Race Day Heat Adaptation – CORE Adaptation SCORE- no waffle

Core greenTEG Body Temperature Sensor for skin reviewHeat Adaptation Score

CORE’s body temperature sensor is used by many high-level athletes.

It clips to a chest strap and boosts its accuracy with heart rate information from the same source and information can be displayed live on your Garmin, Suunto, Coros, Apple or Polar watch.

Why Bother

CORE’s new metrics allow you to understand the impact of het on your physiology. Most importantly you now know what training you need to do to adapt to race day’s heat. The science says you will need 2-12 weeks of training to become heat-adapted, depending on how you train.

Core’s Heat Adaptation Index

It’s based on some of the science linked below and scores adaptation as a percentage of full heat adaptation. Daily inputs update the score based on the heat training load (strain) accumulated during exercise which CORE scores on a scale of 1 to 10.

The principle seems similar to TRIMP and disproportionately rewards more time exercising hard in higher temperatures.

Levels of Heat Adaptation

The higher your adaptation the more positive will be the performance effect for you at progressively higher race day temperatures.

For example, at 30% Adaptation, your body has made some physiological adaptations that help you in warm weather.

Substantial adaptations have been made by your body between 50% and 89% and you now have the potential to perform strongly in hot races.

Maintenance

You will need 1 or 2 weekly workouts to maintain a high level of adaptation. A lack of heat load causes a fairly quick decline in your adaptation (over 1-2 weeks)

Building and Boosting Heat Adaptation

You will need about an hour in Core’s Heat Zone 3 to get a decent Heat Load and hence raise your adaptation

Core outlines various strategies for those who want to maximise the gains over a short period (2 weeks) or those who don’t wish to disturb their training plan too much and increase adaptation progressively over 12 weeks.

Take Out

If you don’t train in the heat for hot race day temperatures you will underperform compared to those who have trained to heat, perhaps very badly so.

If race day turns out to be cool there will be no negative effect from heat training, perhaps even a positive one (see comments).

Race day conditions are the same for everyone.

 

References from Core

  • Daanen HAM, Racinais S, Périard JD. Heat acclimation decay and re-induction: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports Med. 2018;48(2):409-430. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-017-0808-x.
  • Esh, CJ, Carter, S, Galan-Lopez, N. et al. A Review of Elite Athlete Evidence-Based Knowledge and Preparation for Competing in the Heat. J Sci Sport Exerc. 2024. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42978-024-00283-y
  • Périard JD, Racinais S, Sawka MN. Adaptations and mechanisms of human heat acclimation: Applications for competitive athletes and sports. Scand J Med Sci Sports. 2015;25(1):20–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.12408.
  • Racinais S, Hosokawa Y, Akama T, et al. IOC consensus statement on recommendations and regulations for sport events in the heat. Br J Sports Med. 2023;57(1):8–25. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2022-105942.
  • Taylor NAS. Human heat adaptation. Compr Physiol. 2014;4(1):325–65. https://doi.org/10.1002/cphy.c130022.

 

 

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14 thoughts on “Race Day Heat Adaptation – CORE Adaptation SCORE- no waffle

  1. Do you find that this correlates closely with the Garmin “Heat Acclimation” score or no?

    1. i put the exact same question to CORE! let’s see what they say
      i dont have the comparative data
      #i would hope garmin considered the same base science but it will use weather data rather than body temperature/skin temperature i beleive (https://support.garmin.com/en-GB/?faq=PQCtbgWxJ65nRatXoHCmy7). so i can’t be the same but, as your question implies, there might still be a good fit between the two
      idk, i could see it could go either way…good match or way off.

  2. “If race day turns out to be cool you will largely have wasted your time but there will be no negative effect.”

    There’s actually strong evidence that cool weather performance will be significantly improved from training in hot weather. It’s become very common among elites.

      1. That was the study that got everyone’s attention (particularly because unlike most exercise science studies, this actually used highly trained athletes), followed shortly by a New Zealand study with elite rowers that also showed significant improvement: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21915701/.

        I haven’t followed the research super closely since then, but some sports scientists I’ve spoken to have indicated that there’s pretty much a consensus at this point, with most of the debate having shifted to determining the mechanism of improvement and the best protocol for adaptation (usually it’s easy runs/rides followed by saunas or hot tubs). Here’s a more recent study: https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1113/EP088544.

      2. I have to admit to being confused about using heat or cold after a workout.
        Luckily I’ve never been crazy ebnough to sit in a bucket of ice for 30 minutes.

  3. Newer works with similar content: DOI: 10.3390/ijerph18084366 and DOI: 10.3390/ijerph19116412 (sorry for the DOI, but direct links to articles are not allowed)

  4. There also seems to be evidence that Heat training will help for events that are at altitude (like Pikes Peak Marathon or Leadville etc). I’ve personally seen this in my N=1 experiments.

    Living in the southeastern US, I’ve always wondered what exactly the heat acclimation accomplishes. Let me explain: here in SE US, the humidity is actually more of a stressor than just the heat itself. When humidity is at or near 100%, there is evaporative cooling from the sweat mechanism, you just progressively get wetter and wetter. So being that one of the adaptations from heat acclimatization is actually sweating faster and sooner, there isn’t really any benefit to that in a humid environment. In fact you could argue it’s a detriment, in that you’re dehydrating that much sooner from the extra sweating.

    But going from humid training environment to a (still hot) but dry racing environment (like say, Colorado or Arizona) can have a tremendous impact on race feel and performance.

    There are other factors to heat acclimatization though (like plasma volume changes and heartrate/RPE improvements), but it seems like the sweat mechanism is the biggest.

      1. Right – I have a running partner that oddly doesn’t sweat much, even on these awful runs where the dewpoint is 75+. He also seems to run better than most of us in the heat – coincidence?

  5. They are running a 20% discount till 2 Dec, may be a good opportunity to take the plunge.

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