Results of studies in sports science, exercise physiology or medical science are often controversial. A very good example is body temperature and heat stroke. I found an excellent argumentation on the sportscientist’s blog. It is recommended to all athletes who do believe so much in science and its methods. Take a look out of the box. The following is an excerpt of an article that fits perfectly well biestmilch’s philosophy and scientific approach.
Calvin (the young boy, for those who haven’t discovered Calvin and Hobbes) asks his father a seemingly simple question, and gets an absurd answer. Yet incredibly, this is how exercise scientists have approached certain problems for many years – fatigue and temperature is the most obvious of them! So we study what happens at failure (exhaustion) and then infer the cause backwards from there! For example, when studying fatigue, many exercise physiology studies make runners or cyclists exercise at a fixed workload until they are absolutely exhausted and then measure things at the point at which they stop, assuming them to be the cause.
Experience tells another story
Regardless of the air temperature, humidity and windspeed, your body temperature will regularly hit about 39 degrees celsius, with no ill effects whatsoever – it’s a controlled “hyperthermia”, and you’re halfway to heat stroke without ever even realising it! It’s actually amazing to consider how exercise makes the “abnormal” feel normal. Take a physiological snapshot of yourself during a 10-mile tempo run and your heart rate is 175 beats per minute, your breathing rate 54 breaths per minute, your body temperature is 39 degrees celsius. A doctor presented with those statistics would likely admit you to an ICU, yet you feel absolutely perfect during exercise!
How you feel is not necessarily the same as how you are are.
A similar concept applies to exercise. And the point of all this is to introduce the issue of heatstroke to you. Your body is a remarkably designed machine, capable of losing far more heat than you might realise. Yet it chooses to allow you to gain heat and you become “hyperthermic” during exercise even on cold days.
Whole article on www.sportscientist.com
