The Reproducibility of Cardiopulmonary Responses to Exercise Using a Swim Bench

The purpose of this study was to establish reproducible assessments of cardiopulmonary responses to exercise using a computer-interfaced isokinetic swim bench. Five male and four female highly trained swimmers with mean age of 19.2 ±1.2 (yrs), stature 1.75 ±0.02 (m) and body mass of 65.8 ±2.9 (kg) performed an incremental exercise test on two occasions within one week. Oxygen consumption (VO 2 ), heart rate (HR) and exercise intensity were recorded throughout the exercise test. Measurements were made of the peak oxygen consumption (VO 2peak ), peak heart rate (HR peak ) peak exercise intensity (El peak ) and the submaximal heart rate vs exercise intensity (HR/EI) and oxygen consumption vs exercise intensity (VO 2 /EI) relationships. The values for VO 2peak , HR peak and El peak from all tests were 2.85 ± 0.26 (l · min -1 ), 171 ± 2.8 (b · min -1 ) and 86.2 ± 6.8 (watts) respectively. The differences in these peak values from repeated tests were 0.06 l · min -1 , 1.8 b · min -1 and 1.3 W, which were not significant (p>0.05; paired t-test). These represented 2.1, 1.0 and 1.5 % respectively. The HR/EI and VO 2 /EI relationships were shown to be linear (at least r = 0.99 and r = 0.98 respectively) and the differences in these relationships from repeated tests were not significant (p>0.05, ANCOVA) showing adjusted mean differences of 0.02 l · min -1 and 0.5 b · min -1 for the group. These results suggest that this method, which uses a swim bench, provides reproducible measurement of the cardiopulmonary responses to exercise in swimmers.