Physiology In Sport

Original Editor - Alberto Bertaggia.

Top Contributors - Wanda van Niekerk, Naomi O'Reilly, Alberto Bertaggia, Lucinda hampton, Kim Jackson, 127.0.0.1, Evan Thomas, WikiSysop, Nikhil Benhur Abburi, Tony Lowe and Jess Bell  

Introduction

Biology is a branch of science that deals with living organisms and vital processes, both in animals and plants.

Physiology and anatomy are two closely related branches of biology.

While anatomy is the science that investigates the structure of the body, physiology is the scientific discipline that deals with the processes or functions of living things. Physiology derives from Ancient Greek φύσις (physis), meaning "nature, origin", and -λογία (-logia), meaning "study of".

The major goals of physiology are:

• to understand and predict the body’s responses to stimuli;
• to understand how the body maintains conditions within a narrow range of values in the presence of a continually changing environment.
  

Exercise physiology is the specialistic branch of physiology which study the acute responses and chronic adaptations to a wide range of exercise conditions.

Exercise physiology

Exercise is one of the most common stimulii which perturbates human homeostasis.

Usually people think of exercise as a sport-related activity to increment performance and train athletes (such as basketball, football, volleyball, hockey players, weightlifters, runners, etc.). But physical exercise is also present during job-related physical activity (lifting loads, moving objects, walking and standing for 8 hours, etc.), activities of daily living (doing laundry, mowing the lawn, cleaning house, cooking dinner, etc.), and rehabilitation of patients, such as following a stroke or heart attack. In all of these non-sport-related activities, exercise is involved. Therefore, exercise physiology matters in all of these contexts.

The physiological response to exercise is dependent on the intensity, duration and frequency of the exercise as well as the environmental conditions.

During physical exercise, requirements for oxygen and substrate in skeletal muscle are increased, as are the removal of metabolites and carbon dioxide. Chemical, mechanical and thermal stimuli affect alterations in metabolic, cardiovascular and ventilatory function in order to meet these increased demands.

Musculoskeletal System

If you need a recap on muscle physiology this video will be very useful.

The musculoskeletal system is fundamental in exercise physiology because to exercise, there is the need of muscle functional contraction, of course. The strength of a muscle depend mostly by its cross sectional area, therefore size matter.
Mechanical work performed by a muscle is the amount of force applied by the muscle multiplied by the distance over which the force is applied. The power of muscle contraction is different from muscle strength because power is a measure of the total amount of work that the muscle performs in a unit period of time. Power is therefore determined not only by the strength of muscle contraction but also by its distance of contraction and the number of times that it contracts each minute. Muscle power is generally measured in kilogram meters (kg-m) per minute.