Ryan Cousineau said:In article <[email hidden]>,
Joe King said:"Raptor" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...
Quoted message said:Seriously.
What causes puking during a hard workout? I've only experienced it a
couple times, on foot, when I sprint far into the red zone.
Assume strong conditioning, no unusual diet conditions or illness, just
pushing extremely hard. What's the chemical/physiological cause?
Quoted message said:http://www.ultracycling.com/nutrition/puke.html
Reading that article, it seems to say, in not quite so many words, "we
don't know."
It details the various not-very-exercise-related reasons why people
throw up, but I think there's an as-yet undetermined exercise-related
reason.
You probably have had the urge to gag or puke just from -seeing- something
repulsive. So that tells me there's some brain center that can be
stimulated by visual phenomena to cause a reaction, and that this center is
probably sending impulses to the parasympathetic nervous system.
It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that hard effort and ragged
breathing could also either directly trigger the PNS, say as a 'reflex', or
it could trigger a brain center which then sends out a hormone which
triggers the PNS.
I've often wondered if this feeling of puking isn't the body's way of
trying to downregulate an effort that your system considers 'too hard' or
'harder than current experience' causing one to reduce the effort.
It's not too dissimilar to coughing which can occur after a hard effort, in
fact coughing can cause puking even without much of a feeling of nausea.
Notice how when you feel nausea coming on your salivary glands start to
work overtime? Well that's the PNS activating. So just as the inflammation
response can cause most of your 'cold or flu' symptoms, the PNS can cause
unnecessary symptoms, too, and one of them is puking.
Not sure this clarifies much...just pondering the issue.