Heat & Fatigue: Recovery Strategies - Part 1

Parts 1,2 and 3 have a world cup theme. I posted these on LinkedIn which you can now see here.

Heat affects neuro-muscular function. If you get really hot you bake from the outside in. Force generating capacity decreases so teams need strategies to deal with heat. Here you see water or cooling breaks implemented at the FIFA WWC 2019. Central drive decreases, i.e. the brain gets hot, hence you may have seen athletes with ice cold towels on heads & water. Muscle temp needs to be reduced so metabolic heat goes down. Metabolic heat goes up as the intensity and/or duration of work increases. Muscles require energy to contract & perform work. A muscle that is warm performs better, however if the muscle becomes too warm, then it plateaus and loses it's ability to contract.

Think of the muscle like an rubber band. If it becomes too warm & pliable it, loses it's ability to create force. EMG measures timing, relaxation rates, excitability & contraction. The muscle can be stimulated to see what it's capability is, twitch force and characteristics. We can look at how the signal travels through the muscle & we can measure how much force an individual can produce. We can measure neuro-muscular function/net output using jumps & drop jumps, but it doesn't tell us where about in the system the fatigue is. See part 2 and 3.