Not sure if this is right right place to post this but here we go. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/august/cooling-glove-research-082912.html They're making some pretty huge claims in this article about the effectiveness of this glove. "Better than steroids" comes up once or twice. It's a very interesting concept but I don't know enough about the way the body cools blood and it's effectiveness on muscle fatigue to make any definitive statements. Anyone know more about this? If it works we could be seeing some really cool developments in professional sports in the next decade.
I've seen this before. Since they are trying to commercialize it I may give it a go if it's not too expensive. The hands, head and feet are the areas the body loses a lot of body heat in the cold, so I'm assuming they are areas to take advantage of in order to disperse body heat in hot climates as well. I'm also prone to heat injury as I've had a heat stroke before and find it especially hard to do long duration, intense exercise in heat with humidity. While I now depend on proper nutrition and hydration before and during exercise/prolonged physical activity to help maintain body temp. regulation I would be interested if something like this could be beneficial as well. The quickest way to get the body cool though is by throwing a large icepack on your groin area though, a common practice for people who are about to succumb to heat injury/illness. That doesn't seem to be the entire focus of this future product though.
I'm sure it will be at first too. It will be hard to rationalize buying a product that creates a slight vacuum and passes cool water over your hand. If it works well for professional athletes I'll probably buy one of those vacuum packaging things for food storage, a zen water fountain, and come ice packs and make my own
I you only need it on for like a minute, I can see it being used between rounds! Even in top MMA gyms they will probaly start using them.
It is interesting that they make the conclusions that they do about what is happening from their research. I understand why they think it has to do with heat dissipation but a couple of things are missing from what I can remember. Heat goes to most parts of the body when it is cooled but this only lasts for about 10 minutes in most areas before there is vaso-constriction and the blood vessels narrow. Yes , the hands and feet don't have this happen as much as the body attempts to keep the highly vascular (and innervated) extremity areas from freezing and getting frostbite. Interestingly there is no mention that the head never has this happen at all and never has a loss of blood flow to ensure that the brain stays warm. If you really wanted to affect temperature fast I would have thought that a cold bonnet would have been more effective at drawing heat off than a pair of gloves. Now this is stuff I remember researching about back in Uni and it has always been a bit controversial. I could be really out of date here but I would have thought that I would have heard something in the pipeline that would have supported using the hands (or feet) over the head. As far as cooling the core and trying to reduce after exercise soreness, the ice baths were the way people went (we had huge garbage bins full of ice water for our rugby players-relatively quite cheap!) although I hear that this has fallen out of favour to a degree as well now. Bet that if there was research that countered this guys invention he wouldn't be that happy to discuss it. Looks like he has a lot of dosh sunk into his project! FWIW LFD
''The version of the device that will be made available commercially is still being tweaked, but the researchers see applications for heat extraction in areas more important than a simple performance boost. Hyperthermia and heat stress don't just lead to fatigue – they can become medical emergencies. "And every year we hear stories about high school athletes beginning football practice in August in hot places in the country, and there are deaths due to hyperthermia," said Heller. "There's no reason why that should occur." '' http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/august/cooling-glove-research-082912.html What isn't mentioned here is that it is NOT just the heat that determines whether athletes die in hot weather. We use a graph that amalgamates air humidity and temperature to determine whether it is safe to train or not. There are 2 scales and and a curve is plotted. At a given humidity there is a temperature beyond which it is not safe to train. If the temperature is lower and the humidity is high then it is still not safe to train. This article makes it sound like just keeping the core temperature lower would be enough. I am not sure that it is that simple. FWIW LFD
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17473783 ''While certain individuals are more prone to collapse from exhaustion in the heat (i.e., not acclimatized, using certain medications, dehydrated, or recently ill), exertional heatstroke (EHS) can affect seemingly healthy athletes even when the environment is relatively cool. EHS is defined as a rectal temperature greater than 40 degrees C accompanied by symptoms or signs of organ system failure, most frequently central nervous system dysfunction. Early recognition and rapid cooling can reduce both the morbidity and mortality associated with EHS. The clinical changes associated with EHS can be subtle and easy to miss if coaches, medical personnel, and athletes do not maintain a high level of awareness and monitor at-risk athletes closely. Fatigue and exhaustion during exercise occur more rapidly as heat stress increases and are the most common causes of withdrawal from activity in hot conditions. When athletes collapse from exhaustion in hot conditions, the term heat exhaustion is often applied. In some cases, rectal temperature is the only discernable difference between severe heat exhaustion and EHS in on-site evaluations.'' FYI peeps :' D LFD
