Sean's day to day role involves leading a number of NIHR funded research projects, collaborating on other research projects, overseeing an NHS supervised exercise programme for intermittent claudication and performing pre-operative cardiopulmonary exercise testing for patients with abdominal aortic aneurysms being considered for repair.
Sean Pymer is an exercise physiologist at the Hull York Medical School. His background is in clinical exercise physiology having undertaken a PhD at Hull York Medical School and an MSc at the University of Hull. His research interests include exercise interventions in cardiovascular disease and the role of cardiopulmonary exercise testing as a risk stratification and exercise prescription tool.
Sean's MSc research project was entitled 'Does exercise prescription based on estimated heart rate training zones exceed the ventilatory anaerobic threshold in patients with coronary heart disease undergoing usual-care cardiovascular rehabilitation?: A United Kingdom perspective'.
His PhD project considered the role of alternative exercise programmes for the treatment of intermittent claudication - ranging from home-based exercise to high-intensity exercise. The first study considered the evidence for home-based exercise programmes via a systematic review and meta-analysis.
However, the main focus of his thesis was to consider the role of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) in patients with intermittent claudication. His systematic review demonstrated that the evidence for HIIT in this patient group was limited. However, it did suggest that low-volume, short-duration HIIT could be beneficial. This lead to two cohort studies considering the feasibility, tolerability, safety and acceptability of HIIT for patients with IC. The results of these studies have been presented at international conferences and were recently published in the Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation and Prevention.
The findings have also allowed for refinement of the HIIT intervention, that is now being considered in an NIHR funded multi-centre proof-of-concept study - which he is leading.
I assist with teaching on the MSc programmes of Cardiovascular Rehabilitation, Cancer Rehabilitation and Clinical Exercise Physiology within the Department of Sport, Health and Exercise Science at the University of Hull.
Please find out more about Dr Pymer's publications here
I am a member of the Vascular Society of Great Britain and Ireland specialist interest group for peripheral arterial disease and the vascular exercise professionals network.
Exercise physiology and interventions in clinical populations.