Feeling tired after that paddle out? You ain't even
close to being cooked says new study…
Let’s get one thing straight.
BeachGrit isn’t of the belief that going to the gym can
make you a better surfer. You think John John and Dane lift and
squat and shake ropes to make their turns sharper and their oops’
higher?
But what about… fatigue? That’s different to
strength. It eats me alive, probably does you too. After a couple
of consecutive waves, after a difficult paddle-out, we’re off our
game. We squeeze in two turns instead of four, we fall off in the
shorey.
And therefore should we train?
According to a new study about fatigue, it turns out we’ve got a
ton of gas left in the tank, even after that paddle out, even after
catching four waves in a row.
And that whole thing about lactic acid? The juice
actually… helps.
The New Yorker reports, “The study, which was published
last month in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience,
by Samuele Marcora, who heads the University of Kent’s Endurance
Research Group, and two of his colleagues at Bangor, Anthony
Blanchfield and James Hardy, is the latest salvo in an ongoing
debate about the very nature of fatigue. According to one
study fatigue is ‘the inability of the contracting muscles to
maintain the desired force.’ But what causes it? Physiologists in
the early twentieth century studied exhaustion by cutting off the
hind legs of frogs and electrically stimulating the muscles over
and over until they couldn’t contract anymore. In 1907, the Nobel
Laureate Frederick Hopkins and one of his colleagues showed that
the depleted frog muscles were bathed in lactic acid. Their
experiment gave rise to an enduring—and incorrect—explanation for
muscle failure; scientists now know that lactate, the form in which
lactic acid occurs in the body, actually fuels muscular contraction
rather than inhibiting it. Nevertheless, the view of fatigue as a
mechanical breakdown has persisted. You max out your ability to
pump oxygen, the acidity of your blood creeps up, and the
neuromuscular signalling between your brain and your muscles gets
weaker: one way or another, you hit a limit.
“Marcora believes that this limit is probably never truly
reached—that fatigue is simply a balance between effort and
motivation, and that the decision to stop is a conscious choice
rather than a mechanical failure. This, he says, is why factors
that alter a person’s perception or motivation (monetary rewards,
for example) can affect performance, even without any change in
muscle capacity. In the subliminal experiments, the cyclists’ heart
rates and lactate levels rose at the same rate no matter which
faces they saw, indicating that nothing had changed from the neck
down. Considerations like heat, hydration, and muscle conditioning,
Marcora says, ‘are not unreal things, but their effect is mediated
by perception of effort.’
“In other words, they don’t force you to slow down, as happens
with the failing frog muscles in the petri dish; they cause you to
want to slow down — a semantic difference, perhaps,
but a significant one when it comes to testing the outer margins of
human capability. Marcora calls his theory the ‘psychobiological
model.'”
What’s it all mean for you and me? That you’ve got a ton in the
tank. Those eight-hour surfs and open-ocean reef paddle-outs (think
Teahupoo) you think are beyond you? They ain’t.
Read the rest of the New Yorker story here. (Just click!)
