Hard training and racing too much may stress the body in a way that disease symptoms suddenly reappear, part 1/2
Performing great and peaking at the right time – that does not only apply to sports – has a lot to do with finding and keeping your body in balance.
As an athlete you are constantly challenging your very own balance. At this point, I would like to mention that one’s balance is something individual, that parameters that define your balance cannot be simply passed on to someone else. The other may have a distinct pattern of parameters from you signifying wellbeing and balance. Balance is an active process, a condition that needs to be reestablished everyday, if you train and push your limits. This can eventually be a tricky thing to do.
There was a real hype around these Power Balance wrist bands last year. A lot of celebrities from Beckham to de Niro bought into this stuff, and a lot of athletes did.
I thought I give this wrist band some attention today, because it astonishes me that so many athletes buy/bought into this stuff, athletes that use to question biestmilch in a very radical way, athletes who are so hooked on numbers and science, who use powermeters and tracking devices, and love to argue that their decisions are driven by scientific evidence. Power Balance, this expensive rubber bracelet, tells a completely different story.
Yesterday I ran over the pages of "Trends in Immunology" which I have a subscription of since many many years. It is definitely a journal of scientific reputation, and gives me a good possibility to follow the drifts in upfront immunology. Long before I got involved with biestmilch in 2000 I am interested in the big unsolved health topics of today. In the current issue I found an interesting article* about the consequences of a modern lifestyle.
The skin is an organ that has to compensate stress factors from the inside and the outside 24 hours a day for a life time. It is a gigantic immune organ that has got its own stress system. Imbalances in stress processing can lead to various skin diseases, of which all of them have got an inflammatory component.
In this post I would like to come back to the problem of exercising and racing respectively in the heat. Also this text refers to a publication on the blog of »The Science of Sport«.
Especially in exercise science over-heating is primarily outlined as induced by the environment: bright sunshine with high temperatures, high humidity and dehydration. All documented reports account for other reasons than environmental ones. Even though the view that heat stoke is a cause of hot weather is prevailing doggedly. Just recently when I have been at the triathlon world championship in Kona on Big Island, Hawaii, heat and humidity has been the big issue. It has become a major topic of the pychological warfare taking place around this tough race.
Nobody can doubt that the environmental conditions there are extreme, nevertheless heat stroke is not a common problem among the athletes. To raise your doubts concerning the well accepted scientific concept of heat stroke and temperature regulation I want to draw your attention upon the fact how different various people perceive temperature. There are those who dress with short sleeves and a sleeveless jacket even if the temperature is a good deal below 10°C and there are others who feel chilly if the thermometer displays comfortable 20°C and above. And moreover, it is common sense that our feeling for temperature is not a stable constant condition but changes depending on our body's condition. His ability to regulate and adapt the weather situation is only one variable and obviously not of such crucial importance (the fact of heat loss, production and storage is certainly there, e.g. evaporization, radiation and convection)
I think when it comes to thermoregulation in the cold insulation becomes central, nevertheless excessive endogeneic heat production and »heat stroke« may be possible. Of course, we won't use this term, but the phenomenon remains the same, I suggest.
But now back to the article of Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas. Thermoregulation they state is a far more complex physiological phenomenon than a simple balance between heat loss and heat production.