Post-warm-up muscle temperature maintenance: blood flow contribution and external heating optimisation

Raccuglia, M., Lloyd, A., Filingeri, D., Faulkner, S.H., Hodder, S. and Havenith, G. (2015) Post-warm-up muscle temperature maintenance: blood flow contribution and external heating optimisation. European Journal of Applied Physiology. (doi:10.1007/s00421-015-3294-6).

Abstract

Purpose
Passive muscle heating has been shown to reduce the drop in post-warm-up muscle temperature (T m) by about 25 % over 30 min, with concomitant sprint/power performance improvements. We sought to determine the role of leg blood flow in this cooling and whether optimising the heating procedure would further benefit post-warm-up T m maintenance.

Methods
Ten male cyclists completed 15-min sprint-based warm-up followed by 30 min recovery. Vastus lateralis T m (T mvl) was measured at deep-, mid- and superficial-depths before and after the warm-up, and after the recovery period (POST-REC). During the recovery period, participants wore water-perfused trousers heated to 43 °C (WPT43) with either whole leg heating (WHOLE) or upper leg heating (UPPER), which was compared to heating with electrically heated trousers at 40 °C (ELEC40) and a non-heated control (CON). The blood flow cooling effect on T mvl was studied comparing one leg with (BF) and without (NBF) blood flow.

Results
Warm-up exercise significantly increased T mvl by ~3 °C at all depths. After the recovery period, BF T mvl was lower (~0.3 °C) than NBF T mvl at all measured depths, with no difference between WHOLE versus UPPER. WPT43 reduced the post-warm-up drop in deep-T mvl (−0.12 °C ± 0.3 °C) compared to ELEC40 (−1.08 ± 0.4 °C) and CON (−1.3 ± 0.3 °C), whereas mid- and superficial-T mvl even increased by 0.15 ± 0.3 and 1.1 ± 1.1 °C, respectively.

Conclusion
Thigh blood flow contributes to the post-warm-up T mvl decline. Optimising the external heating procedure and increasing heating temperature of only 3 °C successfully maintained and even increased T mvl, demonstrating that heating temperature is the major determinant of post-warm-up T mvl cooling in this application.

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Contributors

Author: D. Filingeri

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