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[Suni Williams] Hi.
Welcome to the International Space Station gym.
How you guys doing today?
My name is Suni Williams and I'm living here as part of the Expedition 14 crew
up on the International Space Station for about six months.
Part of the issue with living in space for six months is
we encounter some bone and muscle loss.
And so a big part of our day is spent working out -- about two hours every day --
to make sure that we can work on our bone and muscle mass.
Today, we're going to show you all the exercise equipment that we have up here
and how we work out.
What you see right now is I was working on the bicycle.
It's called a CEVIS -- cycle ergometer vibration isolation system.
You can see it's sort of floating on the wall.
That way it doesn't impart too many loads into the space station
as we're floating above the Earth 200 to 250 miles at 17,500 miles an hour.
We don't want to make too much input into the station as it's moving so fast.
The bicycle works with a computer.
And we're going to show you the computer here that has protocols that we load
so we can ride for about 30 to 40 minutes at different weight-bearing loads.
And like I was talking about,
some of the things we encounter are bone and muscle loss.
Not only our muscles like in our legs and our arms, which you think about all the time,
but also your internal muscles -- the muscles that hold up your organs.
A good example of that is also your heart is a big muscle.
So one of the reasons we do this aerobic exercise is to make sure
that we exercise our heart and keep it in good shape.
So there are other types of exercise that we do also for strength.
The next thing we're going to show you is the resistive exercise device.
OK. So we're in the node. We floated over here.
And this is the resistive exercise device I was talking about.
We call it the RED. And here working out on it is the commander
of the Space Station right now, Commander Capt. Michael Lopez-Alegria.
So, you can see, this machine that we're using -- it doesn't really have weight on it.
It's a system of essentially rubber bands that are tied together or meshed together.
And as we increase the number of rubber bands, we increase the resistance.
And we can use this machine to
do all sorts of exercises like L.A. (Lopez-Alegria) was showing us --
a bench press, and now a dead lift.
You can switch back and forth to work all sorts of muscles in your body.
One of the ways to adjust the weights on the machine is increase the cam.
There's a number that corresponds to the amount of resistance that's added
each time you turn the cam.
So now he's added some resistance for the squat exercise.
We use this football-type harness just to provide a good, stable platform
for the weight to be centered on your back and your hips correctly.
[Michael Lopez-Alegria] Like Suni was saying,
we have to spend quite a bit of time working out every day
for the reasons she stated -- both to prevent muscle loss and bone density loss.
The cardiovascular stuff that she mentioned obviously helps your heart.
But the resistive exercise, we've found, is very important
to prevent bone density loss.
We do a lot of lower body exercise -- much more than upper body --
because on Earth, of course, you spend a lot of your time walking around.
But up here on station, you can see my shoes look pretty clean on the bottom
because they've never really stepped on anything.
And so we need to try to stimulate the muscles and the bone in your spinal column --
the things that support your weight on an everyday basis on Earth
that don't get that sort of stimulation in space.
So we spend a lot of time doing squats and dead lifts,
both straight-leg dead lifts, single-leg squats and two-leg squats.
And then the upper body stuff is a little bit up to us.
We can do bench press.
We can do tricep exercises, bicep exercises, lat pulls.
So we have quite a bit of variation we can do.
It's a little bit like the universal machine, only based on rubber bands instead of weights.
The physical fitness experts on the ground have the ability
to monitor some of the equipment in real time
as well as through files that we download for the CEVIS and the TVIS.
So, after the exercise, we can send down data that include the workload,
the rpm and the heart rate that we're developing.
We can judge -- and they can help us monitor --
our fitness and change our workout, as necessary, to make it most effective.
The last thing we're going to talk about is the treadmill vibration isolation system, or TVIS.
Obviously, you can't walk on a treadmill up here
because there would be nothing holding you down
unless you have some type of device to hold you to the belt itself.
In that case, we use a harness that Suni is donning now.
And it is attached to the deck, which is free floating on the actual deck of the station
by some spring bungee systems.
And we can vary the amount of resistance in a number of ways.
The easiest one is to just vary the number of clips that we have included in the stack-up.
Obviously, the more clips, the less extended the spring is and the less the resistance.
The less clips, of course, the higher the resistance.
Suni is going to demonstrate now one of the workouts that we do.
We have an automated controller up top that records all our data, as I mentioned,
onto a card that we later send to the ground for download.
And she can dial in a speed that she wants to go, and she just hops on.
The belt speeds up and she's away.
It takes a little while at first to get used to how this treadmill works because
it is a little tricky when it's floating in space like that.
But after just a few days, people usually get the hang of it.
You can walk on it, climb on it.
You can also use it in passive mode where there is no motor to grab the belt,
but you have to actually walk. It's a little bit more like walking uphill.
We typically do that toward the end of the mission when walking is going to
become really important for us again after our return to Earth.
[Suni Williams] One thing we want to leave you with,
and we appreciate you coming up, following us along today and working out with us.
And working out is a part of our daily lives up here
because we need to do it to make sure we'll be able to come back to Earth
and be able to walk around without any problems.
Likewise, this is not for only our health,
but it's also experiment and research for the future.
Because if we're going to be sending you guys back to the moon or to Mars,
you're going to have to be able to get there,
and be able to work when you get there and walk around,
and be able to put on a 300-pound spacesuit,
and be able to walk around and have no problems.
So we're just stepping stones for the work that you guys are going to do in the future.
So, I hope you join us with our challenge
and work out with us while we are up here for the next five or six months.
Thank you.
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