Respiratory Muscle Training in Athletes with Spinal Cord Injury

Grenoble – Spinal column injured people suffer from impairments of the respiratory system. One approach to encounter these challenges is to specifically train the respiratory muscles. Dutch researcher demonstrated in former studies with untrained paraplegics and tetraplegics improved respiratory muscle strength, endurance and quality of life after SpiroTiger training. However it remained unclear so far, to what extent trained athletes with spinal cord injury profit from this kind of training.
For this reason, Dr. Samuel Vergès from the University Hospital Grenoble (France) trained 9 world class spinal cord injured athletes during 20 sessions (for 30 min per session) with the SpiroTiger device. The individual training was kept constant.

The respiratory muscle training resulted in an increase in respiratory muscle strength and endurance and an attenuated dyspnoea feeling during exercise. Furthermore, exercise performance was slightly increased in comparison to the standard training without respiratory muscle training.
Even though the athletes had due to their long-term physical training already a respectable degree of adaptation, respiratory muscle function showed even further improvements thanks to the SpiroTiger. Thus not only untrained but also very well trained world class athletes may benefit from respiratory muscle training.
(Reference: Vergès et al., Int J Sports Med 2009; 30: 1-7)

Link to Pubmed abstract