Julian Guthrie of the San Francisco Chronicle reports on a cool invention that helps tired players bounce back:
The Glove works by cooling the body from inside out, rather than conventional approaches that cool from outside in. The device creates an airtight seal around the wrist, pulls blood into the palm of the hand and cools it before returning it to the heart and to overheated muscles and organs. The palm is the ideal place for rapid cooling because blood flow increases to the hands (and feet and face) as body temperature rises.“These are natural mammalian radiators,” said Dennis Grahn, who invented the device with Stanford colleague Craig Heller.
Grahn and Heller also found that cooling overheated muscles dramatically improved physical performance, allowing athletes to work out harder and longer, and hold on to their gains.
“We learned that you can actually reverse that muscle fatigue in a short amount of time,” Heller said. “And if you cool muscles during rest, you get a much greater recovery than if you rested without cooling.”
In the early 1990s, Heller and Grahn first began looking at using controlled heat to halt tremors in patients coming out of anesthesia. When they put their device over the hand and arm of a patient at Stanford Medical Center, “The core temperature went up so fast,” Grahn said, “we thought our recording equipment had broken.” The tremors stopped.
Once the license for their heating technology was sold by Stanford, they shifted their focus to cooling. The two were interested in exploring therapeutic uses of lowering body temperature, particularly for people with cystic fibrosis and multiple sclerosis. They turned to exercise as a way to build up a person’s internal heat load and then worked to figure out how to “pull it out through vascular structures,” Grahn said.
Their first “aha” moment in cooling came after they talked their assistant Vinh Cao into doing his regular workouts in the lab instead of at the gym. His routine included 100 pull-ups. One day, Grahn and Heller started using an early version of the Glove to cool him for 3 minutes between rounds of pull-ups. They saw that with the cooling, his 11th round of pull-ups was as strong as his first. Within six weeks of training with the cooling breaks, Cao did 180 pull-ups a session. Six weeks later, he went from 180 to 616.
“I’ll never forget the number 616,” said Heller. “He tripled his capacity in six weeks. We were like, ‘Wait a minute, this is crazy!’”
Heller used the Glove to work up to 1,000 push-ups on his 60th birthday.
After their findings were published in the American Journal of Applied Physiology, they received a $3 million grant from DARPA. The Glove is now being distributed and redesigned by Avacore Technologies of Ann Arbor, Michigan:
Grahn and Heller are board members and working with the company to create a more user-friendly version of the coffee pot-shaped model — which they call “klutzy” — to make it look and feel like an actual glove. Avacore is in contract with the military to deliver the new, streamlined gloves by the end of the year. Some 100 units of the cooling device are in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division.It is also being used by other football teams, including the Oakland Raiders and the Miami Hurricanes, and by American cyclists who competed in this year’s Tour de France.
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The Glove, formally known as Core Control, is available through Avacore Technologies of Ann Arbor, Mich. It retails for $2,500, but is available at select times throughout the year for less than $2,000. The price is expected to come down with the second generation of the Glove, now in development.
I first read about the Glove in Noah Shachtman’s piece for Wired, Be More Than You Can Be, back in March, 2007.