Metabolic cart and exercise testing equipment for humans

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There is much to be learnt about how the human body responds to exercise. The capacity to examine how acute and chronic exercise stresses the cardiovascular, respiratory, metabolic, and cognitive systems is a fundamental component of exercise science and kinesiology research and relies heavily on high-quality exercise and metabolic monitoring equipment to ensure accurate and reliable data. This request is for a metabolic cart system, treadmill, and cycle ergometer to fill a critical shortage of research-grade testing equipment in the Department of Human Health and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Guelph. It will support three leading edge NSERC research programs which urgently require the infrastructure to advance their research and avoid delays in HQP training. Immediate access to this equipment is imperative for Dr. Millar's research on the causes of inter-individual variability in neuro-cardiovascular responses to exercise. His work has found a role of absolute contraction force in mediating blood pressure responses to static handgrip exercise, explaining why women have attenuated responses despite contracting at the same relative intensity. Unfortunately, this work has been limited to static handgrip exercise, which has limited translation to daily living. The requested equipment will enable Dr. Millar to gain insights into the causes of neuro-cardiovascular variability during the typical daily activities of walking, running, and cycling. High performance exercise equipment is essential to Dr Burr's research on how different types and volumes of exercise acutely and chronically affect the ability to adapt to cardiorespiratory, muscular, and metabolic stresses. Recent work has identified an important role for blood flow restricted exercise in eliciting cardiometabolic and performance adaptations. To advance this innovative research, Dr. Burr requires state of the art equipment with the ability to carefully titrate and adjust exercise loads to accommodate the abilities and limitations of human participants ranging from sedentary to athletic and young to old. Dr. Vallis's research examines how humans seamlessly integrate concurrent motor and cognitive tasks. Her recent work has shown promising improvements with dual-task training using a walking motor task. The acquisition of a research-grade treadmill with safety harness and cycle ergometer will enable new approaches to examine dual-task training that include higher intensity motor tasks, while the metabolic cart will provide novel physiological information relevant to the design of optimal training protocols to improve dual-task performance. The applicants currently train 28 HQP but all three research programs are significantly hindered by the limited access to existing equipment which provides a lower degree of functionality. The requested equipment will greatly expand our capacity for exercise testing and increase opportunities for HQP to conduct high impact human research.