The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about a body temperature cooling device, the "Glove" which appears to have a stunning affect on performance.
The Glove works by cooling the body from inside out, rather than conventional approaches that cool from outside in. The device creates an airtight seal around the wrist, pulls blood into the palm of the hand and cools it before returning it to the heart and to overheated muscles and organs. The palm is the ideal place for rapid cooling because blood flow increases to the hands (and feet and face) as body temperature rises.
"These are natural mammalian radiators," said Dennis Grahn, who invented the device with Stanford colleague Craig Heller.
Grahn and Heller also found that cooling overheated muscles dramatically improved physical performance, allowing athletes to work out harder and longer, and hold on to their gains.
"We learned that you can actually reverse that muscle fatigue in a short amount of time," Heller said. "And if you cool muscles during rest, you get a much greater recovery than if you rested without cooling."
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Their first "aha" moment in cooling came after they talked their assistant Vinh Cao into doing his regular workouts in the lab instead of at the gym. His routine included 100 pull-ups. One day, Grahn and Heller started using an early version of the Glove to cool him for 3 minutes between rounds of pull-ups. They saw that with the cooling, his 11th round of pull-ups was as strong as his first. Within six weeks of training with the cooling breaks, Cao did 180 pull-ups a session. Six weeks later, he went from 180 to 616.
..."I'll never forget the number 616," said Heller. "He tripled his capacity in six weeks. We were like, 'Wait a minute, this is crazy!' "
While a set of pull-ups might take less than a minute, it's enough for the temperature of those muscles to rise, Heller said. "We learned that you can reverse that muscle fatigue in a short amount of time. And if you cool muscles during rest, you get a much greater recovery than if you rested without cooling."
Soon, members of the Stanford football team began paying visits to the Grahn and Heller lab. "After a while, we were watching these guys and saying, 'Oh gee, he only did 700 sit-ups today,' " Grahn said.
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Heller, 65, on the other hand, is upbeat, organized and exceedingly fit. He dipped into the lab's candy jar - using the Glove to work up to 1,000 pushups on his 60th birthday.
Impressive. Most impressive.
Alpha^2
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