ABSTRACT
Many applied physiologists have investigated the effects of high ambient temperatures on exercise performance. During prolonged sub-maximal exercise, it is known that time to exhaustion is significantly reduced in hot compared to cooler conditions (Galloway and Maughan, 1997; Parkin et al., 1999; Arngrimsson et al., 2004). The termination of sub-maximal exercise in hot conditions has been reported to coincide with a core body temperature of ~40ºC in trained participants (Nielsen et al., 1993; Nielsen et al., 1997; Gonzalez-Alonso et al., 1999). This relationship between exercise capacity in the heat and a ‘critical’ core body temperature seems quite robust, since time to exhaustion has been found to decrease when pre-exercise core temperature is increased by 0.1-0.2oC (Gonzalez et al., 2000; Gregson et al., 2002) and vice versa (Lee and Haymes, 1995; Booth et al., 1997).
