Read more: “Olympic extremes: The winning formulas for London 2012“
CUTTING off the blood supply to the arms of people who have had a heart attack doesn’t sound like a good idea – a lack of blood generally causes cells to die. But in 2010 a team of cardiologists found that this helped . The result made , a sport and exercise scientist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, sit up and take notice.
Within 12 hours of having a suspected heart attack, people were made to wear a pressure cuff over one of their upper arms. The cardiologists, led by Hans Bøtker at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, then inflated and deflated the cuff for 5 minutes at a time and repeated the procedure three more times. They found less heart tissue death compared with people who weren’t treated this way.
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“If the technique had such a big effect on heart damage, I thought it might also be useful for athletes,” says Thijssen.
To test this hunch, Thijssen and his colleagues tried out the procedure – known as ischaemic preconditioning, or IPC – on 15 healthy individuals who normally did moderate exercise. They asked the volunteers to cycle 5 kilometres as fast as they could. Each person on average off their time compared with when they did a normal warm-up.
Elite athletes benefit too. In a cycling test, the England rugby 7’s team showed a 1 per cent improvement in speed and lower fatigue levels after IPC, says Thijssen, who is about to publish the results. And Emilie Jean-St-Michel and her colleagues at the University of Toronto in Canada have seen elite-level swimmers shave 0.7 seconds off a 100-metre swim following the procedure. That’s important considering there was less than in the women’s 100-metres freestyle at the Beijing games in 2008.
How the technique works is unknown. It is thought that it triggers the release of some sort of protecting factor, but as yet no one’s quite sure what that is. And even if researchers find out how IPC keeps cells alive after a heart attack, the performance-enhancing mechanism might be different, says Thijssen.
Many athletes have already jumped on the IPC bandwagon, says at the Sports Institute of Northern Ireland, UK, who works with Olympic athletes. “A number of athletes from a number of sports are trialling blood-vessel blocking,” he says. “They’re all looking for little additional aids – anything that will give them that extra 0.1 per cent.”
