Prior exercise has the potential to enhance subsequent performance by accelerating the oxygen uptake (VO2) kinetics. The present study investigated the effects of two different intensities of prior exercise on pulmonary VO2 kinetics and exercisetime during subsequent exhaustive rowing exercise. It was hypothesized that in prior heavy, but not prior moderateexercise condition, overall VO2 kinetics would be faster and the VO2 primary amplitude would be higher, leading to longerexercise time at VO2max. Six subjects (mean 6 SD; age: 22.964.5 yr; height: 181.267.1 cm and body mass: 75.563.4 kg)completed square-wave transitions to 100% of VO2max from three different conditions: without prior exercise, with priormoderate and heavy exercise. VO2 was measured using a telemetric portable gas analyser (K4b2, Cosmed, Rome, Italy) andthe data were modelled using either mono or double exponential fittings. The use of prior moderate exercise resulted in afaster VO2 pulmonary kinetics response (t1 = 13.4163.96 s), an improved performance in the time to xhaustion(238.8650.2 s) and similar blood lactate concentrations ([La2]) values (11.861.7 mmol.L21) compared to the onditionwithout prior exercise (16.065.56 s, 215.3660.1 s and 10.761.2 mmol.L21, for t1, time sustained at VO2max and [La2],
respectively). Performance of prior heavy exercise, although useful in accelerating the VO2 pulmonary kinetics responseduring a subsequent time to exhaustion exercise (t1 = 9.1861.60 s), resulted in a shorter time sustained at VO2max(155.5646.0 s), while [La2] was similar (13.561.7 mmol.L21) compared to the other two conditions. Although both priormoderate and heavy exercise ulted in a faster pulmonary VO2 kinetics response, only prior moderate exercise lead to improved rowing performance.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
