Volleyball Workouts In Hot Weather: Improving Volleyball Players Performance
Summary: By cooling down the blood, just before it re-enters the heart, you can prevent fatigue and increase athletic performance. You can accomplish this by simply taking a cooler and adding ice. Then when players take a water break they plunge their arms into the cooler, which rapidly lowers their body temperature leaving them refreshed and ready to perform.
Why the arms? The arms are last stop before going back into the heart, so you can have the most impact this way.
Pretty cool, huh?
More info…
What do the NFL, the Pentagon and patients with Multiple Sclerosis have in common? They all use the RTX (Rapid Thermal Exchange) cooling glove to improve health and/or performance. Based on real science and developed by researchers at Stanford, the RTX is designed to rapidly decrease body temperature by cooling blood as it passes through the hands. The researchers claim that athletes have remarkably improved performance in physical activities when “cooled between sets” thus preventing exhaustion and allowing the athletes to train harder.
If you practice in hot weather which leads to a hot gym, you can possibly improve your volleyball players performance while making the players more comfortable as well. Our government and private companies have spent millions of dollars researching how to rapidly cool the body. Quite simply, you can do the same for next to nothing.
In short, you can accomplish the same thing by simply taking a cooler and adding ice. Then when players take a water break they plunge their arms into the cooler, which rapidly lowers their body temperature leaving them refreshed and ready to perform.
Why the arms? The arms are last stop before going back into the heart, so you can have the most impact this way.
Pretty cool, huh?
The following is from Stanford Magazine
Mammals have specialized blood vessels in their palms and other hairless skin surfaces-ears, nose, cheeks and soles of the feet-that are designed to dissipate heat. (These radiator-like structures – venous plexuses and arteriovenous anastomoses – were described as early as 1858 in Grey’s Anatomy.) By redirecting blood away from the capillaries and into these blood vessels, the body can shed heat quickly. What Heller and Grahn were seeing was the return trip: when externally applied heat shocked open the radiators in the cold palms of anesthesia patients, warmed blood was returned straight to the heart, and the body was reheated from the inside out. Applying a mild vacuum to the hand intensified this effect.
Their finding that heat loss is not uniform across the body was slow to gain acceptance. In the Journal of Applied Physiology, where their research was first published in 1998, Heller and Grahn issued a frosty rejoinder to skeptics: “since we present not just a claim but hard data, it is nice to emphasize that when data do not fit a model it is time to reexamine the model.”
Critics might worry that cooling masks the body’s signals to stop. In fact, lab data show that athletes who train with cooling perform better in all kinds of conditions — even competitions when cooling is un-available. Heller says removing heat from the body is no different from giving it a drink of water in response to thirst. Asked whether training with cooling might lead to overuse injuries, Weir shakes his head. “t doesn’t allow you to do work you couldn’t ordinarily do. It allows you to recover faster.”
Meanwhile, researchers continue to investigate therapeutic uses for cooling. One exciting area of research involves multiple sclerosis, a disease where even a 1/2-degree Celsius rise in core body temperature can lead to rapid and dramatic physical and cognitive decline. (MS sufferers say the sudden enervation feels as though a switch was flipped.) The disease destroys portions of the fatty myelin sheath that insulates nerves; heat disrupts the electric impulses traveling along the frayed nerves. Retaining strength – key to staying out of a wheelchair – is a significant challenge for MS patients, for whom fatigue can lead to a spiral of disability.
A lab technician who was also a body builder, Vinh Cao, volunteered to be the test subject. To generate metabolic body heat, Heller and Grahn had him do sets of pull-ups to exhaustion. He started with a set of 14 pull-ups and soon dropped to eight per set. After 20 minutes, they applied cooling and a vacuum to Cao’s hand. When they asked him to do more pull-ups, they were amazed to see his performance jump back up to 14 pull-ups. To make sure the improvement wasn’t caused by the rest period, they did a study without cooling. Cao did 10 pull-ups.
They continued to study Cao for the next six weeks. If they applied cooling between sets, Cao’s performance held steady in set after set. Without cooling, it decayed. “It was as if he had no fatigue,” Heller recalls. “We saw incredible gains over the next six weeks. He tripled his capacity to 620 pull-ups.” Preventing muscle exhaustion allowed Cao to train harder, leading to rapid gains in muscle strength. Heller and Grahn theorize that more blood, and thus, oxygen, is available to the muscles when the body doesn’t have to route extra blood to the radiators for cooling.