Study Spotlight: Fish Oil Reduces Heart Rate and O2 Consumption During Exercise

By: Joel Luedke

Getting enough fish in your diet can be extremely difficult.  It isn't always the cheapest food item too purchase and finding sources that are clean and really good for you provides another challenge.  Fish oil is a great alternative for supplementing in order to get your omegas (especially 3) in without going through the consumption of fish.

That being said fish oil also has some great benefits for your health and also your performance.  It can be great to help regulate your blood and your lipid profiles within it as well as be a great anti-inflammatory for your system while at the same time being beneficial to your joints.  In this Study Spotlight we take a look at how consuming fish oil might help you out more during exercise.

What They Did: 

Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) are readily incorporated into heart and skeletal muscle membranes where, in the heart, animal studies show the PUFAs reduce O2 consumption.  The researchers set out to test this hypothesis in humans and their O2 efficiency.

16 sell trained subjects were given with 8 1g pills of olive oil (control) or fish oil per day.  They were then tested on an cycle ergometer whole whole-body O2 consumption was measured.

What They Found:

At the conclusion of the study results showed that the fish oil supplementation lowered heart rate (including peak heart rate) during incremental workloads to exhaustion.  They also found that supplementing fish oil lowered steady-state submax heart rate, and whole body O2 consumption.  They did not that voluntary fatigue was not altered by fish oil supplementation.

What It All Means: 

So what does that all mean?  Fish oil seems to reduce heart rate and decrease O2 consumption but voluntary fatigue remained the same...so what? Big deal.  Well I think this is where you could go several ways with the data and we are going to take it down the route of how this could be beneficial.

In a previous Study Spotlight we looked at which gives up first, the mind or the body.  It turns out most of the time your mind is what shuts you down before your body will give up.  How I see the results of this study is showing that you can get your body to potentially work longer and harder with fish oil supplementation.  If we can continue to increase our bodies ability to perform we can continue to work on training the mind to not let us down and hence increase performance.  I think you could potential find a lot of fascinating and exciting effects (plus all the general health benefits).

Whole Paper: Fish Oil Reduces Heat Rate and Oxygen Consumption During Exercise

Resources
A couple options for fish oil in case you were wanting to give it a try.

Norwegian Naturals (liquid)

NOW Foods Omega-3

Advocare OmegaPlex