Impact of fire protective equipment and the self-contained breathing apparatus on peak exercise in males and females
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With an increase in the number of females entering the fire service it is important to understand the potential impact of personal protective equipment (PPE) on females. This study compared selected physiological responses during two graded exercise tests (GXT) performed in a counterbalanced design: GXTPT – wearing athletic clothing while breathing through a low-resistance valve; and GXTPPE – wearing PPE and breathing from a self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA). Sixteen males and 15 females acted as participants. V˙O2peak was significantly lower, by approximately 15%, during the GXTPPE compared to the GXTPT condition for both the males and females. Physiologically, the decreased oxygen consumption was strongly related to an attenuated ventilation (r = 0.75 and 0.71) and oxygen pulse (r = 0.94 and 0.93) for the males and females, respectively. The results of this investigation demonstrate that the SCBA and PPE impacts males and females to a similar relative extent and manner. Practitioner summary: Little information exists regarding the impact of the SCBA and PPE on physiological parameters for females. This investigation determined that females have reduced exercise capacities to the same extent as males, which should be considered when evaluating the aerobic demands of fire suppression work and the fitness levels of firefighters.Abbreviations: GXT: graded exercise test; SCBA: self-contained breathing apparatus; personal protective equipment; MMC: metabolic measurement cart; ANOVA: analysis of variance; RPE: rating of percieved exertion; PRD: perceptions of respiratory distress; PTD: percieved thermal distress; V˙O2: rate of oxygen consumption; V˙O2peak: rate of oxygen consumption at peak exercise; V˙Epeak: minute ventilation at peak exercise; V˙E/V˙CO2: ventilatory equivalent for carbon dioxide; FVC: forced vital capacity; FEV1: forced expiratory volume in one second; FEF25-75%: forced expiratory flow; PEF: peak expiratory flow rate; MVV: maximum voluntary ventilation.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".