Measuring exercise intensity using self-talk or a rating scale helps in achieving an appropriate exercise activity. These aids can help in exercise therapy, wellness promotion, and lifestyle maintenance. Also they can minimize post-exertional malaise. This post discusses how we can use self-talk or The Talk Test and also rating scales to evaluate and produce our […]
Leg fatigue is a key symptom encountered during distance running. And last spring, short hikes used to really tire me out! Overall tiredness and wobbly legs were part of my fatigue when walking or running. How come? Increasing leg fatigue during exercise indicates that the leg muscles are acquiring task failure. Deconditioning results in more leg […]
SUMMARY: “In general, dynamic stretching before you train and static stretching after you train is a great way to warm[-]up and cool[-]down. By taking the time to warm[-]up and stretch before any workout, you’ll minimize the chance of injury.” (Obadike, 2014) Professor: In addition, here are some myths revealed by questions in a column by […]
SUMMARY: Part One: There are two separate areas of the insula. One is involved with generalized sensory magnitude integration, and the other is specialized in evaluating nociceptive stimulus properties including a weaker estimation of magnitude. Student: And what is giving you such a puzzled look? Professor: I am confused! Some experts have highly criticized one of […]
SUMMARY: This post explores sensory gating of external and internal sensation. Can our reticular thalamic nuclei keep out or reduce ‘irrelevant’ sensory information for the endurance athlete? EVIDENCE FOR SENSORY GATING Student: That summary looks familiar: gating in sensory information and gating out other sensations. Professor: Yes. (See more at: The Sensory Gate is Real.) […]
Summary: List blog topics that will help prepare review for a journal about fatigue. Student: You have been invited to write a review about Fatigue and RPE. Congratulations! Professor: Thank you, Simone Cairns of Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand for setting up the invitation. The actual invitation came from Fred Friedberg, for his journal: “Fatigue: Biomedicine, […]
Professor: This post will finish the proposed six (6) stages for handling breathing discomfort. So far, we have completed a tour through the first five (5) stages: Professor: We will add a final, sixth stage for communication to Menon & Uddin’s model of five perceptual processing stages (2010) that has been our guide for the first two […]
Professor: This post will continue following someone experiencing a mild pulmonary inspiratory obstruction, like putting on a surgical mask to reduce symptoms of asthma in cold weather. In this post, we will discuss: switching attention from being fully alert; to planning, selecting, and activating motor responses. Student: What about: consciously detecting and recognizing this event, […]
Summary Professor: Part 1 of this post is about the beginning of the time course for symptom awareness: Within about .015 seconds, less than one breath, the Saliency Network (SN) of our brain can NOTICE something is strange. Student: At the end of the third of six stages of relatively fast cortical processing, for example, […]
SUMMARY Professor: This post is about: Q: How do we continuously update our ‘body senses’ while we are exercising (or whatever we are doing)? A: We use our brain alpha rhythms, like a windshield wiper, to disregard ‘unimportant’ neural network activities. Q: How are the ‘important’ neural events detected? A: We use our right anterior […]
Student: Today it was cold outside, and when I started out to exercise I promptly reactivated my cold-induced asthma. I could hardly catch my breath until I put a hand sock, er, ‘glove’, over my mouth and nose. Voila, not so much wheezing, and my breathing became a lot easier. Professor: Very smart trick, like […]
Student: Where have you been? Professor: Well, I’ve gotten lost deep in the forest of pulmonary physiology. So, for dyspnea described as ‘breathing too deeply’, let me list the paths I’ve covered: Starting along the path from the brainstem respiratory centers , through phrenic spinal cord motoneuron, and the contracting diaphragm; then traveled from its […]
Student: Today my asthma lots of wheezing, and I was really terrible at meditating, at focusing on my breath. Professor: You were focused on wheezy breathing, eh? That must have been very distracting. Student: Yeah. I kept on thinking of using my ‘PUFFER’ instead of ‘THE BREATH’. Professor: Sorta sounds like: “Mind wandering and attention […]
Student: The Airways are connected to the Pulmonary Stretch Receptors that are connected to the Vagal Nerves. Then they are connected to what next? Professor: Before we get to the your intriguing question, let’s consider all the ‘inputs’: Airway smooth muscle Diaphragm skeletal muscle Chest wall skeletal muscle Lung airways and tissue Shown below are […]
Student: Is the “Clustering of Dyspnea Symptoms” done statistically or phenomenologically? Professor: Both! According to Lansing, Gracely, and Banzett (2009), “There are at least three separable ‘qualities’ of uncomfortable breathing sensations”: ‘Work’, ‘Air hunger’, and ‘Tightness’. “The division into different kinds of sensation classification is not based on perceptual quality alone. To be classed as […]
Student: A lot of dust on this Dyspnea diagram. Where did you get it? Professor: The schematic diagram I got from a very old backup disk of manuscripts written in the early 1990s. Notice that the diagram is an attempt to place uncomfortable subjective qualities, i.e., symptoms, for breathing into a hierarchy as shown below: […]
Student: Mile high Denver! You were there from 1968 to 1981. Professor: Yes, I was assigned to the Nut Lab, that is, to the US Army Medical and Nutrition Laboratory. That’s near where Eisenhower went and did his cardiac rehabilitation. From: http://www.endurance-education.com/
Professor: Dr Arthur Dickinson, I apologize for leaving your name off the Stockholm article and presentation. In fact, Art’s Applied Exercise Physiology Lab was the actual location of the study. Student: Wasn’t this presentation based on a preliminary analysis of Dave Stamper’s MS thesis with Dr Art Dickinson as his advisor and in Art’s lab? […]
Professor: First of all, thanks, Dr Rod Dishman, for cleaning up the Spherical Analysis for the symptom clusters (Dishman, 1994): Student: Wow; no more overbearing, lines for the filling. Now I can see the cluster numbers clearly. Outstanding! Professor: And now, how might these symptoms be the result of physiological processes? Here is a possible […]
Student: Show-and-Tell today? Professor (grinning): Yea. I get to uncover the history of the General Fatigue and Leg Fatigue symptom clusters. Student: But I was really hurting during the weekend runs. My legs are heavy as lead and sore deep down to the bones. Why? Professor: Hey, you are not alone. Here is what a […]