally hydrated throughout the day as well as during training and competition is very important.
Often carrying a large bottle of water with you is the best way to ensure you drink throughout the day. Show transcript Hide transcript. Audio 2. Skip transcript: Audio 2 Transcript: Audio 2. Mick Curry. The diet is very, very important. Its good to get three meals a day, though, never eat within three hours of a run, apart from chewing a banana or cereal bar.
The weekend runner, he would study more on what he eats normally during the week, with a bit of a favourite during the week, he may eat pasta, rices, it just depends what they favour.
Not too much alcohol and get plenty of water down, at least two litres a day. Fluid is more important than anything actually, you can hang on without food for a while. The porridge or cereals we usually eat on the morning of a race one because they are very easy to digest, easy to prepare. Also helps your bowels, helps the system. One of the most difficult things actually running is if you suffer constipation or whatever, wind.
On the day of competition I can get down a lot of bananas, cereal bars different types, because you get fed up of the same thing. And I have to make sure in the bag on the back of the wheelchair there are bananas, cereal bars and drinks. I also have to feed Philip en route, very often still running doing it. You can probably say what I do is doubling what the other runners are doing. The next activity gives you a chance to practice making linear notes and a mind map.
Activity 3: What you need to do Look back over this section and make notes of the main points as you go along. Discussion How did you get on? Figure 4 Linear notes. Figure 5 Mind map. At this point, you should understand that in the human body: there are various systems of body parts that have different roles — one example is the cardiovascular system we have to consider things as small as atoms and molecules and as large as the systems, organs and even the whole body.
Figure 6 The two positions at which you can measure a pulse. Activity 4: Measuring your pulse: what you need to do Can you measure your own pulse? Figure 7 Different sports. Activity 5: Athletes and heart rates: What you need to do Think about the athletes in these photographs, and the sport involved.
Activity 6: What you need to do Create a list of what you think are the most important points in this section. Discussion Compare your list to the one here.
An efficient heart can pump a lot of blood with each pump and can beat quickly for a long time. Athletes train to have efficient hearts that pump more blood with each pump, and can beat quickly for long time to get oxygen and nutrients to all their bodies more quickly.
Resting heart rate equals the number of beats per minute when someone is resting. A non-athlete's resting heart rate usually equals 55—65 beats per min. By travelling to high-altitude mountain training camps, sleeping in depressurized altitude tents, and strapping on altitude-simulating masks for workouts, athletes force their bodies to adapt to the scarcity of oxygen so that, when it comes time to compete in normal air, they'll have an extra zip in their step.
But there may be a simpler and more economical way of reaping some of the same benefits, according to several recent studies: Just hold your breath while dashing through a series of short sprints. The most recent study, published this month in the European Journal of Sports Science, involved 21 rugby players who completed seven sprint workouts over a four-week period, with half of them doing the sprints in a condition of "voluntary hypoventilation"— that is, holding their breath during the sprints.
By the end, the breath-holders had increased the number of sprints they could complete during a testing session from 9 to 15, while those who breathed normally showed no significant improvement. The idea of restricting your breathing during training actually has a long history, explains Xavier Woorons, a researcher at the University of Lille, in France, who led the new study.
Starting in the s, the legendary American swimming coach James Counsilman advocated training while breathing only every five or more strokes, instead of the customary two to three strokes, in order to force the body to adapt to lower levels of oxygen.
But there was a problem with Counsilman's approach, Woorons found when he began studying the idea in the mids. Inhaling a lungful of air and then holding your breath is uncomfortable because levels of carbon dioxide in your blood increase — but oxygen levels in your blood don't actually drop significantly.
This is why several endurance athletes have started to incorporate oxygen-based treatments into their routine, like water polo player Ashleigh Johnson and basketball superstar LeBron James. Both are fans of oxygen therapy, with USA Today reporting that the NBA star even sleeps in a hyperbaric chamber , to help his muscles recover faster and improve his performance This particular treatment that James uses provides pure oxygen with increased pressure.
But considering that LeBron James is currently the highest-paid basketball player in the world with endorsement deals with a slew of major brands, paying a couple of hundred dollars to improve his game is not going to be an issue. Aside from replenishing oxygen supply, oxygen therapy is said to reduce inflammation, minimize muscle soreness and help repair scar tissue.
It means that oxygen is not only responsible for increasing energy levels, but also speeding up the recovery process following intense workouts. What you need to do is refine your breathing technique so that it comes from the diaphragm. Yoga teacher Dana Santas pointed out that shallow breathing causes tension in the chest, neck, and upper back muscles. This constricts the body and leads to an inefficient breathing pattern.
To practice diaphragmatic breathing, take a seat with one hand on your stomach and one hand on your chest. Inhale deeply through your nose and feel your stomach rising up while your chest remains still.
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