TRANSCRIPT
As Australia's summer sets in and heat records continue to be broken, health experts are warning people of the dangers of exercising in extreme heat.
Sydney has just experienced it's hottest first fortnight of summer in over one hundred and sixty years of records.
However, soaring temperatures are proving no deterrent for some of Bondi Beach's regular outdoor gym goers, who say weather is no excuse for missing a workout.
"It's never too hot to workout outdoors, it's not hot enough, lets go!" Vox2: "It's just not it for me, anything above thirty it becomes like hazardous" Vox3: "Between thirty to forty degrees" Vox4: "You can use any temperature as an excuse not to work out, but really at Bondi it's never too hot."
But, Australian National University specialist physician and heat researcher Doctor Simon Quilty did a PhD on heat and health in the Northern Territory and he says research shows that exercise in extreme heat can have permanent consequences on the body.
Doctor Quilty says the impacts of prolonged exposure to exertion in hot weather is something doctors have only really understood in the past five or six years.
"As the research is coming out it's becoming more and more apparent that regular prolonged exposure to exertion in hot weather damages you bodies permanently and can for instance will definitely do permanent damage to your kidneys and that's something that we've only really known about over the last five or six years. So this problem of extreme heat and how it interacts with our bodies is something that's really only just starting to come under investigation and people will have to take notice of it if they want to live long, fit and healthy lives and we have to live within the constraints of the climate we're now living in."
The research shows that when your body starts to heat up, one of the first things affected is the brain.
Doctor Quilty says exercise in high temperatures can not only damage your organs but can also lead to dangerous decision making.
"As you body heats up, all of your organs start to come under strain and we have acclimatisation biology built within us to try and deal with that heat and one of the first organs to be affected by the heat is your brain. So yes you can make poor decisions about crossing the street, you can make poor decisions about continuing your run and then other organs start to get involved. So the first sign is poor decision making, you also start feeling very hot and thirsty, some people start to feel like they have a fever or they get goose-pimples on their body, and that's their body starting to fail to be able to cope with the heat. And then you get this cascading effect of the amplification of the heat within your body and your organs literally start to cook."
As conditions continue to heat up around Australia, Doctor Quilty says it's important to allow our bodies to adapt to heat.
He says people who live in hotter conditions are often able to withstand the heat better than those in colder climates, but he also warns that people who spend most of their time in air-conditioned spaces are also less acclimatised than those who don't.
Warning that even very fit people are at risk of overheating if they push their limits too far.
"I very clearly remember a very young fit man doing a long run, a competitive run in Katherine in the Northern Territory. It was in the middle of the cool season, it was still 33 degrees that day and he ran fast and hard and he collapsed and he got rhabdomyolysis and all of his muscles melted and he came within a whisker of dying and had to be aeromedically airlifted to Darwin where he went to the intensive care unit. This can happen to young people who are fit and well. Just because you're really fit and well, doesn't mean that you're not very vulnerable to the heat and we all as a society have to start learning how to live in hotter weather."
So as summer continues to break heat records, Doctor Quilty advises exercising early in the morning, taking advantage of the coolest part of the day and avoiding what could be a fatal final workout.
