Ventilatory endurance in athletes and non-athletes

Do the ventilatory muscles (VM) of normal persons become fatigued while high ventilation is maintained during strenuous exercise? If so, then one effect of the intense training performed by endurance athletes should be an increase in VM endurance. To investigate this possibility, eight female endurance-athletes and eight female non-athletes were compared in studies of both short-term and long-term maximal ventilation. The two groups were matched for age, body size, and vital capacity. While athletes and non-athletes had similar short-term maximal ventilation (12-s MVV), the athletes displayed greater ventilatory endurance on two-long-term breathing tests. In the first, ventilation was increased 30 1/min every 4 min. Before exhaustion, athletes reached a ventilation that was a significantly greater fraction of their 12-s MVV (75% vs 67%, P less than 0.01), than did non-athletes. Although the energy cost (VO2) of submaximal levels of ventilation was identical in the two groups, athletes reached a significantly greater peak VO2 during this progressive test (P less than 0.05). In the second test of ventilatory endurance, 80% of the 12-s MVV was sustained until exhaustion. Endurance times averaged 11 min for athletes and 3 min for non-athletes (P less than 0.01). While these results do not rule out the possibility of genetic predisposition to high VM endurance in athletes, they are consistent with the possibility that VM training may occur in normal persons during forms of endurance exercise training.