The science coming out of universities may or may not apply to you personally, but chances are that those results are far more likely to apply to you then the results of physiology studies coming out of the Department of National Defense. Yet, so many conclusions have been extrapolated from studies on soldiers both in the lab and in the field to athletes that it seems the assumption is that there is no difference between the physiology of soldiers and athletes. I beg to differ.
Think to what soldiers are tasked with… march, crawl, climb, jump and do so in combat gear, with 20, 30, 50 or more lbs on their back, not to mention the weapons they carry plus the ammunition. Soldiers can be called into action at any moment, no enemy calls out for a 20min warm up so that everyone is ready before starting to fire upon one another. Combat scenarios can last seconds, to minutes, to hours, to days, to weeks, lasting through days, nights into the next day without any rest. Combat occurs in hot dry desert conditions, wet monsoon conditions, cold wet boggy conditions, you name it… people fight in it. And if nothing else then there is one tiny little variable that drives soldier and athlete far apart: no athlete is ever, ever, ever in a do or die scenario; soldiers live in it.
It can be argued that many sports mirror specific activities performed by soldiers… agreed; but… for soldiers its typically all at once, with no defined starting or stopping point. How do you pace a combat scenario? You cannot, because you do not know if the enemy is going to fight 10mins, 10 hrs, 10 days or 10 weeks!
Understandably, research that came out of our military institutions was at times the only research available on various topics, but that does not mean in any way that the research applies to sport. The unfortunate reality is that instead of discounting the research performed on soldiers, sport has attempted to turn itself into a battlefield in an effort to endorse war time physiology onto athletes. Turn on any sporting event and you will hear commentators calling the play field a field of battle, the athletes warriors, battling for supremacy, whatever…
Sport is not war. War is war, and soldiers are soldiers and maybe some characteristics of being a soldier are athletic in nature but the two are not the same, nor is the research. Anyone who thinks different… has likely never been in a combat scenario, needs to experience one so they stop disrespecting what our service men and women do. Athletes compete in safe, regulated events, with specific start and stop points, with measures in place to minimize any risk of injury and there is rarely a threat of death to any athlete by competing in sport.