Alteration in scaling behavior of short-term heartbeat time series for professional shooting athletes from rest to exercise

Scaling analysis of heartbeat time series has emerged as a useful tool for assessing the autonomic cardiac control under various physiologic and pathologic conditions. We study the heartbeat activity and scaling behavior of heartbeat fluctuations regulated by autonomic nervous system for professional shooting athletes under two states: rest and exercise, by applying the detrended fluctuation analysis method. We focus on alteration in correlation properties of heartbeat intervals for the shooters from rest to exercise, which may have a potential value in monitoring the quality of training and evaluating the sports capacity of the athletes. The result shows that scaling exponents of short-term heart rate variability signals from the shooters get significantly larger during exercise compared with those obtained at rest. It demonstrates that during exercise stronger correlations appear in the heartbeat series of shooting athletes in order to satisfy the specific requirements for high concentration and better control on their heart beats.