Effects Of A Cross Country Running Season On Fitness And Immune Function In Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE The aims of this study were to assess 1) the effects of an aerobic training program on fitness and immune function in a group of novice female crosscountry runners and 2) the effects of an exhaustive bout of exercise on salivary immunoglobulin A (IgA), testosterone and cortisol levels before and after training. METHODS Subjects (11 females; 21.5 ± 2.9 years, 59.2 ± 6.2 kg, 164.9 ± 6.2 cm, means ± SD), with no or limited experience in cross-country running, were recruited to participate in this project. All participants completed a series of pre- and post-season tests consisting of anthropometric measurements, physical tests (aerobic fitness, squat jump and sit and reach tests) and collection of saliva for measurement of IgA, testosterone and cortisol concentrations. To assess the effects of an exhaustive bout of exercise before and after training, saliva was collected after an overnight fast pre- and post-season, at the same time of day, for 3 minutes, before and after a Léger Boucher 20m shuttle run leading to voluntary exhaustion. Salivary IgA, testosterone and cortisol levels were measured using commercially available ELISA kits. The participants were supervised while training 6 days per week, ± 1 hour per day, for the duration of the season (i.e. 10 weeks). The effects of a cross-country season on performance were assessed using a repeated measures ANOVA. The effects of an exhaustive bout of exercise before and after training on salivary IgA, cortisol, testosterone and testosterone to cortisol ratios were assessed using a 2 way ANOVA with repeated measures. RESULTS Aerobic fitness, as assessed by the field test, increased significantly following training (p=0.029). Flexibility and leg power did not change significantly. There was a significant increase in salivary testosterone concentration following training (p=0.022) while increases in IgA concentrations almost reached significance (p=0.060). The salivary testosterone to cortisol ratio did not change significantly in response to an acute bout of exhaustive exercise or in response to a season of training. Interestingly, there was a significant correlation between salivary IgA levels and testosterone concentrations (r=0.57). CONCLUSION These results demonstrate that, in young women, an intense cross-country season training program significantly improves aerobic fitness, and elevates salivary testosterone levels. There were limited effects on immune function, as assessed by salivary IgA concentrations, in response to an exhaustive exercise before and after the season, although there appears to be a relationship between increasing salivary testosterone and IgA levels. Supported by NSERC.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".