Current research interests
My research group (The Integrative Physiology Unit) is devoted to examining exercise tolerance and pacing strategies in humans. We focus on understanding the physiological responses to, and causes of, muscle fatigue in varied exercise conditions (e.g. short bouts of sprint exercise, Wingate Anarobic test, time-to-exhaustion performance, weigth training). It may well be that exercise is regulated (rather than limited) by a complex system that integrates afferent (feedback) sensory information with anticipatory feedforward control that, at the beginning of exercise, is based on the pre-exercise expectations of task duration and intensity. Thus, understanding how the brain regulates our involvement in physical tasks is fundamental. Current projects involve the exploration of how skeletal muscle recruitment regulates performance, and its relationships to cerebral cortex and arterial blood oxygenation. Other projects look at the pacing strategy in supra-maximal exercise by using deception manipulation (i.e. the subject is not aware of the task characteristics).
Furthermore, greater resistance to fatigue has been associated with sex (less fatigue in women compared with men) on many occasions. Cardiovascular and respiratory systems, substrate metabolism and mucle phenotypes have been examined extensively, but little consideration has been given to a critical factor that directly contributes to movement: the central motor output to locomotor muscles. The scientific literature agrees that factors responsible for part of the sex differences are present when oxygen is available. Therefore, a second major purpose of our research is to investigate whether sex alters the impact of oxygen delivery on cerebral oxygenation and haemodynamics, and to analyse whether this cerebral perturbation accounts for the lower impairment in voluntary activation (hence exercise tolerance) in women during exercise. By focusing on the factors that may influence the brain's activity in women from a global, physiological approach, we promote sex equity in the Canadian sport and wellness community.
Through collaboration with colleagues I have been involved in several other projects outside my main area of research. Most recently I worked on the effects of normobaric hypoxia exposure in elite athletes, and
Key words that best define my research: exercise performance, neurophysiology, cerebral cortex activity, muscle recruitment, pacing strategy, women