Posted by R Bear on May 04, 2001 at 11:39:29:
In Reply to: Computers and Body Fat posted by JStone on May 04, 2001 at 01:39:48:
Being FAT is not necessarily correlated to being out of shape?
There is an important distinction there that I want to make. Some of the most powerful men in the world are VERY fat. Examples include NFL linemen, sumo wrestlers, and championship power lifters.
For NDL diving, I believe that being in shape is MUCH more important than being lean. The obvious corollary here is that improving cardiovascular fitness is more important than weight loss. In my opinion, VO2 max would be a much more important statistic to plug into a computer than body fat percentage.
The THEORIES?
VO2 max is a measure of how efficiently your lungs extract oxygen from the air you breath. Divers have found that there is a correlation between efficiency of oxygen extraction and efficiency of nitrogen elimination.
?
Fat is not well vasculated. This has different implications on NDL divers than it does for deco divers. Fat basically takes up nitrogen and off-gasses nitrogen slower than lean tissue. I believe that the slow uptake of nitrogen into fatty tissue means NDL divers don?t saturate fat very fast and the fat is therefore farther from the NDL than their lean tissue. The fact that the fat also off-gasses more slowly is at least partially offset by the fact that it wasn?t as fully loaded in the first place.
It is a different story for deco divers. Over weight deco divers have a strong tendency to get skin bends at the sites where they store subcutaneous fat. I believe that this is because deco divers tend to push all of their tissues (including the fat) farther towards saturation. If the fat and the lean tissues are both saturated, then more time will be needed to properly decompress the fat.
I would like to believe that this information is worth more than you paid for it. [:]-)
Ron