Ever wonder why one endurance athlete—say, cyclist or marathoner—is faster than another, or what it might take to get faster, short of a heart and lung transplant or a new pair of genes (although we might not be able to skip the part about the pain and suffering of hard training)?
Now there is something for us academic types who are completely comfortable sitting on the sideline allegedly exercising our brains while telling other people how they can go faster by invoking pain and suffering on them.
Last year, a couple of physiologists—Joyner and Coyle—at the Mayo Clinic devised a model, which is a review of known factors, how they interact, and their ability to predict endurance performance (i.e., speed or power) in elite athletes. The authors are quick to point out there are still some important unknowns, including genetics, psychology of motivation, and aspects of neuromuscular interactions.
Thus, the model can be thought of more as a summary of current understanding, food for thought, and/or a generator of new ideas, rather than the last word on the subject. Such are models in science.
Regarding the different variables and their interaction as they relate to endurance performance, we’ve known for some time, for example, that there is more to the equation than just VO2•max , since two different athletes with the same VO2•max can possess different levels of endurance. No doubt, lactate threshold (LT) is also an important consideration in endurance performance. While many believe LT to be the most important indicator of endurance performance, this is highly contentious at best. The present model accounts for the relationship between these last two factors, or what Joyner and Coyle call “the oxygen consumption that can be sustained for a given period of time,” a concept the authors have dubbed “performance VO2.”
How other variables such as cardiac output, hemoglobin content, maximum heart rate, and the relative abundance of type I (slow twitch) muscle fibers, for example, affect endurance performance are also discussed.
The authors describe their tripartite model as follows:
VO2•max and lactate threshold interact to determine the ‘performance VO2’ which is the oxygen consumption that can be sustained for a given period of time. Efficiency interacts with the performance VO2 to establish the speed or power that can be generated at this oxygen consumption. This review focuses on what is currently known about how these factors interact, their utility as predictors of elite performance, and areas where there is relatively less information to guide current thinking.
Now there is something for us academic types who are completely comfortable sitting on the sideline allegedly exercising our brains while telling other people how they can go faster by invoking pain and suffering on them.
Last year, a couple of physiologists—Joyner and Coyle—at the Mayo Clinic devised a model, which is a review of known factors, how they interact, and their ability to predict endurance performance (i.e., speed or power) in elite athletes. The authors are quick to point out there are still some important unknowns, including genetics, psychology of motivation, and aspects of neuromuscular interactions.
Thus, the model can be thought of more as a summary of current understanding, food for thought, and/or a generator of new ideas, rather than the last word on the subject. Such are models in science.
Regarding the different variables and their interaction as they relate to endurance performance, we’ve known for some time, for example, that there is more to the equation than just VO2•max , since two different athletes with the same VO2•max can possess different levels of endurance. No doubt, lactate threshold (LT) is also an important consideration in endurance performance. While many believe LT to be the most important indicator of endurance performance, this is highly contentious at best. The present model accounts for the relationship between these last two factors, or what Joyner and Coyle call “the oxygen consumption that can be sustained for a given period of time,” a concept the authors have dubbed “performance VO2.”
How other variables such as cardiac output, hemoglobin content, maximum heart rate, and the relative abundance of type I (slow twitch) muscle fibers, for example, affect endurance performance are also discussed.
The authors describe their tripartite model as follows:
VO2•max and lactate threshold interact to determine the ‘performance VO2’ which is the oxygen consumption that can be sustained for a given period of time. Efficiency interacts with the performance VO2 to establish the speed or power that can be generated at this oxygen consumption. This review focuses on what is currently known about how these factors interact, their utility as predictors of elite performance, and areas where there is relatively less information to guide current thinking.
Having been provided the various known factors governing endurance performance, an interested party can do some research to determine which ones can be improved upon and how this might be done through training.
The original article that appeared in the Journal of Physiology is located here with useful hotlinks for many of the reviewed references quoted therein.
