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Games special: Freezer therapy
Blood sport CUTTING off the blood supply to the arms of people who have had a heart attack doesn’t sound like a good idea – a lack of blood generally causes cells to die. But in 2010 a team of cardiologists found that this helped protect the heart from damage. The result made Dick Thijssen, a sport and exercise scientist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, sit up and take notice. Within 12 hours of having a suspected heart attack, people were made to wear a pressure cuff over one of their upper arms. The cardiologists, led by Hans Bøtker at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, then inflated and deflated the cuff for 5 minutes at a time and repeated the procedure three more times. They found less heart tissue death compared with people who weren’t treated this way. “If the technique had such a big effect on heart damage, I thought it might also be useful for athletes,” says Thijssen. To test this hunch, Thijssen and his colleagues tried out the procedure – known as ischaemic preconditioning, or IPC – on 15 healthy individuals who normally did moderate exercise. They asked the volunteers to cycle 5 kilometres as fast as they could. Each person lopped an impressive 30 seconds on average off their time compared with
Freezer therapy when they did a normal warm-up. Elite athletes benefit too. In a cycling test, the England rugby 7’s team showed a 1 per cent improvement in speed and lower fatigue levels after IPC, says Thijssen, who is about to publish the results. And Emilie Jean-St-Michel and her colleagues at the University of Toronto in Canada have seen elite-level swimmers shave 0.7 seconds off a 100metre swim following the procedure. That’s important considering there was less than 0.3 seconds between bronze, silver and gold in the women’s 100-metres freestyle at the Beijing games in 2008. How the technique works is unknown. It is thought that it triggers the release of some sort of protecting factor, but as yet no one’s quite sure what that is. And even if researchers find out how IPC keeps cells alive after a heart attack, the performance-enhancing mechanism might be different, says Thijssen. Many athletes have already jumped on the IPC bandwagon, says Phil Glasgow at the Sports Institute of Northern Ireland, UK, who works with Olympic athletes. “A number of athletes from a number of sports are trialling blood-vessel blocking,” he says. “They’re all looking for little additional aids – anything that will give them that extra 0.1 per cent.”
FOR years, sportsmen and women have been sticking ice packs on injuries to numb the pain and slow inflammation. The latest craze in the world of sports cooling, or cryotherapy as it is known, is to shut athletes in a room and blast them with air set to teeth-chattering temperatures as low as -160 °C. Such cryochambers are used by the Welsh rugby union team to speed recovery after intense training sessions. One aim of cryotherapy is to slow down metabolism in injured muscle tissue. After an injury, an initial rush of blood to the damaged site is followed by a disruption in blood flow, which causes local cells to die. The thinking is that cryotherapy protects against this process by slowing down the action of the immune system’s chemical messengers, says Chris Bleakley, a sports scientist at the University of Ulster in the UK. There are even claims that those who dip into icy waters every so often are more resilient to infections. “There is a degree of evidence that people who undergo cold water immersion may be less susceptible to colds,” says Olympic physiotherapist Phil Glasgow, of the Sports Institute of Northern Ireland. Further evidence comes from a group based at France’s National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance (INSEP) in Paris, who found that taking a cold bath after a bout of exercise could improve elite athletes’ subsequent performance in a rowing test. The team also found that alternating between warm and cold water was more effective than cold water alone.
COOL, calm, collected and, above all, focused. Getting into the right state of mind is a vital part of sporting success. To get into “the zone”, some sportspeople are turning to ways of controlling their brain waves. One technique, neurofeedback, involves placing electrodes on a person’s head to measure their brain’s electrical activity. The information is displayed on a computer screen, so the individual can watch it in real time and learn through practice how to alter it. “You can enhance skills themselves or you can enhance states of mind,” says John Gruzelier at Goldsmiths, University of London, who points out that the technique has already proved successful in improving the skills of actors and musicians. In sport, neurofeedback could be used to help athletes learn how to consciously get their brain into a state associated with improved attention, focus and aim. It could also improve hand-eye coordination, says Gruzelier. He has found that surgeons using the technique had improved control over their movement and could perform more efficiently in the operating theatre. So far there has been little published research on the success of neurofeedback in sports training. “It’s a technology in its infancy,” says Phil Glasgow at the Sports Institute of Northern Ireland. “But that doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t come up with something amazing and for obvious reasons they’re just not sharing it.”
Main photograph WOLFGANG RATTAY/Reuters/Corbis. Left ian walton/getty
Thought control
Left: Elite athletes like Michael Phelps go to great lengths to succeed Right: They may not be relaxing, but ice baths really do help tired muscles 21 July 2012 | NewScientist | 45
Freezer therapy when they did a normal warm-up. Elite athletes benefit too. In a cycling test, the England rugby 7’s team showed a 1 per cent improvement in speed and lower fatigue levels after IPC, says Thijssen, who is about to publish the results. And Emilie Jean-St-Michel and her colleagues at the University of Toronto in Canada have seen elite-level swimmers shave 0.7 seconds off a 100metre swim following the procedure. That’s important considering there was less than 0.3 seconds between bronze, silver and gold in the women’s 100-metres freestyle at the Beijing games in 2008. How the technique works is unknown. It is thought that it triggers the release of some sort of protecting factor, but as yet no one’s quite sure what that is. And even if researchers find out how IPC keeps cells alive after a heart attack, the performance-enhancing mechanism might be different, says Thijssen. Many athletes have already jumped on the IPC bandwagon, says Phil Glasgow at the Sports Institute of Northern Ireland, UK, who works with Olympic athletes. “A number of athletes from a number of sports are trialling blood-vessel blocking,” he says. “They’re all looking for little additional aids – anything that will give them that extra 0.1 per cent.”
FOR years, sportsmen and women have been sticking ice packs on injuries to numb the pain and slow inflammation. The latest craze in the world of sports cooling, or cryotherapy as it is known, is to shut athletes in a room and blast them with air set to teeth-chattering temperatures as low as -160 °C. Such cryochambers are used by the Welsh rugby union team to speed recovery after intense training sessions. One aim of cryotherapy is to slow down metabolism in injured muscle tissue. After an injury, an initial rush of blood to the damaged site is followed by a disruption in blood flow, which causes local cells to die. The thinking is that cryotherapy protects against this process by slowing down the action of the immune system’s chemical messengers, says Chris Bleakley, a sports scientist at the University of Ulster in the UK. There are even claims that those who dip into icy waters every so often are more resilient to infections. “There is a degree of evidence that people who undergo cold water immersion may be less susceptible to colds,” says Olympic physiotherapist Phil Glasgow, of the Sports Institute of Northern Ireland. Further evidence comes from a group based at France’s National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance (INSEP) in Paris, who found that taking a cold bath after a bout of exercise could improve elite athletes’ subsequent performance in a rowing test. The team also found that alternating between warm and cold water was more effective than cold water alone.
COOL, calm, collected and, above all, focused. Getting into the right state of mind is a vital part of sporting success. To get into “the zone”, some sportspeople are turning to ways of controlling their brain waves. One technique, neurofeedback, involves placing electrodes on a person’s head to measure their brain’s electrical activity. The information is displayed on a computer screen, so the individual can watch it in real time and learn through practice how to alter it. “You can enhance skills themselves or you can enhance states of mind,” says John Gruzelier at Goldsmiths, University of London, who points out that the technique has already proved successful in improving the skills of actors and musicians. In sport, neurofeedback could be used to help athletes learn how to consciously get their brain into a state associated with improved attention, focus and aim. It could also improve hand-eye coordination, says Gruzelier. He has found that surgeons using the technique had improved control over their movement and could perform more efficiently in the operating theatre. So far there has been little published research on the success of neurofeedback in sports training. “It’s a technology in its infancy,” says Phil Glasgow at the Sports Institute of Northern Ireland. “But that doesn’t mean that someone hasn’t come up with something amazing and for obvious reasons they’re just not sharing it.”
Main photograph WOLFGANG RATTAY/Reuters/Corbis. Left ian walton/getty
Thought control
Left: Elite athletes like Michael Phelps go to great lengths to succeed Right: They may not be relaxing, but ice baths really do help tired muscles 21 July 2012 | NewScientist | 45