A HEART WITH MORE CAPACITY

Pumpum, pumpum, pumpum … Can you hear your heartbeat? Place the tips of the index and middle fingers of your right hand on the inside of your left wrist, press lightly and feel the blood rush through your veins. Your cardiorespiratory system makes your heart beat, oxygen is distributed throughout your body.

You need oxygen to be distributed in order to live. This depends on your oxygen consumption, your cardiorespiratory capacity, and how and how much oxygen your body is capable of transporting and metabolizing. That is, at rest you will have a certain oxygen consumption, but when you move it increases, and when you exercise it shoots up.

We do not all have the same oxygen consumption doing the same activities, since it will depend on issues such as our body composition, our physical condition and even fatigue and stress. In addition, your metabolism will depend on your oxygen consumption. For example, at rest your body consumes 3.5 ml / kg / min of oxygen, which is equivalent to your basal metabolism of 1MET.

Well, your maximum oxygen consumption can tell us that your metabolism is more active, but it also tells us about cardiovascular risk, since if it is below 21ml / kg / min (6 METs) according to the New York Heart Association we begin to have class II cardiovascular risk. In addition, sports performance is closely related to your maximum oxygen consumption: Indurain, in his fourth Tour de France, had values ​​of 79 ml / kg / min.

For health and performance it is essential that we maintain good aerobic capacity, but it is not always possible to improve it as much as we need, either because an injury hinders it, or because poor physical condition prevents us from moving enough to obtain results, or lack of time.

Running, walking, cycling, etc., are the most common activities chosen to maintain optimal cardiorespiratory levels. But what alternatives do all those people that we have indicated that they cannot have? The electrostimulation decades has been proposed as an alternative, since it has been shown that at low frequencies get the following: improve muscle metabolism, improve microcirculation, increase oxidative enzymes, improve oxygen consumption, improve endurance muscle , increase intramuscular exchanges.

However, few studies have been concerned with investigating the possible adaptations of low-frequency electrostimulation at different levels of sports performance. For this reason, we bring you to the blog a pilot study from 2014 (Deley and Babault) with quite remarkable results. This research was carried out with a single subject, and was carried out with analytical electrostimulation in the quadriceps. We hope that in the future a similar protocol will be carried out, with more subjects and with comprehensive electrostimulation.

The experiment consisted of 6 weeks of analytical electrostimulation training in the extensors of both legs, 45 minutes 5 days a week. The parameters used were very similar to those used in the FAST method in some programs such as Reduce. It is important to note that during the study the subject did not perform any other training or additional physical activity.

The training improved aerobic capacity, muscle strength, and muscle architecture. But regarding what concerns us in this article, which is the cardiorespiratory system, these 6 weeks achieved that this boy increased his maximum oxygen consumption by 4.5% and the ventilatory threshold by 11.5%. In addition, the post-training heart rate was reduced by 18%, the systolic blood pressure by 24% and the diastolic by 19%.

Now let’s reflect: if 6 weeks of analytical electrostimulation training, only in quadriceps, and without simultaneous exercise, improved the cardiorespiratory system so much, how much more would a training with Active Integral Electrostimulation achieve ?