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Comparisons of local and systemic aerobic fitness parameters between finswimmers with different athlete grade levels

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Abstract

To study the relationship between the local and systemic aerobic fitness parameters, and between the muscle oxygenation and aerobic performance, 16 female finswimmers were recruited and divided into high-level (HL) group and low-level group. Cardiorespiratory function, blood lactate concentration and near infrared spectroscopy muscle oxygenation in the vastus lateralis (VL) were monitored simultaneously during a maximal incremental exercise. We found that the break point (Bp) of the oxygenation index (OI) in the VL (BpVL) had significant correlations with lactate threshold (LT) and gas exchange threshold (GET), and the appearance sequence of the three thresholds was BpVL ≈ LT ≤ GET. When considering different levels, the \( \dot{V}{\text{O}}_{2} \) at BpVL, LT and GET were higher in the HL group. During intensive exercise, there were significantly faster \( \dot{V}{\text{O}}_{2} \) increase and evidently slower OI decrease in the HL group, suggesting that faster \( \dot{V}{\text{O}}_{2} \) increase in the HL group slowed down the muscle deoxygenation and facilitated subjects to cycle to higher workloads. In conclusion, multi-modality approaches combining local and systemic physiological monitoring technologies might provide better explanations of the relationship between local and systemic aerobic fitness parameters, and might be a novel way to analyze the difference between groups of different levels.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all the subjects for their enthusiastic participation. Also, we would like to acknowledge Guodong Xu, Kunru Lv, Yanjie Ye, Li Qin and Peicai Wang from Wuhan Institute of Physical Education (Wuhan, China) for their helpful assistance. This work was mainly supported by the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University, the 111 projects (B07038), and the National Nature Science Foundation of China (30770554).

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Britton Chance Center for Biomedical Photonics, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Bangde Wang, Qingping Tian, Zhongxing Zhang & Hui Gong

  2. Key Laboratory of Biomedical Photonics of Ministry of Education, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Bangde Wang, Qingping Tian, Zhongxing Zhang & Hui Gong

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  1. Bangde Wang
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  2. Qingping Tian
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  3. Zhongxing Zhang
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  4. Hui Gong
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Correspondence to Hui Gong.

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Communicated by Susan A. Ward.

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Wang, B., Tian, Q., Zhang, Z. et al. Comparisons of local and systemic aerobic fitness parameters between finswimmers with different athlete grade levels. Eur J Appl Physiol 112, 567–578 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-011-2007-z

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