I've been grey-ing out a lot lately. Not only because I have abysmally low blood pressure and heart rate, but because, well, I don't eat much. Yay me! However, many years ago, I watched a doco on Russian cosmonauts who, before going into the cosmonaut program, were all tested in a giant centrifuge to see what their natural resistance to G-forces were like. Apparently, some people have a higher resistance to that kind of thing... As you do.
The American program, by contrast, would put all of their applicants through several months of training, spend oodles of money on them and only then test them in the centrifuge. Some guys passed out as soon as their asses hit the chair, thereby failing the course and being evicted from the house. To me, it seemed like a colossal waste of time and money, not to mention dashing the hopes of any potential astronauts who had a low G-force tolerance.
My point of all this rambling, is that during the training of the American astronauts, they went into quite a lot of detail about how to resist said G-forces. When in the centrifuge, blood is forced to the lower extremities of the body and away from core internal organs and the brain, hence the loss of consciousness. How they resist this is by vigorously squeezing all the muscles in the lower body whilst under the G-force, so quads, gluts, anything else, which then pushes blood back to the centre of the body and brain. I have since discovered that this technique can also be applied to the oft-encountered grey-out.
If you, like me, often grey-out when you stand suddenly after being seated for a while, or when you get up in the morning, stop what you're doing and squeeze all the muscles in your legs and ass. Works a treat.
So far only black coffee today, but we'll see how the rest of the days go.
Bless to all
S xx
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