Abstract
Background
Athletic competition has been a source of interest to the scientific community for many years, as a surrogate of the limits of human ambulatory ability. One of the remarkable things about athletic competition is the observation that some athletes suddenly reduce their pace in the mid-portion of the race and drop back from their competitors. Alternatively, other athletes will perform great accelerations in mid-race (surges) or during the closing stages of the race (the endspurt). This observation fits well with recent evidence that muscular power output is regulated in an anticipatory way, designed to prevent unreasonably large homeostatic disturbances.
Principal Findings
Here we demonstrate that a simple index, the product of the momentary Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) and the fraction of race distance remaining, the Hazard Score, defines the likelihood that athletes will change their velocity during simulated competitions; and may effectively represent the language used to allow anticipatory regulation of muscle power output.
Conclusions
These data support the concept that the muscular power output during high intensity exercise performance is actively regulated in an anticipatory manner that accounts for both the momentary sensations the athlete is experiencing as well as the relative amount of a competition to be completed.
Citation: de Koning JJ, Foster C, Bakkum A, Kloppenburg S, Thiel C, Joseph T, et al. (2011) Regulation of Pacing Strategy during Athletic Competition. PLoS ONE 6(1):
e15863.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0015863
Editor: Alejandro Lucia, Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain
Received: August 19, 2010; Accepted: November 25, 2010; Published: January 20, 2011
Copyright: © 2011 de Koning et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: These authors have no support or funding to report.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Description
Analyzes pacing strategies in athletic competition.