Bill, I appreciate that you think I am kind and considerate
I think you are up-to-date and contribute a lot. I'm especially impressed by your expertise in pancreas problems.
Swatterson, There was a recent NYTimes article that mentioned some studies about "ventilatory threshold." I'll paste in the relevant text below.
I mention it because that dance class I used to take made me go past my "ventilatory threshold," but because I had control of when I stopped, I believe it was healthy. I was pushing and growing, like when I played soccer or ran track and did sprints.
MAYBE your daughter can build (slowly and with supervision) past what is needed for a 2.5 minute cheer routine. And maybe her whole cheer team can get in on it. I'm not an athletic trainer but from years of track, soccer, dance, I've learned how to build, to push in increments farther or faster. That said, I also know that with lung disease, there are times when building is just not possible, and stasis is even the longshot, but I figure this is worth mentioning as a future possibility.
If part of the cheer practice was jogging a 400m or maybe an 800m, then doing some blocking/flips whatever, then running it again, the team might improve their cardio in ways that blocking the routines might not be doing. For a ten-minute mile, the 400 would come to about 2.5 minutes. A trainer could advise on what length of time and distances are best to train at.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/updating-the-message-to-get-americans-moving/
In a series of studies, Dr. Ekkekakis and his colleagues found that as exercise intensity increased to the point where a person was on the verge of breathing so hard that it was difficult to talk — the so-called ventilatory threshold — people had different reactions. Some say they felt more and more pleasure, while others felt less. Beyond the ventilatory threshold, though, most felt bad. It’s complicated, though. A hard workout for one person can be ridiculously easy for another.
At one extreme are acutely sedentary people. “As soon as they get up and take a few steps, they are above their ventilatory threshold,” Dr. Ekkekakis said.
At the other extreme are athletes who cannot reach their ventilatory thresholds until their hearts are beating at nearly the maximum rate.
Even within fitness levels, there are individual variations. Some people actually feel their best when they surpass their ventilatory threshold.
It is not at all clear what is going on in the brain — why at some level of intensity a workout starts to feel good. Nor, Dr. Dishman said, is it known why a long endurance workout can feel good in a different way than a short workout with intense bursts of effort.
