engleski

Maximum exercise performance in humans: what is the role of body size?

Physical performance tests are routinely used in various human movement-related disciplines for purposes such as assessing muscle function, evaluation of the success of various training and rehabilitation procedures, evaluation of the performance capabilities in sport- and work-related activities etc. Numerous factors may confound the results of physical performance tests, one of them being body size. Review of literature clearly shows that there are inconsistencies in normalizing physical performance for differences in body size. As a consequence, a number of previously reported data on exercise performance have been body size depended, while relationships among different exercise performance tests have been confounded by the effect of body size. Another consequence is that the comparisons of the data obtained in different studies have been often invalid which prevented researchers from establishing normative values for various physical performance tests applied on particular populations. In this talk, I will discuss how different physical performance depend on body size and what could be the optimal methods for normalizing physical performance, with particular emphasis on the theory of geometric, as well as on allometric scaling. I will also provide experimental evidence based on allometric scaling that support predictions of the theory of geometric similarity regarding the effect of body size on human physical performance. Thereafter, I will present the results of our two recent experiments related to human muscle power and, based on them, I will propose two hypotheses: (i) human rapid movements (jumps, sprints, kicks, throws) represent a body size independent measures of muscle power, and (ii) muscular system is generally designed to provide the maximum mechanical output (e.g., power, impulse) when acting against the gravitational and inertial load of its own body.

exercise performance; body size; allometric scaling

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