He's Back!

Recognize this handsome, young man? If you're Singaporean, you definitely will. The only Singaporean to ever win an Olympic gold medal.

Well he just came back to sunny Singapore and will be back for a little while. And Sports Solutions or Physio Solutions is always one of his first port of call.

Welcome home Jo! Always a pleasure to see you.

Don't Drink The Pool Water!

During the last couple of days over National Day, we took a family staycation at the Goodwoodpark Hotel. I ended up spending lots of time in the pool with my two boys as you can see in the picture above. Probably ended up drinking some too.

Not the greatest thing to do if you read what Canadian researchers found when they tracked two public pools for three weeks. Olympic swimmers have admitted doing it and now evidence shows that the rest of the general public are doing it too.

Doing what? Peeing in the swimming pool that's what!

The researchers tracked the concentration of an artificial sweetener, acesulfame potassium (ACE), which is found commonly in processed food and passes through our bodies unaltered. Great for the researchers if you happen to eat processed food and pee in public pools.

By tracking ACE levels, the researchers calculated that swimmers released 75 litres of urine (enough to fill a medium sized dustbin) in the first public pool (830,000 litres, about one-third the size of an Olympic pool).

There was 30 litres of urine in the second public pool, which was around half the size of the first pool over this two week period.

The research team sampled a total 31 different swimming pools and eight hotel jacuzzi hot tubs in two Canadian cities. ACE was present in 100% of the pools and hot tubs!

Number of pool visitors were not monitored, but the results also suggested that urine content in the pool was added several times each day.

If you thought that the pool readings were bad, measurement in the eight jacuzzi hot tubs were much higher. One particular hotel jacuzzi had more than three times ACE levels than the worst swimming pool.

Just so you know, urine is sterile, but the compounds in urine (urea, ammonia and creatinine) can react with pool disinfectants cause eye and respiratory irritation. Long term exposure to these compounds has been linked to asthma.

The results were not surprising as another anonymous survey showed that 19% of adults polled admitted to having urinated in a swimming pool at least once. Professional swimmers have confessed to being among the worst offenders.

Have you ever peed in a swimming pool? Hmmm, let me ask Jo Schooling when he next comes and sees me in the clinic.


References

Blackstock LKJ, Wang W et al (2017). Sweetened Swimming Pools And Hot Tubs. Environ Sci Technol. 4(4): 149-153. DOI: 10.1021/acs.estlett.7b0043.

Wiant C (2012). New Public Survey Reveals Swimmer Hygiene Attitudes And Practices. Int J Aquatic Research Edu. 6(3): Article 4. http://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/ijare/vol6/iss3/4.

Researchers Lindsay Blackstock and Xing Fang Li testing for ACE

Joseph Schooling At Sports Solutions

Jo at Sports Solutions

For the past few days, our staff were already talking about taking pictures with him when they saw his name booked in for an appointment in our clinic today.

I was treating another patient when Jo arrived, so Jo went to see Aized for his appointment. My next patient was running late so I went to say hello to Jo. Aized said the first question he asked was "Where's Uncle Gino?"

Yes "Uncle Gino" is what Jo still calls me. We used to swim together from 2004 until early 2008 when we were both swimming at the Center of Excellence (COE) under coaches John Dempsey,  Au Yong Kim Moon and Herbert Yu. I used to treat all the swimmers there including Jo.

That was my agreement with head coach John Dempsey. He would allow me to swim with the COE swimmers (while I was still training for triathlons) on the condition that I treat all the swimmers who needed help.

In fact I first treated him at a swim meet in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2004. Jo used to kick my behind in the pool even when he was nine years young!

Great seeing you today Jo! As Aized said, our pleasure and honor to be treating you when you're home.

Too Much Recovery May Slow You Down

*You did great Jo!!!

You've read that it's best to do a recovery ice bath after your training session, eat within 30 minutes of your exercise to replenish your glycogen stores, get a massage etc.

Well, you'd better stop that. Are you kidding me? Isn't that what Michael Phelps, Joseph Schooling and all the other top athletes do after training? And you're asking me not to do that?

Well, don't be recovery-obsessed, not while you're in training anyway.

Exercise and training are all about adapting to stress. However, the more time you spend "forcing" recovery, the less chance your muscles have to build up strength and endurance.

Researchers are discovering that when you try to recover quickly (from training) by removing the signals of stress (from your exercise/ training), you may be helping only short term recovery. This will also reduce the signals needed for your muscles to adapt.

While the researchers are suggesting that you still need to recover from training, but you just need to plan and periodize recovery the same way you would plan and periodize your training.

Meaning, you don't have to achieve optimal recovery after every training session. Some fatigue and soreness is acceptable and even necessary at certain times in your training program.

However, during high quality training sessions and especially during competition, an increased focus on recovery (and not adaptation) is needed.

So here are some general guidelines. Most often your recovery strategies should be targeted towards the longer term.

During base training/ pre season or easy workouts, adaptation to training stress is fine. You want some fatigue and soreness (or "inflammation") because this is part of the muscular adaptation process. Using ice immersion post training will often interfere with the adaptation process leading to less than optimal adaptations.

Ice immersion can be used during competitions (althogh evidence now suggests hot immersions are better) especially if you're racing in a few events a few hours later (like Phelps and Schooling during the Olympics) or over a few days. It is also time to eat real good food to recover, get your massage sessions in etc.

You'll probably have to figure what works best for you as different recovery strategies work differently for everyone. Some prefer a massage while others prefer ice baths.

References

Halson SL, Bartram J et al (2014). Does Hydrotherapy Help Or Hinder Adaptation To Training In Competitive Cyclists? Med Sci Sports Ex. 46(2):1631-1639. DOI: 10.1249/MSS.0000000000000268.

Roberts LA, Raastad T et al (2015). Post-exercise Cold Water Immersion Attenuates Acute Anabolic Signaling And Long-term Adaptations In Muscle To Strength Training. J Physiol 593(18) : 4285-4301. DOI: 10.1113/JP270570.

*I used to swim with and treat Jo Schooling way back in 2004-2008 when we were both swimming at the Centre of Excellence under coach John Dempsey. He used to kick my butt in the pool even when he was ten years old. Great job on winning Singapore's first ever gold medal at the Olympics. So very happy and proud of you!