"Cool" invention triples athletic performance | Hacker News Reader

"Cool" invention triples athletic performance

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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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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.

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.

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.

I don't have that psychological 'disgust' response. Infact, I can't understand why drugs aren't used for more things.

Safer steroids for athletes. Smart drugs for college students. And so on.

I mean, sure, they might have bad long-term effects, or have side-effects, etcetera.. but so does most things, that most people do.

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

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.

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?

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.

Well, there are several distinctions, but an important one is that the Glove just hasn't been around long enough for the dangers of Glove abuse to become apparent. If it turns out that excessive Glove use raises your risk of concussion, or ages your joints prematurely, or induces heart attacks in 2% of the population, or causes impotence, or takes twenty years off your life, or whatever, there might come a day where nobody sees a distinction between Gloves and performance-enhancing drugs.

(Not that I have any reason to expect any bad side effects. But you never know. It takes time and statistics to work these things out. Physiology is holistic. And, when you remove one bottleneck (in this case, the rate at which your body can dissipate heat) you inevitably run up against another bottleneck, one which may have much scarier consequences than the first.)

Huh? There's a huge difference between injecting a foreign chemical into your body and simply cooling your own blood. Not even in the same ballpark.

Testosterone and HGH are not foreign chemicals. They're just more of what you've got naturally.

Well, people have been cooling themselves for literally millions of years without adverse effects. Of all the performance enhancers you could buy, including legal ones, the Glove seems the least likely to screw you up long-term.

It doesn't matter which drugs are banned and which are legal, as long as everyone is playing by the same rules. I don't see what the issue is here.

Many athletes are willing to put their life's at risk. That pressures the other athletes to do the same. Banned substances are meant to protect them.

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.

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.

"When the total CPK level is very high, it usually means there has been injury or stress to the heart, the brain, or muscle tissue. For example, when a muscle is damaged, CPK leaks into the bloodstream. Determining which specific form of CPK is high helps doctor's determine which exact tissue has been damaged."

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003503.htm

The part about muscles releasing proteins when working out is definitely true, I just don't know about the rest. It's something I was told by my sports doctor though.

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.

Thanks for the link, I really appreciate that.

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.

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.

to be fair once you break the 100 barrier you can pretty much go forever. pushups aren't that hard because you're only pushing about 2/3rds of your body weight.

lots of pullups however IS impressive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If I remember correctly, the glove lowers the air pressure to keep the blood flowing.

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.

I've got a ~$120 vest full of a gel that freezes at 50 degrees, so it's not painful to wear. I use it as A/C on my motorcycle here in Florida; but my marathon-running co-worker says he's seen people wearing them for a few hours before races, to lower their core temperature. Looks like it works, but it can be done cheaper.

What do you mean exactly? How do you measure work?

If he is doing weight training, work = mass * gravity * height.

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.

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.

That's very good progress, but I'm not convinced the glove is what's responsible. That sounds like reasonable gains for someone who is working out regularly and trying to improve. Good, of course, but still within reason.

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.

The idea is pretty old too: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/07/19/icebox-on-wrist-to...

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?

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