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Accepted: 29 March 2021 / Published online: 22 April 2021
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Abstract
Profiling physiological attributes is an important role for applied exercise physiologists working with endurance athletes. These attributes are typically assessed in well-rested athletes. However, as has been demonstrated in the literature and supported by field data presented here, the attributes measured during routine physiological-profiling assessments are not static, but change over time during prolonged exercise. If not accounted for, shifts in these physiological attributes during prolonged exercise have implications for the accuracy of their use in intensity regulation during prolonged training sessions or competitions, quantifying training adaptations, training-load programming and monitoring, and the prediction of exercise performance. In this review, we argue that current models used in the routine physiological profiling of endurance athletes do not account for these shifts. Therefore, applied exercise physiologists working with endurance athletes would benefit from development of physiological-profiling models that account for shifts in physiological-profiling variables during prolonged exercise and quantify the 'durability' of individual athletes, here defined as the time of onset and magnitude of deterioration in physiological-profiling characteristics over time during prolonged exercise. We propose directions for future research and applied practice that may enable better understanding of athlete durability.
1Background
One of the primary roles of the applied exercise physiologist working with endurance athletes is physiological profiling, in which a number of physiological attributes relevant to training and endurance performance are assessed. These physiological attributes can subsequently be used for purposes of monitoring training adaptations relevant to performance [1, 2], training programming and load monitoring [3, 4], intensity regulation during prolonged training sessions or competitions [4, 5], and the prediction of exercise performance [6, 7].
In this review, we propose that existing models used for the physiological profiling of endurance athletes do not consider how these variables shift over time during prolonged exercise. Shifts in some physiological variables have been shown in response to prolonged exercise in the literature [8-10], which we contextualise here with field data from a number of real-world settings. If not accounted for at an individual level, shifts in physiological attributes during prolonged exercise have implications for the accuracy of their use in intensity regulation during prolonged training...