Master Athlete Case Study

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To begin this study we must first begin with defining what a master athlete is and what you have to do to be considered one. A master athlete is defined as a person that is older than 35 years of age and still systematically trains and competes in events. The usual age to be considered for most sports is 35 but there are a few sports like golf (50 years) and swimming (25 years) that you might be older or younger and considered one. This is due to the fact that different sports require more or less stress on the body and can or cannot be competed in as long. Once an athlete reaches the age of 35 years of age the body begins to start going through a lot of changes that start to cause many things to decline in the body that in turn cause a decline …show more content…

The main reason for all of these factors is aging. As a person gets older the body has to work harder to maintain the same capacities that the body could do at a younger age. As individuals get older the factors that affect performance continue to decline in a curvilinear fashion until the athlete reaches 60-70, and at that point the factors begin to decline exponentially. One of the biggest components of aging is that an athlete’s muscles begin to become more fatigued and damaged more when performing in an exercise session. Muscular fatigue is a very strong indicator of how the body can function and maintain hemostasis under the stress of exercise. As a person gets older these seems to be three different components that cause this increase in muscle fatigue and damage. These three are that older individuals are far more susceptible to muscle damage because the age of their muscles, older individuals have a poorer regeneration of the muscle fibers that are torn during exercise, and older individuals have and incomplete functional recovery of skeletal muscles causing them to be sorer for longer periods of time. One of the ways that these factors were tested was having older individuals perform a max voluntary contraction (MVC) before and after a long distance activity (55km trail run), and comparing them to younger athletes. (Brisswalter) This would allow researchers to see if the master athletes are fatiguing faster that the younger ones. After the research was done it was found that both before and after the run that the master athletes could not hold their MVC as long as younger athletes could. This is a prime example of how aging can effect the intensity and performance of master athletes compared to younger athletes in the same competitions. This research can be seen on the

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