A Brief History of Endurance Testing in Athletes Stephen Seiler Sportscience 15, 40-86, 2011 (sportsci.org/2011/ss.htm) University of Agder,
Faculty of Health and Sport, Kristiansand 4604, Norway. Email.
Reviewers: Frank Katch, former Chair and Professor
of Exercise Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Will Hopkins, Auckland University
of Technology, Auckland, NZ; Mattin Buchheit, Aspire Academy for Sports Excellence, Doha,
Qatar.
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Hundreds of laboratories around
the world perform physiological testing on endurance athletes as part of
ongoing assessment or research projects. Three core variables are routinely
measured: the maximal oxygen consumption, the lactate threshold, and work
economy or efficiency. In 2010, I gave a lecture to the Norwegian sports
medicine congress in which I traced the development of this triad through the
key investigators and seminal papers that influenced their acceptance. This
article contains the slideshow I presented in that lecture. History lectures are dangerous:
one is forced to compromise completeness for the sake of flow and focus. My
organizing theme was the current physiological performance model for
endurance and the laboratory-based testing of endurance athletes. I also
focused on classical studies that emerged through evaluation of citations. I
had to filter out a large amount of interesting history related to field
tests, fitness testing, cardiovascular risk assessment and so on. Note also that, while I focused on the “standard
endurance testing model”, this lecture is not an endorsement of all aspects
of that testing regime and it does not explore in depth the research that
supported or questioned the underlying mechanistic paradigm. So, accepting
those caveats, I hope the material is useful to students of exercise
physiology who sometimes have no time to think about the big sweep of
historical developments in their field as they race to add new pieces to
their physiological jigsaw. Key references are included in the slideshow. The reprint pdf contains this introductory article with a
printer-friendly version of the slideshow and speaker's notes (one slide and
notes per page). Some of the images in the pdf are of poor quality that
cannot be improved, owing to an insoluble problem with the conversion. Use
the pdf in parallel with the slideshow if you want to read the notes as you
view the slides full screen.
Alternatively view the notes in the presentation
itself by selecting the Notes Page view or the Normal view. Published Nov 2011 ©2011 |