Over the past several years, UB's Center for Research and Education in Special Environments (CRESE) has done research based on the concept that the training of respiratory muscles is key aspects of enhancing athletic performance in divers.
Surprisingly, researchers now find evidence that shows how simple breathing exercises can improve performance.
"We decided to see if this training of the breathing muscles could confer, perhaps, a particular advantage to divers," said Dr. Claes Lundgren, CRESE director and professor of physiology. "It turned out incidentally that it also enhances the performance of surface swimmers."
Endurance respiratory muscle training is exactly what it says - subjects had to breathe very hard and fast for thirty minutes throughout a training day, each day five days a week for four weeks.
"If you train the breathing muscles, you can then endure a longer period of relatively hard work," Lundgren said.
The experiment resulted in remarkable improvements in subjects' swim times - a 50 to 70 percent step up - over the original performance rates. Enhancing a diver's ability to perform for extended periods over greater distances gives the experiment vast potential for applications in both the military and civilian rescue services.
Volunteers performed diving and surface swimming tests in a pressure chamber and circular swimming pool at CRESE's facilities on the UB South Campus.
"We tested them swimming at a certain speed in our circular pool and when they couldn't keep up the speed that was prescribed, that was the end of their performance," Lundgren said.
The essential problems with breathing in physical environments such as diving come from the breathing gear and the gas mixtures that are used, which impose extra work on the breathing muscles, he said.
With obvious advantages for its divers, the U.S. Navy was a primary source of funds for the experiment through a grant applied for by CRESE.
The experiment incorporated subjects into three exercise protocols. Resistance Respiratory Muscle Training required subjects to take maximal breaths against specially designed spring-loaded valves.
"It's like weight lifting for your respiratory muscles," Lundgren said, explaining the deep, fast breaths that would usually make a person dizzy. "That's because you blow off too much carbon dioxide, but we circumvented that by a device where they were partially re-inhaling part of the air they had expired, which contained CO2, so that they did not get dizzy."
According to Dr. Lundgren, testing male subjects was a requirement specified by the Navy, however, he said that there is a definite interest in performing the experiments with female volunteers.
The findings of the experiment have been published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology. CRESE publishes in literature concerned with applied physiology that is of immediate practical consequence, such as this experiment.
Lundgren estimated the direct cost of the project at $200,000, and said it could not have been done without close collaboration with Professor David Pendergast, current director of CRESE and expert in the "energetics" of swimming.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
