Kinesiology Graduate Students Featured in Washington Post

*Updated 6/23/09*

In a posting today on the Washington Post's MisFits blog, reporter Lenny Bernstein decides he wants to test out his current level of fitness. To do that, he heads right here to our Kinesiology Department's Exercise Physiology Lab.

Working with graduate students Nathan Jenkins, Sarah Witkowski and Erik Hansen as well as Dr. Barbara Albert of the CHBR, Bernstein is run through a VO2 Max test and a DEXA scan to measure his aerobic fitness and body composition, respectively. It's written in a lively manner by Bernstein, who describes at one point that "After seven minutes and 30 seconds, with the treadmill at 20 degrees, I am a dripping, panting mess, unable to continue another half-minute."

You can read the article in its entirety here, but here are a two nuggets that I particularly enjoyed:

After warming up, I stand on a treadmill, wires running out from under my shirt and held to my abdomen by a Velcro strap. They lead to the ECG machine that Albert will use to monitor my heart throughout the test. After fiddling with the equipment and shaving away ever wider swaths of my chest hair so the electrodes stay put, Jenkins and postdoctoral fellow Sarah Witkowski (both of whom look like they would ace this test) fit me with a large plastic piece of headgear. It holds a wide tube that will route my exhalations into plastic bags for analysis.

A clamp is placed over my nose so I can breathe only through my mouth. Jenkins cranks up the treadmill to a 14-degree angle and sets it at 3.8 mph, a brisk walking pace on a sharp incline. Every two minutes, he raises it by two degrees, and when we reach 18 degrees, he increases the speed to 4 mph.

Witkowski has assured me that, as a recreational runner, I should fare well on this test. We would soon find out.

Here's a quote included in the article from Witkowski:

"People overestimate how healthy they are," Witkowski says. "What is usually pretty shocking to people when they go through a program like this" is how poorly they fare. "What is equally shocking," she adds, "is how much they improve when they start exercising."

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Kudos to graduate students Nathan Jenkins, Sarah Witkowski and Erik Hansen for being featured in the article, which is located at this link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/18/AR2009061803317.html.

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Update 6/23/09: In the original post, we neglected to mention that Dr. Barbara Albert, the Medical Director of the Department of Public and Community Health's Center for Health Behavior Research, also participated in the story. Great work by all.