Achieving athletic peak performances with light doping
fitness & yoga
Top athletes have to travel around the world to attend competitions several times a year, just like traveling to South Korea for this years Olympics. Find out how special eyewear is supposed to help professional athletes to keep up with local ones and to show peak athletic performances.
Competition with Jetlag?
Anyone who has already been on a few long-distance flights knows that the real fun starts right after that. During the day we can hardly keep our eyes open and at night we lie in bed wide awake with a growling stomach. Our body is able to adapt to two hours a day to the new time zone. And that is only when we fly west. When traveling to the East (such as to Korea), it is just one hour per day. That means: with a time difference of 8 hours, you’ll need over a week until you fully adapted to the new rhythm.
What is an unpleasant inconvenience for leisure travelers can be fatal for top athletes participating in competitions. Those who don’t arrive early enough will still suffer from jetlag. At least that was the case so far. A special light goggle is now supposed to relieve the athletes’ biorhythm and help them adapt to a new time zone way faster than before.
Speeding up time change with OSRAM´s glasses
Karlheinz Waibel, national coach for science and technology at the German Ski Federation (DSV) might have found the solution. “We can use biological light of a specific wavelength to accelerate the time change.”, explains the sports scientist. In cooperation with lighting specialist OSRAM, they have developed special lamps and a pair of light goggles that have been used in the DSV for three years now, especially for the alpine races. The aim is to equip all athletes with those light goggles.
Light-Doping makes use of certain light receptors in the eye, the so-called “photosensitive ganglion cells”. These cells are responsible for our day-to-night-rhythm and the release of certain substances such as the sleep hormone melatonin. With the help of these receptors, our inner clock can be moved forward or backward faster. This also influences our biorhythm and the associated processes. Thereby the digestive tract plays a crucial role.
Strictly regulating the hormonal balance
The glasses emit different colored light of varying intensity depending on which conversion is to be achieved. The top athletes wear those glasses according to a strict plan, since the hormonal regulation can only be influenced in a certain time window, according to Waibel. However, the athletes are not limited in their actions by those glasses. With them you can pursue various activities such as jogging or reading. In addition, specific light sources are used in the rooms of the athletes which should also speed up the desired adaption to time change
A bright future?
Some athletes are still critical regarding the goggles’ effect, for example giant slalom specialist Viktoria Rebensburg. However, there are also some enthusiastic voices raised on social media: “That would be perfect for business trips!”.
Statement
It remains to be seen how intensively light-doping will be used in the future.
This post is partially based on an article of Stuttgarter Nachrichten, Januar 2018
Bildquelle: OSRAM Group
