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In fitness and leisure sports, compression clothing (e.g. tights, garments, stockings) has become popular with the need to minimise the stress of activity by improving physiological factors. The area of contact between textile material and human skin represents a complex parameter in which factors such as the deformational behaviour of fibrous material under pressure, surface hardness, and surface roughness play interactive and dependent roles. The nature of human skin surface morphology and bulk properties add further complexity. Early researches on compressive garments focused on increased venous blood flow due to the compression and its positive effects on venous thrombosis in post-operative patients. In healthy subjects, the compression stockings have been shown to increase cardiac output and stroke volume, suggesting that the venous return with the stockings was larger than without it. To date, improving venous return without causing physiological disorders is a major objective for product designers in the leisure sport sector. The favourable effects of compression clothing on the muscle pumping action of the cardiovascular system have led scientists to speculate whether increases in venous return could assist in the removal of blood lactate from exercising muscles. Actually, most of the studies suggest a distinct performance advantage to wearing compression tights during local and global dynamic exercise. Besides, the increased microcirculation provided by compressive garments may prevent post-exercise damage and pain by reducing oedema and helping promote recovery post training and competition. Future garment construction and/or areas of the body targeted may need to reflect the specific biological mechanisms and demands of the sport for which it΄s intended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) is a common experience following unaccustomed eccentric exercise. DOMS and associated force deficits may limit optimal performance in subsequent days. The cause of DOMS remains poorly understood, thus there is no effective treatment. Graduated compression stockings (GCS) are a commonly used intervention believed to diminish DOMS. The purpose of this study was to determine if GCS after eccentric walking exercise minimizes DOMS and associated deficits (e.g. muscle force capacity). Eight healthy subjects (age 26±4 yrs, height 175±8 cm, weight 70±5 kg) volunteered to perform a single bout of backward downhill walking exercise (duration 30 min, velocity 1 m.s-1, negative grade-25%, load 12% of body weight). Following walking exercise, subjects were required to wear 5 hours per day for 3 consecutive days GSC (SupportivTM) on one leg while the second was used as control. Muscle soreness and neuromuscular measures (M-wave, peak twitch, maximal voluntary torque or MVT) were taken pre and postwalk, then 2, 24, 48 and 72 hours post-walking exercise for the two legs. There was a 28% reduction in DOMS 72 h after exercise when wearing GCS (P<0.05) than in the control leg. Immediately after exercise there was a 15% decrease in MVT of the plantar flexors in both legs partly attributable to an alteration in contractile properties (-22% in electrically evoked mechanical twitch). In leg wearing GCS, MVT starts to recover while the contractile properties had significantly recovered within 24 h but not in the control leg. In the current study, GCS might have had the effect of compressing the muscle tissue to such an extent that less structural damage occurred relative to a control condition. GCS accelerated the recovery of the muscle force capacity at 24 hours beyond that achieved by the control condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial towns in the early nineteenth century were seen as sources of social and economic problems. ‘Degeneracy’, wrote Richard Ayton in Swansea in 1813, ‘results from the increase of manufactories, and the consequent attraction of a larger population to one point’. The expansion of manufactures was perceived during the debate on the ‘Condition of England’ question in the early 1840s to be responsible for many social ills, some of which were urban. The town of the mid-nineteenth century has come to be represented by a series of pessimistic images, like the view of the cotton mills alongside the Rochdale Canal at Ancoats, Manchester, published by George Pyne in 1829, and by several much-quoted descriptions: Engels and de Tocqueville on Little Ireland in Manchester, or Reach on the east end of Leeds. Peter Gaskell summarised a popular perception when he observed that ‘the universal application of steam-power … separates families; and … lessens the demand for human strength, reducing man to a mere watcher or feeder of his mighty assistant’. Contemporaries were nevertheless aware that the development of manufactures was not synonymous with urban growth, that the factory system needed to be understood in rural as well as in urban contexts, at Egerton and Styal as well as in Manchester and Leeds. None of the industries which most conspicuously expanded in the century before 1840 – coal mining, textiles, the mining and processing of non-ferrous metals, ironmaking, hardware, glassmaking, ceramics – was essentially urban. Towns were significant in these industries, but they encompassed much activity outside urban limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Justus Möser entered the regency at a moment when war had brought Osnabrück's economy near collapse. Forced requisitions by the occupying armies had sorely depleted the population of draught and domestic animals. The production of flax and the number of grazing sheep had fallen dramatically. The cottage linen and woolens industry was severely depressed by the lack of raw materials – bleaching agents, wool, flax – and of capital and entrepreneurial skills. Rural indebtedness had increased sharply, since warfare and occupation had made it impossible for most of the rural population to pay rents, taxes, and personal duties. Finally, the administration of the bishopric and the Estates of the Osnabrück Diet were also deeply in debt from forced loans, actually ransoms, paid to each of the occupying armies. Collapse was the incentive to reform, and Möser played a central part in the reform effort. His preeminence derived from his superior intellectual gifts, which placed him above the other figures within the administration; from the power exercised through his many offices; and from the special constitutional situation of the regency, during which he acted as the pivotal mediator between the Estates and the Hanoverian government. As we have already noted, he served as syndic and secretary to the Ritterschaft, arranging its agenda and preparing its policy recommendations. As chief administrator and consultant to the London chancellery, he was able to force compromises on the two resident privy councillors, since he cast the deciding vote in deadlocked situations. In addition, he formulated the memoranda and legislative drafts that were sent to the German chancellery in London to be transformed into law, and often these drafts were copied verbatim into the final decrees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]