The Alternate Sports solution Team, has recently been working hard on completing their thesis which is required to complete your honours.
The thesis is titled : Profile of energy utilization during competitive surfing.
"It was pretty cool to work on an topic which has never been researched in South Africa, especially with all three of us being interested in alternate sports, so being involved in this study was an awesome experience"
Over the last 7 months we been working pretty hard on proposals , ethical issues,presentations and communicating with possible subjects, but finally on the 09/10/2010, we completed our data collection.
We simulated a typical surfing heat, however the subjects wore heart rate monitors whilst surfing so we could analyse heart rate changes as well as to predict Vo2 and oxygen consumption. We also measured blood lactate both before and after the 20 minute heat , Lactate is a marker of the anaerobic energy system in use.
We found some interesting information from the data collection, which we are still further analyzing.
All the hard work paid off on Thursday 21 October where we had to present our findings to the Department of Sport Science, our group was awarded the Gold Award for our research!
So all thats left for us is to produce the final written project and submit, and hopefully a publication in a Med Journal.
Its been a great journey.
Wade Botha
Sports Scientist
