PULSE Racing
Lisa – Student Gezondheid en Leven and the ALO
Every year, a new student team takes on the challenge of helping people with a spinal cord injury to cycle again. VU student Lisa had the ideal combination of studies for PULSE Racing. She shared her knowledge about health and nutrition from the Gezondheid en Leven programme. And with the skills she developed at the Academie voor Lichamelijke Opvoeding (ALO), she worked on training schedules, physiology and coaching athletes.
Pulse Racing gives mobility and vitality back to people with a spinal cord injury.
Exercise is important, but it’s not so simple for everyone. If you have a spinal cord injury, certain parts of your body are paralysed, and you can't move, for example, your legs. That affects your physical fitness, blood circulation and state of mind. PULSE Racing gets people with a spinal cord injury cycling again using their leg muscles by applying Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES). In other words, it uses electrical pulses to activate paralysed muscles. On a special bike, the ‘BerkelBike’, paraplegic athletes improve their mobility and vitality. And they train together with top athletes for a major international competition: the Cybathlon. The goal? To make FES more widely known and accessible in the Netherlands.
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