Keeping Your Cool
Keep Your Core Temperature Under Control for Better Performance
Summer is just around the bend and with that comes the added challenge of performing in the extreme heat and humidity. Just think about Ponca City and Loretta Lynn’s! Your body’s constant fight to maintain are really efforts to maintain as much blood flow to the muscles as possible.
Here’s how it works: your body has only so much blood to go around. When it’s hot, your body has to balance the demands of your working muscles with the demands of thermoregulation. You are out there, riding hard, charging to the front of a long, hot moto. Your muscles are asking for all your available blood flow for fuel and oxygen delivery and the removal of waste products. But….your body is also overheating so it’s having to shunt blood to just under your skin to release heat to the atmosphere via convective and evaporative cooling. It’s a struggle to balance it all. On top of this, you are losing blood plasma via sweat which reduces the volume of blood available for both of these jobs.
Your two defenses are:
control your core temperature as much you can to reduce the amount of blood that has to be sent to the skin for cooling and
keep your blood volume up via hydration so that you have as much blood as possible for feeding muscles/removing waste and heat transfer through the skin.
There are obvious ways to control your core temperature while you are active: ventilated clothing to aid in convective and evaporative heat loss, light colored clothing to limit absorption of heat, and of course staying hydrated for the aforementioned reasons.
There are some not so obvious measures you can take while not active to fight the debilitating effects of heat:
Directly cooling the body via cooling vests, cold towels, ice bags, etc. Keeping your core temperature as close to your “normal” core temperature of 98.6 degrees for as long as you can before the event and return it as quickly as possible after the event is beneficial to performance. The closer your body temperature is to normal before you start the effort, the less time it will be in the stressful higher temperatures and thus the more time you will have operating in under optimal conditions. Example: it’s a hundred degrees out and you are in staging. You are already sweating (so you are losing blood volume) AND your body is sending blood to your skin to dissipate heat. This means when you start the moto, you are down on blood volume and you are shunting blood away from the muscles. If you were actively cooling yourself up to and during staging, you would start the moto with more blood volume due to less sweating and you would have all your blood available to send to your muscles until your core temperature elevated. At this point you would also start to sweat more. So you are avoiding the negative effects before the event and delaying them during the event so you have more operating in less stressful conditions. The best places to apply cooling devices are around your torso, armpits and groin area.
Using cold drinks to cool you from the inside. If your core temperature is elevated during rest and recovery periods, using very cold drinks has been shown to allow more rapid return to lower body core temperatures. The use of “slushy” recovery drinks has (blended with ice instead of just water) been used in other sports with success.
Shade: seems obvious but sometimes you have to plan ahead as sources of shade may not exist. You may have to bring a golf umbrella with you as the sources of shade at or near staging may be taken up already or just not exist. Don’t get caught out!
Fans: again seems obvious but if there is not a fan in staging and there is a place to plug in, I don’t think anyone is going to object if you bring a big box fan and just leave it there!
Remember that all these suggestions are to keep your core temperature as close to normal as possible, NOT lower than normal. You should not feel generally cold. You will feel cool or cold in specific areas if you are using a cooling device but overall you should feel warm as normal. You don’t want to reduce your core temperature to less than normal as this is another form of stress.
All these measures are an attempt to reduce the total amount of time spent in higher than normal core temperatures. This reduces the total amount of stress, improves physiological conditions during activity, reduces dehydration and allows more time for recovery. You are trying to delay the onset of these higher temperatures during activity and also reduce the time you spend in this stressed state during rest periods. Reduction of core temperature to normal as quickly as possible after activity is important for the above reasons but also to speed recovery as this drop in temperature is a signal to your body to start recovery processes.
So plan ahead and create a strategy to stay on top of your core temperature at your next big event in extremely hot conditions. Not only will you subjectively feel better, you will also perform better!
Seiji Ishii is the head coach of www.coachseiji.com. Coachseiji.com provides online coaching and personal training services to motorsports athletes. Coach Seiji has worked with both pros and elite amateurs including: Heath Voss, Ryan Clark, Matt Lemoine, Hunter Hewitt, Austin Stroupe, PJ Larsen, Drew Yenerich and Rusty Potter. Learn more at www.coachseiji.com or contact Coach Seiji directly at seiji@coachseiji.com
This article was originally published on http://www.vurbmoto.com/