boosting

On Friday, I was sitting in the main PT office waiting for my appointment with our Associate Chair Berni and perusing a copy of the PT Times (I just made up that name, I'm not really certain what the journal is actually called). Everyone knows that there are some athletes that cheat - we hear the IOC talk to us all the time about stripping medals from athletes who do blood doping or take steroids or whatever. What I didn't know is that paralympic athletes also have a version of cheating.

This method is called boosting, and involves the peripheral nervous system being activated. For example, wheelchair athletes who have little to no innervation from the waist down will sit on pins or tacks in the area just below the part they can't feel. This causes sympathetic activation and increases autonomic activity (BP, HR, etc.) by a process known as autonomic dysreflexia. By doing this, it has been shown that athletes can increase performance by up to +10%.

A handful of researchers are only now starting to examine this and hopefully it'll be eliminated. It's just interesting how people can trick their nervous system into doing different things. Boosting is actually a really dangerous practice and really stressed the cardiovascular system, so it's strange to see people doing this voluntarily just to achieve a faster time.