Why I’m excited about Muscle Oxygen Monitoring for Training

Why I’m excited about Muscle Oxygen Monitoring for Training

(This blog post contributed by Roger Schmitz, Owner and Chief Engineer at Fortiori Design LLC, and inventor of the Moxy Muscle Oxygen Monitor.)

The mechanisms by which the human body improves performance are well understood.

1)      Neurological adaptations

2)      Physiological adaptations

The first mechanism occurs relatively quickly with any training regimen.  It’s sometimes called the novice effect.  Basically it means that your body learns how to most efficiently control the muscles to perform the intended task.  This adaptation can occur very quickly because you don’t need to grow more muscle mass; you just need to learn more efficient movements.

A personal example of this phenomenon occurred when I had a job setting concrete forms to pour basement walls.  The forms were 8 feet tall, 3 feet wide and weighed over 80 pounds.  At first, I just about couldn’t move the things.  However, I quickly learned how to balance the weight, hold them close to my body, and many other techniques that made the job much easier.  Within a few weeks, I could carry them on one arm!

The neurological adaptations occur on large and small scales.  The body learns to only recruit muscles that most efficiently perform the task and fibers in within each muscle start to work together better. 

 

The physiological adaptations take longer and are more difficult to stimulate.  A muscle needs 2 things to generate physiological adaptations.

1)      Stress

2)      Recovery

Stress is the body’s signal to grow muscle.  The stress comes from use… hard use.  Recovery is the body’s opportunity to rebuild the muscle stronger than it was before the stress.  Recovery isn’t just passive however.  Recovery requires adequate nutrition and it works best with lots of blood flow to the muscle.

This brings us to muscle oxygen monitoring and we need to think about both mechanisms of performance improvement.  Muscle oxygen monitoring indicates the current stress status of a muscle.  High oxygenation means low stress and vice versa.

It’s not always easy for an athlete to know that they are exercising at the proper stress level to induce muscle growth or at the proper level for recovery.  Studies have shown that athletes tend to exercise at too low of intensity on the high stress workouts and too low of intensity on their recoveries.

The athlete’s perception of the stress level in their muscle can be clouded by the neurological adaptation.  Initially, a certain workout will induce the desired stress level to induce muscle growth.  However, as the neurological adaptation occurs, the same workout becomes too easy due to improved efficiency.  Workouts like the p90X workout were developed in an effort to address this issue.

On the recovery side athletes tend to want to feel the burn or feel like they’re pushing themselves.  Often, this puts them at too high of an intensity level for optimal recovery.

Monitoring the muscle oxygen level is a fundamental answer to this problem.  It measures directly what athletes need to know in order to improve performance.

Thanks Roger, and a big thanks to all of you for reading my blog!!

Stu