Dr. Andy Galpin

My handle is DrAndyGalpin on both platforms.

Thank you for listening, and never forget, in the famous words of Bill Bowerman, if you have a body, you're an athlete.

The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life.

Welcome to Perform.

I'm Andy Galpin, a professor of kinesiology in the Center for Sport Performance at Cal State Fullerton.

In today's episode, we're going to be talking about the heart.

And I'd like to start with a very simple question.

And that is, why do you breathe?

Now, that may have caught you off guard, and so I'll let you think about it for a quick second.

Why is it that you breathe?

The first couple of answers probably rushing to your head are something like, well, if I don't breathe, I'll die.

And yes, that's true.

But why?

Why is it that if you don't breathe, you'll die?

With that prompt, you're now probably thinking about, well, I've got to get oxygen into my system because oxygen is needed as a fuel for metabolism to produce energy and to keep my cells and heart and brain alive.

Well, that's not exactly the right answer.

Of course, oxygen is critically important and you will die without it, but there are many other things going on that determine how you breathe, why you breathe, how often you breathe, and why that's vital to both your health and performance.

Given that the focus of this show is to discuss the science and physiology of maximizing performance,

I think it's pretty prudent of us to then spend a little bit of time learning more about how and why your heart functions.

In order to do that, we're going to cover what I call the three I's.