Oxygen in Sports
This morning, I was thinking about the Super Bowl and I thought of the play at the end of the second quarter when Kurt Warner threw an interception at his own goal line and then the Steelers linebacker (or other defensive lineman) caught it and ran it back the entire length of the field for the touchdown. It was a pivotal moment. Before they went to a commercial, they showed this player sitting on the bench with an oxygen mask over his face. And today, I was wondering what that does for an athlete. Apparently, this is a situation described as EPOC: excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. Everyone knows what this feels like. You run and you breathe heavily and get tired. There is a whole range of different processes at work below this, which include various different body systems that you can read up on when reading about exercise afterburn. The only thing that you can really do in that situation is to give yourself a moment to breathe heavily. That will slow down these other processes back to a basic level. For a linebacker who generally doesn’t need to run long distances, this player clearly needed some extra oxygen pumped in to settle back to a more normal level.