Inspiratory muscle warm-up attenuates muscle deoxygenation during cycling exercise in women athletes

Effects of Respiratory Muscle Warm-up on High-Intensity Exercise Performance

“…Similar conclusions were reported in other related studies [14][15][16]. As expected, performance enhancements cannot be explained by acute changes in pulmonary function either as it was also generally unresponsive to the RWU, which was expected [4,12,14,[29][30][31].…”

“…Participants used the same device for all familiarization and experimental trials. The specific RWU volumes and intra-set rest intervals used here replicated procedure used in previous studies [13][14][15][16][17][18]. The device was specifically chosen because it is inexpensive, portable, and allows the amount of airflow restriction to be adjusted (range of 3-13 mm), making it a realistic option for practitioners.…”

“…Firstly, the time between our RWU and the start of our exercise differed from some of the previous research. The current study followed the general methods of previous literature with similar procedures [16,18]. However, we chose to implement a rest interval that was shorter than previous research as it better reflected practices during normal exercise settings.…”

“…This important stage in the research required scientists to control and monitor as many variables as possible [13][14][15][16][17][18], and led to the prescription of a desired inspiratory pressure of 40% [19]. Our goal was to examine RWU in setting more realistic to practitioners.…”

“…Intentionally restricting airflow during inhalation, exhalation, or both [10][11][12] forces the respiratory muscles to increase work output to adequately support airflow and gas exchange needs. Improvements in whole-body performance have been found in a variety of sports [12][13][14][15] and general exercise settings [16][17][18] following these types of respiratory exercise. For example, Romer, McConnell, and Jones (2002) reported that chronic respiratory training significantly improved 20 km and 40 km cycling time trial performance by ~3%-5% [12].…”