I was only a graduate student in exercise science, when I tested various subjects for physiological performance. I was nobody important or even known outside of our university (UW-La Crosse). I was hired as a graduate assistant for UWL; to be a lab tech and course instructor. I lived in the lab, and spent about 16 hours a day there. I ate all my lunches there, and dinners too. The lab director, who was my advisor, was very open to having graduate students under her care use the fancy equipment the lab either purchased or had on trial. Siemens Corporation (Quinton) sent us a very expensive metabolic cart (gas analyzer), which was state of the art, to use. I used it often and thoroughly enjoyed how easy it was to set up, use, and gather data that was useful. By comparison, the new metabolic cart was a dream compared to the older one!
One of my professors, the head swimming coach, who has a PhD in exercise physiology from the University of Utah, was very into testing his swimmers. We took human performance lab equipment to the pool, under his direction, and tested his university team swimmers. He was into David Salo, PhD, protocols of testing. Salo was into power production and very against high volume training; instead focusing on high intensity training. Recently I found out that Salo has coached several world class swimmers somewhere in California. I think Dara Torres was one of his swimmers; and she was the silver medalist, I think, in the Olympic Games at over 40 years of age.
With the swim coach, we did a lot of testing for velocity vs. lactate relationships. One thing I learned is that being very quick and drawing blood is important. Another thing I learned; get rid of the first droplet of blood because it can be full of either sodium or chemicals.
To test VO2, we collected expired air in Douglas bags, and then we ran the bags upstairs to the lab; where we extracted air through spirometers for analysis of CO2, Oxygen, and nitrogen. It was very tiring, running up and down the stairs with bags. I actually hated it after awhile. My legs were dead tired after 2-3 hours of running up and down stairs!
For cyclists, we found that it was best to not use the Monarch ergo-meter but, rather, let cyclists bring in their own bikes, which were fit to suit their body dimensions. The most astounding performance was given by a former professional cyclist; name Mark Frise, who was 3rd in the junior nationals several years earlier; the same year the Greg Lemond, his friend, won the juniors. Mark competed in Europe for many years professionally, and had just retired when we tested him. He was still cycling seriously about 3-4 hours per day, while adjusting to triathlon training (training for Ironman Hawaii). His relative Vo2 max was nearly 83, which was amazing considering he was not a lightweight guy and something like 34 years old. He had huge, powerful legs and no doubt that was a factor in why he had such a huge Vo2 max. The thing is, he was not aerobically efficient, despite his high Vo2 max. He hit 4 mmols of lactate at just 76% of Vo2 max, as I recall, which meant that he was probably out of racing shape for time trialing, which he fully admitted. He had just been putting in long runs, working the hills hard, and doing sprints.
We tested many runners; some were on the university team and quite talented, while others were community runners who just thought it was neat to be tested. Right away I talked my boss into letting me not use the Bruce Protocol, which was the lab standard. The Bruce was too slow for competitive runners, I believed, and the grades too steep; unless one is a fell or mountain racer. The Bruce stress test violated a key principle of sports performance: specificity.
I remember telling the lab director that the Bruce protocol was not a good predictor of who was going to race faster on our XC or track teams because all serious runners will go faster than 7:30/mile pace. To demonstrate the impracticality of the test, I correlated the test Vo2 max test results with actual ranking of runners on our team. That is, I matched the ranking of Vo2 max and the ranking of our runners from our recent home meet (the Drews Invitational). The top Vo2 max achiever on our team scored a relative value of 81 mls/kg/minute, but he was only the 5th fastest runner on our team and a 1:20 behind our top athlete. Runners with the 3rd and 6th best Vo2 max values were ranked number #1 & #2 on our team: at 77 and 75 mls/kg/minute.
Following graduate school, I lived in Minneapolis and my cousin, Allan, bought an Accusport lactate analyzer, which I had previously used in our human performance lab at UWL. (Accusport gave us sample models to use.) The manufacturer probably sent models to many universities, as either a promotion or as a means of validating the data the machines provided. The results of the Accusport lactate meter were cross-validated using standard equipment: YSI lactate analyzer. Spinning blood in a cetrifuge wasn't exciting,I must say. In contrast, I enjoyed administering performance tests, on subjects.
I have experience testing athletes, thanks to my job as a lab tech and graduate student, but I have limitations: I am not a published researcher. However, for the sake of discourse on this website, my expressed insights might be of value to some people.
Currently, I share what I know with others, but I defer to researchers like "Phoenix", who frequents this website when he isn’t busy solving the mysteries of monocarboxylate transporters.
Note I believe that MCT’s are the key to enhancing performance of top athletes in endurance sports. Thus, I hope that researchers like Phoenix continue their quest to solve mysteries that determine how gene expressions of MCT are up-regulated.
Regards,
Tinman