Science and sensibility

Science and sensibility

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Better cycling through science

With all that talk of cheating I thought I might mention a perfectly legal way of increasing your endurance uncovered by a recent BMC Physiology paper: breathing.

I won’t go into too much detail because the paper is accompanied by an excellent press release. In short the study that showed ten sessions of rapid, deep breathing lasting thirty minutes decreased cyclist’s average time for a given ride from 47:06 to 44:54. The researchers describe this change in their paper

The almost 5% improvement in cycling performance in the trained subjects is remarkable considering that they were fit and already close to the limit of their performance potential

9 of the 10 riders in the experimental group improved their time for the ride. Sadly for me I won’t be able to replace training with breathing exercises as in order to stop the cyclists getting dizzy and fainting as a result of their hyperventilation carbon dioxide was pumped into the gas they were breathing. With no ability to pump carbon dioxide into the air I breathe and no desire to dope my blood I’ll have to stick to climbing Mt Cargill to get my endurance levels up.

Posted by David Winter 1:22 am

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