recovery – Page 6 – Sweat Science

March 1, 2010March 1, 2010

Overtraining may cause (or result from) oxidative stress

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- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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“Overtraining” is one of those terms that means different things to different people. For some, it means they’re tired because they went too hard for a few workouts in a row; for others — particularly elite endurance athletes — it’s a potentially debilitating condition that can take many months to recover from. The confusion arises in part because there’s no definitive definition of the condition, or any reliable way to predict or diagnose it.

Overtraining syndrome is characterized by an unanticipated reduction in performance, despite increased or maintained training challenges.

That’s the simplest possible definition, from a new paper in the Journal of Sports Sciences by researchers from Finland. The study joins the search for physiological indicators of what’s going on and why, focusing on oxidative stress. In the normal course of events, exercise causes oxidative stress, and your body’s natural antioxidant system responds to neutralize the oxidation. The more you train, the more powerful your body’s antioxidant defenses become.

The Finnish researchers studied seven overtrained athletes, and compared them to a group of matched controls. At rest, the overtrained athletes had higher levels of oxidative stress than the controls. When they exercised to exhaustion, the antioxidant response increased in the controls, but not in the overtrained athletes — and this was still true six months later. The conclusion: overtrained athletes are no longer able to adapt to the oxidative stimulus of exercise.

Of course, this doesn’t say anything about cause and effect. But it does add weight to the argument that overtraining syndrome — whose very existence, like chronic fatigue syndrome, is often debated — really does exist as a distinct physiological state. And the researchers suggest that one of the markers of oxidative stress in the study, protein carbonyls, has potential to be used for early detection of overtraining.

January 9, 2010January 10, 2010

Is physiotherapy useless?

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- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Gina Kolata has another debunking-conventional-wisdom Personal Best column in the New York Times, this time taking on physical therapy (or physiotherapy, as it’s known here in Canada). I’ve really appreciated some of her previous articles on stretching, cool-downs, massage, lactic acid, and so on. This one, I was less impressed by. She writes:

When I’ve gone to physical therapy, the treatments I’ve had — ice and heat, massage, ultrasound — always seemed like a waste of time. I usually went once or twice before stopping.

To me, this is sort of like saying “Yeah, I’ve tried antibiotics several times, but it never seems to work for me, so I always just take the pills for a day or two and then throw the rest away.” Any successes I’ve had with physical therapy tend not to be the “fix pain in two weeks” category, but more like “spend six months correcting some subtle weaknesses and imbalances in order to avoid repeating the injury you just had.” It’s a long-term investment.

That being said, the article has some interesting information about which treatment and recovery modalities actually have solid evidence behind them (not many). I’ve written about heat and ice and massage before — the fact is, if we limited ourselves to the modalities that have solid peer-reviewed evidence, we’d all just be lying in bed for a few weeks every time we got injured. So much as I like evidence-based medicine, I think we have to be realistic about the current state of knowledge.

December 10, 2009

Jockology: vitamin C may slow muscle recovery and inhibit fitness gains

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- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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This week’s Jockology column delves into the highly controversial body of research on antioxidants and exercise:

The question

How do antioxidants affect my workout?

The answer

Sales of orange juice are soaring as people seek flu protection from vitamin C, The Globe and Mail reported last month.

Old habits die hard, and our faith in the power of antioxidants is deeply entrenched. Over the past few years, a vast series of studies involving hundreds of thousands of subjects have failed to find any health benefits from antioxidant supplements.

Now, a handful of studies suggest that popping these pills may even block some of the benefits of exercise, and even slow down post-workout muscle recovery. [read on…]

Not to spoil the ending, but to me this research is yet another reason to focus on meeting nutritional needs by eating good foods (in this case, fruits and vegetables) rather than by swallowing pills.

November 26, 2009

Jockology:exercising while you’re sick, and boosting your immune system

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- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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This week’s Jockology column takes a look at how exercise affects your chances of staying healthy during the cold and flu season, and what happens if you exercise when you’re already sick:

The question

Will working out help me beat the flu?

The answer

As cold and flu season kicks into high gear, so too does the search for an immunity edge.

Recent studies offer plenty of evidence that regular exercise really does strengthen immune function – a claim that can’t be made for most of the pills and potions whose sales spike at about this time of year. But like any powerful medicine, exercise also carries the risk of an overdose.

“It’s what experts call the ‘J-curve’ hypothesis,” says Brian Timmons, a researcher at McMaster University’s Children’s Exercise and Nutrition Centre. “Moderate intensity is good, but too much exercise is not so good.”

Exercise also turns out to be a mixed blessing if you do get sick: harmless and possibly even helpful for some symptoms, but not recommended for others.[read more…]

An important point made by a commenter on the Globe site: if you’re contagious, you definitely shouldn’t head to the gym and infect other people!

October 23, 2009

The science of cool-downs after exercise

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- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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The cool-down is another one of those well-established exercise habits, like stretching, that most people swear by without really wondering about the underlying science. And for good reason: it turns out there isn’t really much science there, according to a recent article by Gina Kolata in the New York Times.

Exercise researchers say there is only one agreed-on fact about the possible risk of suddenly stopping intense exercise. When you exercise hard, the blood vessels in your legs are expanded to send more blood to your legs and feet. And your heart is pumping fast. If you suddenly stop, your heart slows down, your blood is pooled in your legs and feet, and you can feel dizzy, even pass out.

So that suggests that, at the very least, you should keep moving, if only at a walk, for a few minutes after vigorous exercise. But there’s no evidence to support the idea that a cool-down will reduce stiffness or muscle soreness the next day, let alone “flush out lactic acid.”

Of course, this may simply be because scientists have yet to do rigorous research into the cool-down. (Kolata does mention a couple of studies that failed to find any benefits.) Based of their personal experiences, many people are firmly convinced that they feel better if they warm down, science or not. And, unlike stretching, there’s no significant evidence that cooling down actually hurts you, so you might as well stick with whatever makes you feel good!