Question

Present Approaches of Heat acclimation for athletes on how are you going to approach this problem? Scientific evidence and examples

Answer 1

Heat acclimation is biological adaptation that reduces physiological strain, improves comfort , improves exercise capacity and reduces the risks of serious heat illness during exposure to heat stress. The biological adaptation includes integrated thermo regulatory, cardio vascular, fluid electrolyte, metabolic and molecular responses. Heat acclimation occurs when repeated exercise - heat exposure are sufficiently stressful to invoke profuse sweating and elevate body temperature. Generally about one to two wk of daily exposure of 90 minutes are required but highly fit athletes can heat acclimate in half that time. Heat acclimation is specific to the climatic heat stress and physical exercise intensity the athletes are exposed to ,which should stimulate the expected competitive environment. There are strategies and suggestions that trainers, athletes, coaches can follow to optimally induce heat acclimation prior to sports competitions.

Most experimentally tested heat acclimation strategies were developed for occupational settings and not for competitive athletes. Competitive athletes are fitter and participating events requiring higher metabolic intensities. Therefore the "specificity of training and specificity of adaptation" principle might require higher intensity exercise bouts than what has been experimentally tested. Indeed, most heat acclimation protocols were conducted over many days eliciting a slow adaptation.However athletes may rapidly travel from a temperate environment to warm hot climate or from a humid heat to a dry heat climate and may need a more rapid induction of heat acclimation to optimize performance.

The exercise heat acclimation phenotype is generally achieved through one of the three induction pathways.

1. Constant metabolic rate

2. Self paced

3. Controlled Hyperthermia

The magnitude of adaptation may also related to the induction pathway as Taylor has argued that repeated exposure to a constant metabolic rate regiment results in a less complete adaptation , whereas the progressive overload approach likely induces more complete heat acclimation. It has been recently proposed that a controlled exercise intensity protocol whereby a given level of cardiovascular strain is maintained during daily exercise heat exposure may further optimize adaptations.

Heat acclimation in a dry environment confers a substantial advantage in humid heat, but the physiological and bio physical differences between dry and humid heat lead one to expect that humid heat acclimation would produce somewhat different physiological adaptation from dry heat acclimation. The cross over benefits of humid and dry heat acclimation and the benefits at higher exercise intensities have not been well studied. I f heat acclimation need to be induced for both dry and humid heat, and is rapidity of induction is important, then we postulates that first acclimatizing athletes to dry heat and secondly acclimatizing athletes to humid heat might be most efficacious.