

"Cool" invention triples athletic performance - browser411
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/22/BAQU12UC28.DTL&type=tech
The invention is based on a neat concept but can this $2500 device stack up to a bag of ice? This may be a case of over-engineering a solution.
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Eliezer
If there were a drug that had an identical effect, it would be banned, of
course. Or heaven forbid, a gene therapy. Apparently we've got some kind of
huge mental distinction going between outright transhumanism and a little
temporary cyborging.

~~~
ars
We do - you're right. It's kind of odd, but even after thinking about it, I
still see a distinction, but I can't place my finger on what it is.

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DaniFong
The potential for harm. Perhaps.

One of the psychological 'disgust' responses has to do with the invasion of
chemicals or other external elements into the body. It's pretty near
universal.

Drugs trigger that response. These are amplified by reports of steroids
harming people. But the glove involves zero fluid or substance transfer. It is
like a type of clothing, or an ice pack.

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Prrometheus
Many banned substances can be used safely. This would be even more true if it
were legal to use them under physician supervision.

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DaniFong
It might just be a silly gut reaction that putting stuff in your body could be
bad, but how can we really know, honestly? 'Safe' is obviously a relative
term. How safe do we need?

We have very incomplete understanding of cellular and molecular biology (much
less than, for example, the circulation system, which the glove uses). Where
harm can be potentially averted by the use of drugs for medicine, it makes
sense. But where harm can be potentially caused by the use of drugs for
recreational activity (of which sports are an example), things seem much more
morally ambiguous.

You have to draw a line somewhere. At some point, the increased risk is simply
too much to ignore. And when you have a highly competitive situation like
professional sports, it is, I argue, _immoral_ to tempt people, by
competition, into doing something potentially harmful to themselves. Voluntary
recreational drugs are one thing, but in competitive sports, I argue that we
should try to keep training methods and substances as safe as possible. I
think, in general, if, by competition or incentives some other method one
induces a class of people to risk inflicting harm unto themselves, one is
doing a moral wrong.

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gaius
But is it really, tho'? I mean, why are so many of the Olympic gymnasts
teenagers? Even without drugs, their bodies are wrecked after a few
competitions. No-one has a problem with kids doing this in regulated
competition; why should anyone care that adults want to do it just for
lifestyle choice.

Another interesting point is that society has no problem either with women
dosing themselves with artificial hormones in support of their lifestyle
choices, whereas enhancing male characteristics is considered _wrong_. Why do
you suppose _that_ is?

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DaniFong
That's not true; many parents have misgivings about putting their children in
situations likely to harm their body (gymnastics, or football, or hockey, or
extreme sports), or despair of other parents injecting children with growth
hormones or steriods or pumping them full of creatine. Many adults are wary of
those around them doing amphetamines or cocaine. Many women worry enormously
(and hence avoid) potential health effects of HRT or the birth control pill,
as it is associated with many reproductive cancers among other diseases. Many
men avoid steroids and testosterone; it causes problems with the heart and
circulatory systems, and it can make you bald.

Surely the _magnitude_ of fear people feel with regard to drugs versus
activities is higher. This is probably instinctive: they are a lot of things
one can have put into one's body, and throughout evolution, most were pretty
bad. But the drugs and training regimens and lifestyles are not in principle
distinct. To the extent we can have equally complete knowledge of their
effects (which we probably can't), we should judge them the same.

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Alex3917
When you lift weights your muscles break down and release proteins into your
bloodstream. I've heard that if you do things like 1000 bench presses with
just the bar then you can get so much muscle breakdown that the protein can
actually cause liver damage. If that is true then that is something I would
worry about when using this device. You are basically circumventing your
body's defense mechanism to prevent that from happening. If I were a coach I'd
probably have the athletes do some bloodwork to make sure this wasn't a
problem, especially for college kids who are likely to be drinking and such in
addition.

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ars
Care to post any citations for that? Because it doesn't match what I know
about how muscles work.

I've never heard of muscles breaking down proteins, nor have I ever heard of
proteins causing liver damage (that doesn't make any sense).

Muscles do release lactic acid, which will eventually cause enough pain to
make you stop, but I never heard of any serious damage caused from it. And
this cooling method won't prevent that feedback.

It's obviously possible to inure a muscle, but it will hurt, and this cooling
method won't affect that.

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oostevo
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhabdomyolysis>

It's usually caused by crush injury, but if you're enough of a knucklehead,
you can give it to yourself in the gym too.

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Alex3917
Thanks for the link, I really appreciate that.

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iamelgringo
It's kidney failure, not liver failure. I've seen several cases of it as an ER
nurse. It's fairly common for people running marathons to go in to Rhabdo
afterwards, but they usually just orally rehydrate and they're fine. (Flush
the system out). When people run in to problems is when they don't hydrate
enough.

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DenisM
I keep track of my excersize performance - amount of work, heart rate and
ambient temperature. I have certainly noticed positive correlation - for every
centrigate of room temperature drop I perform about 1% more work (keeping the
heart rate the same in all cases).

But this. Wow. 1000 push ups at 65 years old? Truly dramatic. I should buy
one.

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browser411
I wonder if this is a case of over-engineering a solution. Does it have that
much more of a positive effect compared to a lower tech solution (e.g., bag of
ice). The machine costs $2500 retail.

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13ren
Or hands in cold water. It's surely not as good, but if the effect is so
dramatic, it would still have a noticeable impact. Easy to test.

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DenisM
My understanding is that hands in cold water will lead to blood vessels
contracting and thus the entire body not being cooled, just your hands being
kinda cold. Their device keeps blood vessels expnaded thus inducing
hypothermia.

The diference is between chilling entire body and only your arms.

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13ren
Do you know why this happens, or how they circumvent it?

Is it because it is water (i.e. not air-cooled)? Or is it because the
temperature differential is too great (i.e. dangerously so, according to the
body)?

A damp towel might overcome these issues - or wetting your hands and holding
them in front of a fan, for evaporative cooling via fake sweat + fake breeze.

~~~
ars
They make a partial vacuum in the glove that basically sucks the blood to the
surface of the hand where it can pick up the coldness.

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trapper
This is crap. Why do you guys accept a press release from the company as fact?
Better than steroids my a$$! Can it make you gain 20lbs of muscle in a month?
Doubt it.

Anyway, this technology has had ample chance to prove itself via peer reviewed
studies and to my knowledge has never had any results confirming their claims.

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kingmaker
I participated in this study at Stanford for a while. The results are pretty
dramatic. I doubled the number of pull ups that I could do in six weeks and
went from being able to do 12 reps of 155 on bench to 12 reps of 175.

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Alex3917
Looking back at my own logs from three summers ago, I see it took me from June
5 to July 17 to go from 12 pullups to 24. It seems like your rate of
improvement is about par for pullups and a little below average for bench
press. I doubt the glove made any difference.

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gdee
The idea is pretty old too: [http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/07/19/icebox-
on-wrist-to...](http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/07/19/icebox-on-wrist-to-
cool-the-whole-body/)

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natch
I've got the opposite kind of thing going on here in my life, with a super-
warm, and that's putting it politely, laptop.

Can these guys do anything for me, I wonder?

