Cooling glove gives ‘superhuman’ power
STANFORD, California: A cooling device that has been improving strength and endurance in mostly male athletes for 15 years is finding new uses in helping people with multiple sclerosis live normal lives, preventing overheating in Ebola workers and cooling working dogs.
In a recent trial among women, it helped freshmen participants perform hundreds of push-ups in an hour.
The idea itself isn’t new. The mitten-like device is designed and built to draw heat out of the body’s core and has been shown to radically improve both strength and endurance. Now, Craig Heller, a professor of biology; Dennis Grahn, a senior research scientist in biology; and their lab are testing it in a variety of new settings and verifying that it is as effective in women as in men.
“One of the suggestions that always comes up is that it works on males because of the hormonal background,” Heller said, and that it might not have the same dramatic effects on women – but that suggestion appears to be wrong.
“We’ve actually had some freshmen women doing over 800 push-ups” in less than an hour, Heller said.
Heller and Grahn, who worked on mammalian temperature regulation, came up with a
We’ve actually had some freshmen women doing over 800 push-ups in less than an hour. – Heller said
simple device to rewarm patients: an airtight sleeve fitted over the arm, a water perfused pad in the sleeve, and a vacuum pump to create a negative pressure in the sleeve to increase blood flow in the arm. The idea was to draw blood out of a person’s core – the critical organs that actually need warming – into the arm where the blood was warmed before flowing back into the core.
The idea worked, and soon the researchers understood why. “We discovered it had nothing to do with the arm. It was only the hand,” Heller says, where special blood vessels bypass high-resistance capillaries and directly deliver blood into low-resistance veins that are arranged in a large network.
In essence, the non-hairy skin of the palms of our hands, soles of our feet and the upper part of our face (where we blush) are natural radiators that cool the body.
Heller and team worked on that discovery into a cooling glove that they found could keep a person’s muscles and core from overheating and, in the process, improve athletic performance. Early tests with a gym-frequenting research assistant, Vinh Cao, showed that cooling his palms in between sets increased the total number of pull-ups he could do in a single workout from 10 sets with 30minute rests between to more than 600.
Subsequent tests showed the cooling method also improved endurance during cardiovascular exercise and had lasting effects on strength and endurance, but all of that early testing was in men. The cooling glove is used by Stanford athletic teams and many professional athletic teams in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
Now the group is verifying their assumption that the glove will work as well in women athletes as men by testing it in women Stanford students and staff. — Stanford News