The Heat Impact On Athletes Body
In sports, all athletes will respond differently to certain environments and how they react will either benefit or reduce their performance. Heat has the largest impact on an athlete’s performance because it physiologically affects large amounts of the body. Coaches and athletes alike need to recognize these risks and work together to minimize them so the athletes can perform at an optimum level.
The human body can only be in the sun for a certain period of time before it starts to overheat. Physical activity can place a large strain and extreme amounts of pressure on the body with varying short and long term effects. A large amount of heat will result in the slowing down of the central nervous system. Consequently, you will start to feel fatigued which will lead to a decline in an athlete's performance. Blood pressure can also drop resulting in dizziness or fainting.
Training and competing in the heat all day has many advantages and disadvantages to an athlete’s health and their level of resilience to high heat conditions. The two major risks which an athlete faces in these conditions are their core body temperature rising rapidly when exercising, and being overly dehydrated. When an athlete’s core temperature increases, the body changes from aerobic energy production, meaning with oxygen, to anaerobic energy production, meaning without oxygen; this would put extreme pressure on the athlete's body, making it use more muscle energy storages. Also having increased core temperature decreases the blood flow to the heart as blood fuels the limbs which are exercising. If the heart does not get enough blood to pump to the lungs to gather oxygen, the right side of the heart will fail.
The other major risk to an athlete’s health is being dehydrated. Being dehydrated as an athlete is very dangerous as the athlete’s intake of water is far greater than a person who does not exercise. The athlete is even at a higher risk if they get dehydrated in extreme weather such as heat or cool conditions. The body uses a lot of fluids every day, but as athletes move a lot their bodies are using more fluids, resulting in sometimes going into survival mode as there is not enough water to fuel the body to gain energy to continue exercising at a reasonable rate. ScientificAmerica published a paper at the start of July 2019, stating a player from the Women’s Nigerian soccer team was hospitalized after collapsing at her training session due to severe dehydration. This shows the importance of maintaining the intake of electrolytes that are lost through sweat. From a coaching perspective, you need to understand the risk of dehydration and the effects it can have on your athlete's performance and on the health. As an athlete are maintaining this intake of electrolytes as unfortunate situations like this don’t occur.
Manaus is known as ‘City of the Forest’ because of it's hot, humid, and sticky climate. Regularly the temperature gets up to 35-degrees Celsius and nothing below 25-degrees Celsius during the summer period. This would be extremely hard to play a two-hour Soccer match in high stressors during the World Cup in 2014. A case study was conducted in 2014 on the climate conditions in Manaus which England and Italy’s soccer teams would have had to face in their soccer match. Alexandra Topping went to the University of Kingston, south-west of London to be placed in a heat acclimatization chamber, around the same temperature as Manaus. First Topping met with a lecturer in health and exercise physiology, Dr. Hannah Moir. Dr. Moir talked about the temperatures which the players would meet and how their bodies would react. Dr. Moir said in an interview with Tropping, “Typically the temperatures will be about 30C, but the other big issue is the humidity. That could be anywhere from 60% to 95%. So regulating core temperature is going to be a real issue for the players,' she says. 'The humidity is going to impact on their ability to sweat – sweating is really important because it helps regulate that core temperature.” Once Dr. Moir finished explaining core body temperatures and how to measure them, Topping went into the acclimatization chamber where she proceeded to run for half an hour on a treadmill. Topping after her workout wrote a paper on her findings, stating “England players, by contrast, will run around seven miles in Manaus, and lose anywhere from three to five liters of fluid.” This comes back to what was stated before, that being in extreme heat athletes are bound to become dehydrated but continuing playing in competition and not treating dehydration is very dangerous and could have high risks to athlete's health. Playing in these conditions is extremely challenging and tiring. Therefore athletes need to make sure they training in similar conditions before they compete so their body has a chance to acclimatize. As a coach, you should implement risk management such as applying sunscreen every two hours, keeping hydrated before, after and during the competition. These will help minimize how much the athlete’s performance declines.
Athletes and coaches need to work together to minimize the physiological risks and the risks of poor sporting performance. Heat affects all athletes differently and to prevent a decline in performance it is crucial athletes train in similar conditions to allow their body to start to acclimatize to the heat. Coaches need to understand the risk of heat on their athletes. This is important regarding the safety of athletes.
