How to Build the Perfect Athlete - Helen Glover, Hugh Dennis, Steve Haake and Emma Ross

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1:16Learn more at direcTV.com. Restrictions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. You're about to listen to The Infinite Monkey Cage. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays. Wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, the full series is available right now. First on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Inks. And this is The Infinite Monkey Gymnasium. Today we guarantee that in just ten days, you two can have a body like Robin Inks. Yes! It'll take a lot longer to have one like Brian's. But with mine, you can probably do it in five days, actually, with the correct amount of cakes.

1:51We have trained together, though. This is true. When we went on tour, we trained, and Brian thought that I would die. Because Brian does lots of training, and I don't. This is why, because it would make the profit, for me, bigger, had he died. I didn't realise how much he'd insured my life for, and I should have really checked on that. But yeah, so what happened was, we went up onto the moors, so it was a very kind of Heathcliff thing. And we had these ropes and stuff, had to do all this kind of exercise.

2:24And afterwards, he did kind of go, how come you haven't died? And it would have been wonderful if you died. And then you'd have become star stuff. Anyway, so I explained to him, I said, well, the thing is that I actually do work out all the time, right? I do a thing which I call the BBBC, which is the Bibliomaniac Bodybuilding Book Camp. What I do is, everywhere I go, I have a rucksack on my back, I walk everywhere, and I go, oh, look, there's a second-hand bookshop. And I go from having an empty rucksack to one that is absolutely filled

2:59with encyclopedias. And thus, I am buff. And I actually do a Brian Cox bodybuilding thing, right? And it is all based around this thing going, tired of having sand kicked in your face? With the Brian Cox bodybuilding. So you'll find that when you do get sand kicked in your face, you immediately go, of course, that's really fascinating. Because in many ways, that does explain entropy. Today, we are discussing how to build the perfect athlete. How has technology enhanced performance? How can we hack our biology? And how can we do all this whilst remaining a good sport?

3:32And our PE instructors for today are a physiologist, a sports engineer, Olympic gold and silver medalist, and the winner of the mighty throwdown, which I presume is some kind of wrestling event. It's pottery, isn't it? It's pottery. Pottery. Well, that was a mistaken book in there, wasn't it? And they are. My name's Steve Haake. I'm from Sheffield Hallam University. I'm a professor of sports engineering. And my most excruciating athletic experience was probably going down San Marit's bobsled track in a four-man bobsled. I'd been in a bar the night before, and the guy had said, do you want

4:06to come down on the track in the morning? We need a break, man. So I said, yes, it was a tourist sled. So I turned up early, we went down, and it was terrible. It was terrifying. 4Gs, rivets kind of sticking in your legs, in your nethers. And I got to the bottom and thought, well, I won't have to do that again. And he said, right, we've got three more. And it took me a week to recover. It was horrible. I'm Dr. Emma Ross. I'm an exercise physiologist.

4:36I was the head of physiology for the UK Sports Institute. And now I work specifically with female athletes. And my most excruciating athletic experience was when I did an Ironman. So for those uninitiated, an Ironman is a triathlon. Women can do it too, despite the name. It's 3.8 kilometers of swimming, followed by 180 kilometers of cycling, followed by a marathon. Back to back to back. Is there a month in between? And it took me about 12 and a half hours. I mean, a lot of it was enjoyable, weirdly, but it becomes excruciating by the end.

5:09And I'd done a really good job of fueling myself quite well. I was a sports scientist. I was quite proud of the fact that I had a really good fueling plan. But the trouble is, when you've been fueling yourself with carbohydrates for 12 hours, your stomach just becomes really unhappy. And digesting food is not a priority. And so your stomach just says, I don't want anything in here. So the last half of the marathon was many, many pit stops at the Port-a-Loo, which was quite excruciating. But once you reach the finish line, it's all worth it.

5:42It is. Type 2 fun is what we call it. I'm Helen Glover. I'm an Olympic rower. And my most excruciating sporting experience was probably the pressure of being in Olympic year and lining up on the start line of the parents' race at my kids' school. The pressure was real. Did you win? I knew someone was going to ask that. It's an inevitable question. Here's the thing. We had to run backwards, holding the hands of our... This would be very easy for you. You do rowing. Well, you were thing. You were thing. You had to...

6:14Holding your child's hand, and one of my twins dropped their ice lolly as we were doing it. I have all the excuses prepared. Didn't speak to her for a week. So, yeah. So, I'm Hugh Dennis, I think probably best known as the winner of Channel 4's Pottery Throwdown. My most excruciating kind of athletic thing, I do a lot of long-distance cycling. So, I'd done a thing called the Etape de Tour a couple of times, which is an open stage of the Tour de France, which takes place kind of a week before the tour goes through.

6:46It's always in the mountains. So, it was 200 kilometres in the Pyrenees, and you have 12 hours to do it. And you get followed by a thing called the broom. So, if you're not going fast enough, you get taken off the course because you're holding people up. But in the ninth hour, I thought, you're doing incredibly well. I set my sights on this guy. It had taken me nine hours to catch up with this cyclist. Got closer and closer and closer to him, and I overtook him. And as I overtook him, I realised he'd got one leg.

7:20And this is our panel. I love that it was an ice lolly that was dropped, because, of course, you are also from a famous Mousel ice cream family, aren't you, Helen? Yeah, there's so many links. You don't immediately imagine a large amount of delicious ice cream leads to Olympic excellence. So, have you found a way of balancing the two? You know, honestly, every day of my life, for my whole childhood, I ate bowls fulls of ice cream. Yeah, my dad was an ice cream maker in Cornwall, and that's how he grew up.

7:51Yeah, lots of ice cream. There's the secret. So, if you take away one thing from listening to this show, eat more dessert. Now, Hugh, I'll start with you. Do you think there's such a thing as a perfect athlete? Well, I'm certain it's not me. I don't know. I'm sort of interested in the views of the rest of the panel here, because I would have thought that, you know, you can be perfect, say, for rowing, or perfect for running, perfect for football, but, you know, it doesn't transfer. It's not a kind of transferable thing. So, I suspect, no.

8:24That was a more serious answer than you were hoping for. No, no, no. We wanted this. Can we ask everyone, actually? This is an interesting thing. As briefly as possible, summarise what you think makes the nearest you can have to a perfect athlete. Do you know what, though? To Hugh's point, right, you walk into an Olympic village, and you look around, and every single body type is represented, because every single sport requires something so different. And they're selling the ice cream. I'm sure there's an archer, or a shooter.

8:55But, yeah, honestly, there's something for everyone, and it's actually really refreshing, because there really is something for everyone. So, the perfect athlete, I actually think, would come down less to the physicality and more to the mindset, if you're going to say, what is perfection? I think the mindset has to be really highly up there. Emma, what do you think? When we look at athletes from a sports science perspective, we always drill down into what are the important determinants of success for this event, and they will all differ. So, for some athletes, we want them to have a really big engine, if they're an aerobic athlete.

9:31For some people, we want them to have a lot of speed and strength and power, if they're a sprinter. So, it really does depend what they're training for. But I also agree with Helen. I think, even as a physiologist, who kind of is wedded to the fact that we can build this amazing biological specimen, all the research we have shows that there are so many other factors, and things like mindset and psychology. But even how supported we are growing up, there's even some really cool data about if you went to a village primary school, you're 10 times more likely to be an elite athlete.

10:03So, I think when you look at the individual, you have to make sure the whole ecosystem around them is being well designed to help them develop into an amazing athlete. What is the village school link? So, it's in comparison to cities, where I think there's just so much more competition. So, I think your talent might get nurtured better if you're in a smaller pond, if you like. Well, that would be swimming. Or rowing. Or rowing. Or rowing. Yes. I mean, from a technological point of view, as you said, it's the whole ecosystem. So, you've got the athlete, and then you've got the kit.

10:35So, if it's a cyclist, it's the cyclist and the bike. If it's bobsled, it's the bobsled and the athlete. And so, we try and optimise the whole system, and so it's putting all that together. And as you said, Emma, to pick up what you said, you talked about mindset. You also said we can build or help construct an athlete, in a sense, through training and so on. In a particular sport, how much is what you might call genetic, and how much is then the training and the commitment and a lifelong commitment, practice, and so on? I think we'd love to be able to do, like, a genetic test for an athlete, and geneticists in sport

11:10have been looking for genes which really predict performance, and they've really struggled to find it. But what we do know, if you take a group of non-elite athletes and a group of elite athletes, about 60% of the variance between the two is down to genetics. But genetics to do with all sorts of things. So, yes, someone's aerobic capacity, their fitness, their strength, their muscle composition, but also their propensity to be injured. You know, staying injury-free is one of the best predictors of being a successful athlete, and even their personality. So those things can be genetic, and those things all feed into what

11:41makes a champion. So we can build and we can train, but you have to be starting with the right genetic material. So certainly, if you're talking about, you said, Olympic gold, for example. So there, you have to have everything, I suppose, because you're the best of the best. But then you also have to have that factor of opportunity. And for me, I was 21 when I started rowing, and I've got science to thank for the fact that I am a rower, full stop. Like, I started rowing through a talent ID program. I was measured, physically measured, my fitness was measured, and I was told at the age of 21, four years

12:15before London, you could be a good rower. And it's like, I had the makeup and the genetics and stuff that I still have today, but if that sliding doors moment hadn't happened, I would not be an Olympian right now. So there has to be opportunity, there has to be access, you know. That's what I always try to say when I go into primary schools. There's nothing to stop it being you. Olympians are not people who are different or exceptional just because they are born that way. There is so much around it, around the edges and around the opportunity that I think it's

12:46really important to instill in the self-belief of young people as well. And that idea that there will be a sport for you, because you said it's almost everyone is represented. Yeah, and we've got really good at identifying talent in this country. Like, Helen was identified because we knew that tall people with long limbs would be really good at certain sports like rowing. But you were already involved in many sports. What were you doing up to the age of 21? So that's the thing, it kind of looks like the starting point was 21, but actually, you know, my whole

13:16life had been sport. I was running, hockey, swimming, everything I could. So I actually had this massive multi-sport base, and I was given this opportunity to channel it into one thing that I was physically really well suited for. So it kind of, it worked out really well in my favour. And as a physiologist, I would say that's the perfect mix, because some of you will have heard of the 10,000 hour rule, this idea that if we do deliberate practice for 10 years or 10,000 hours, we're going to be really, really good at sport. But actually, that research was based in music.

13:47And with sport, we know now that it's much better to do a variety of things when you're growing up, when you're going through puberty, when you're developing, so that you swim and you do games play and you learn how to be chaotic and move your body in a really chaotic way. And then you build a big engine by doing running, and then you might do some sprinting. And you build up this really amazing, resilient body, which knows how to move in loads of different ways. And then you refine it. And even better, if someone says, oh my goodness, your body is perfectly designed for export. And we are quite good at that in this country, identifying talent. But having that really broad base of exposure. Is there an age at which you have to give up your

14:20dream of being an elite sportsman? No. Not at all? I work specifically now with female athletes. And the menopause is obviously a predictable time of life for females to go through. And I thought, gosh, I don't think we're going to have to encounter that. But I have worked with many athletes who have had to contend with going through the menopause and being a world champion. And yes, they tend to be archers or horse riders or target shooters. But yeah, at any time of life, you're capable of getting out there. There's still hope. There's still hope. But I think so much of it, we were talking earlier about how much of it is mindset as well. So there was this huge science base to, say, me starting rowing, where I was measured and all this. But actually, I was slightly too short for the cutoff.

14:53I was by far the smallest person that was tested and measured that day. And a really important factor was the coach, who was the person who selected me, was stood at the side of the room watching the physical testing. And years later, after London, he was asked by the press, why did you choose her if she didn't even make the height criteria? And it was a bit offensive what he said. He said, she was a mongrel. We were looking for this. We were looking for this. He said, we were looking for a pedigree. We thought we knew what we wanted, this perfect pedigree. And watching, I knew she was the dog that if backed into a corner, she would fight her way out. So that's essentially that nod towards, yes, you've got this physical attribute, but really, who's got the fight?

15:26I didn't realise that because I noticed at the end of every race you did, you're always given a little treat. So, Steve, I was thinking that, you know, how much do you look at, you know, biology and think, hang on a minute, if evolution had gone this way? What for me? When you're, yeah. Well, not necessarily for you, though there's no reason not to. But, you know, that sense of looking at the technology you're creating and feeling this kind of, you know, almost Darwinian thing of going, but if I imagine how this creature might have evolved to be faster or be able to jump higher, does that come into the way you kind of think? Well, we're often just trying to work out, if we have a piece of technology, is it actually going to

15:57work? So, for instance, let's say tennis, for instance. We can create the perfect tennis racket, and we've done lots of work with lots of manufacturers, but when you actually give it to the player, the player goes, oh, I hate this. Oh, this is horrible. It feels terrible. So that translation from the bit of tech into what the player actually is going to do with it, whether the oars feel terrible for some reason, there's no grip or in the water or something like that. From a technological point of view, we can work out the science and the physics of it, absolutely, but then you hand it over and there's this translation into the actual use of it, which you can get quite physically, you know, wrong. One example, a very simple one, was the colour of tennis courts.

16:28If you paint a tennis court green, an acrylic court green, people go, oh, I love this tennis court. If you paint the exact same tennis court red, people go, oh, this is really hard. I hate this tennis court. It's much harder than the last one we had. And it's just the colour. So it's this kind of psychological perception of what's going on. Today's episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a podcast from NerdWallet. Do you have a friend who treats airfare like a puzzle and somehow always ends up with a first-class upgrade? Smart Travel is like that friend, minus the group texts. NerdWallet's travel journalists break down the pros and cons of travel decisions, like when lounge access is worth paying for and which hotel loyalty programmes actually pay off. Make your travel dollars work harder.

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19:06those things are not something that generally if you have a healthy gut, you should be living with. So that's when we deep dive. We deep dive into your medication. We deep dive into your OTC medication. And then at that point, we can probably identify something that we can change. Hear the full conversation plus some fascinating facts about how gut health affects so much more than just your stomach on Beyond the Script, a podcast from CVS Pharmacy and iHeartRadio. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. This is sport specific, of course, but in a sport like running, for example, a lot of technology goes into running shoes. Is there any way of saying, what percentage does the technology give an athlete? So, I mean, obviously, Formula One, obviously, is quite a lot.

19:36But in terms of a couple of sports, running, tennis, the rowing, I suppose, with the technology, the boat. You know, after working in sports technology and sports engineering for about 10 years, I did kind of go, I wonder if this actually works. Am I wasting my time? So, we thought, well, okay, if it works, it's going to be in the data. So, we went back to the data. We start looking at the data, starting with the first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. And we collected all the data we could, top 25s, every year for whatever it was, 120 years when we did that bit of data to see what is it that has the most impact on sporting performance. And so, the first thing that you see is you see that performance grew rapidly and then levelled off.

20:09Every sport is levelling off in performance and we're almost at equilibrium for every sport that we looked at. So, the first thing that makes performance grow is actually finding the right athletes. So, back in 1896, it actually really was whoever turned up. So, people just turned up and said, oh, I'll do that. I'll do that. And didn't even know what the rules were. So, they had tug of war and things like this. So, people would turn up, they'd get a medal and that was the performance of the day. As time went on, more and more good athletes were found and then as globalisation occurred, particularly after the Second World War, sadly the Second World War killed a lot of our good athletes and so performance absolutely dropped after the Second World War. But then it took off again and then it's now levelled off.

20:42So, we've now got, so the population has grown since then. So, that's the first thing. So, you've got a bigger population. You've got a better way of finding the athletes. So, you've got a bigger athlete population to choose from and that kind of allows you to get the best athletes. So, once you've done that, you then go, right, what else can we do? So, there might be something like the Fosbury flop if anyone remembers that. So, a high jump at the Fosbury flop. You can see that as a little blip there in that particular data. So, that's a technique. It's a technique, yeah. Yeah, so people would kind of run at it and go over kind of facing it and kind of do a scissor jump and then Fosbury flop is where you turn

21:13backwards and go over head first with your bum kind of just scraping the top of the bar. Most people don't go over at all, by the way. Yeah, yeah. Or under, yeah. I've never managed. And then you get other things where you go, okay, what about swimming for instance? First of all, swimsuits went from being quite big and being made out of wool and then silk. That's a wool. I can imagine swimming suits. A full body wool and swimming suits. They got very, very heavy. In fact, women first were asked to swim in dresses and dresses and blouses with weights in the dresses to keep the dresses down so you couldn't see the bloomers underneath. So, performance was not particularly good. So, then as time went on swimsuits got smaller and smaller and smaller and

21:44then anyone remembers the speedos, the tiny speedos and then suddenly swimsuits got longer again because they realised that it reduced the drag through the water and then they turned them into something very stiff and plastic-like when it came to about 2009. At the Rome World Championships, 43 records were broken wearing these new swimsuits and everyone was wearing them. Whoever was sponsored by one company was taking the logo off and sticking the logo of the best suit on and everyone was trying to wear the best suit. So, the ruling body just went, oh no, we can't have this. We can't have this anymore. We're going to have to ban these suits. And from a technology point of view, that's when you can find out actually how much difference they made because

22:14overnight they were banned and you can tell exactly how much difference it made. So, to answer your question for swimsuits, 50 metre, it was about 3%. A 3% improvement in performance wearing the suit or not wearing the suit. Which is huge. Which is huge when you're thinking about so it's seconds and seconds and seconds. Is that worrying though? I mean, given that we're talking about athleticism. So, the rules are about the human with the technology of the time of the day and actually what FINA, the ruling body, should perhaps have done had just let it go its natural course because we were kind of

22:45at equilibrium and they allowed the swimsuits to appear and maybe they shouldn't have done that in the first place but once they were out there and being used suddenly performance went up. But what would have happened is everything would have reached an equilibrium again. Everyone had been wearing the suits and everyone had reached a different level but a bit higher up. What strikes me though as she is as a sports person clearly they're expensive things. How do you see that interaction between technology and just the athlete achieving the best that they can do? Yeah, I really like this topic actually because for me I'm quite like purist around the sport and I think

23:21for me actually limiting technology universally it doesn't limit the sport itself. Like in rowing everything needs to be commercially available for everyone so you can't go into a lair and develop a boat that no one's ever seen before to a spec that doesn't exist in any other country. When you line up you know you're basically in the same boat with the same oars as everyone beside you. That sits really well with me. I like that but then I can also understand that you know if you're a cyclist and your bike is a gram lighter than the person beside you that's part of your sport as

23:55well. So I think it really is sport by sport. It depends on the sport because for some sports the tech is like you say it's really hand in hand with the athlete and for others actually it's slightly more standalone as the athletes. I think it's really important that each sport has a bit of a handle on what tech is developing in their sport that it is available for everybody and people aren't priced out of the market and really crucially that youngsters don't feel the pressure or the need because otherwise yeah you can buy yourself a few seconds but if

24:26you're if you're 13 years old you don't need to be doing that you need to be enjoying it enjoying a variety of sports and not necessarily having those incremental gains worried about at that early age. I think I was going to say about that in the Olympics last year the tragedy of someone deciding not to wear underpants and I'm sure someone would have seen this it really this guy does this incredible jump but unfortunately he obviously had gone commando and that meant that as he went over his penis just dropped a little bit and knocked the bar off and that is one of the I don't know if you'll make the edit

25:02but it is it really was because it was comedic and tragic does anyone remember it? Oh yeah it was shown on slow-mo in many ways yeah well it's actually on a similar theme surprisingly so when we talk about technology giving percentage points improvement one of the big projects I did ahead of the Tokyo Games was working with a research group at the University of Portsmouth around sports bras because what we now know about the biomechanics of breast tissue is that if we don't support the breast tissue well enough the breast movement can change our whole biomechanics and energetics so we decrease our stride length use more energy we fatigue more quickly

25:38and basically if you were someone lining up on the start line of a marathon and a clone of you was next to you and you were exactly the same in every way training, preparation, fitness one of you had a really good fitting sports bar on that minimised breast tissue movement and one didn't the person with a good sports bra would finish a mile ahead so we don't need engineers Steve we just need good sports bras having said that for that particular research talk about Jo Skirr down at Portsmouth I worked with her on the physics

26:08of the sports bras because she was doing lots of sports science but she didn't really have the physical models so she said can we develop these physical models so I wrote some papers on this but one of the things was I could see all the data but obviously I couldn't see any of the video so there's lots of videos being taken of women in various guises from wearing bras to no bras and so I'd have to look at the data and shut my eyes and imagine what was going on and my daughter I remember my

26:39daughter coming into the bathroom and I've got my hands out and I'm kind of doing this side to side motion with my fingers with my eyes shut and she says dad stop it I know what you're doing that is such a sad story the story of the clone as well the fact that they've managed to spend all the money on creating the exact copy but ran out of money to buy a second sports from it's just very bad planning so we've talked about the technology but there's a technology I suppose you could call nutrition the

27:11training regime itself technology how much difference is there now across different countries for example in terms of the technology that you apply to get your athletes into peak physical fitness I mean I think the western world of the top sporting nations are probably all fairly equal but they do a really good job of finely tuning things like nutrition and things like altitude training is a bit of a hack I guess for for accelerating adaptation to training so you either go to altitude 2000 metres let's say and the oxygen availability up there is less and so

27:44your body has to work harder if our body isn't getting enough oxygen it's really hardwired to adapt to this stressor so it just starts to make more red blood cells which can carry more oxygen to the muscles so that adaptation can be kind of enhanced by going to altitude and then the next step was oh well what if we didn't need to go to altitude what if we just brought altitude to sea level and we made altitude laboratories where we can manipulate the oxygen brilliant now we don't even have to go up to altitude so

28:16now we have athletes who are sleeping in a low oxygen tent who might be training in a low oxygen laboratory just to try and amplify the effect isn't that a bit disappointing for the athletes who are hoping they were going to go up Kilimanjaro and now they're still in Basildon I don't know if you've done it Helen I've never done altitude and actually I really wish I had done it at some point in my career because I think all the research is really strong in it and there's so much benefit from it but no I've

28:48never done it so it's a mountain stage so did you get to a height where you started to feel the effects of altitude no what was it weirdly I didn't know but I how high does it get do you know a couple of thousand metres I don't know what the highest coal was but you're never at the top of the mountain you don't cycle actually to the peak and then down the other side you always go for the coal when does it start to I mean how high do you have to go to start seeing

29:21benefits you probably have to go 1500 metres and the coals are probably 1200 on some of the peaks of when I drove across Peru with Ben Fogel for a series called The World's Most Dangerous Roads and they were quite dangerous they were sort of you know cliffs and stuff and no barriers and stuff and I turned to Ben at one point and said do you think they should be called The World's Most Dangerous Roads he went no I don't really I think they should be called roads passable with care that's the difference between me and

29:53Ben Fogel up in the Andes every hotel lobby has got an oxygen tank so you can just go in and kind of throw a mask on your face and feel better for a bit because you've done a few of those kind of shows and you've done one with David Baddiel recently yeah that wasn't really the endurance event well it didn't seem to be endurance for you but for David Baddiel it did you know we were cycled across France epic journey along a canal to the maximum height we got to was about I don't know maybe

30:2525 metres and he was on an electric bike yeah I think the fact the trailer they've been using on television is mainly you massaging his car after you go oh this electric bike's so heavy I also think going back to the actual technology thing we used to get criticised didn't we as a nation GB used to get criticised for really only being good at the sitting down sports and you kind of go well that's sort of fair in a way I think you know rowing we're really really good at sitting down sports because they're the

30:58only sports in which humans would actually win any competition with animals however fast you can run whatever shoes you're wearing you're not going to be a cheetah you're not going to be a shark swimming but you put a shark on a bicycle and you're spending a lot of money on this research as well if you get a glimmer from going to Dennis's zoo you'll see why it's about to be closed down in terms of training we spoke about the fact that there's a big advantage to having begun sports early but you in particular famously had

31:30a break you had twins didn't you so how did you find that process did you lose a great deal of fitness is it kind of banked up somehow do you know what I was really there's lots of things I banded around about the amazing ability of you know post childbirth mums and what happens the physiology and blood volume and all these things and when I had the kids I never considered that I would get back into a boat never considered that I would go to another Olympics after Rio I hadn't rowed for four years and

32:03when I got back on the rowing machine it's because we were in lockdown and I just had the twins and they were newborns and every time I got onto the rowing machine they would only sleep to the sound of the fan of the rowing machine it was really comforting to them so basically their nap time the way to get them to sleep and keep them asleep was to get on the rowing machine and slowly but surely my numbers came down and I was really surprised how after four years out of the sport how quickly my

32:35numbers came down I mean I was really surprised that I could still do this yes I had a big bank of fitness and that must have stuck with me but I had four years out as well what was the gap between giving birth to twins and actually going back to the Olympics so what would that have been just over a year would have been twins to Tokyo and then I think I raced the European championships they must have been about nine months old maybe ten months old then when you say you took a break I

33:08bet you didn't you didn't row but how many miles a week were you running I did a marathon a half hour and a half hour and a marathon and all these things to keep fit but then as soon as I had Logan in 2018 and the twins in 2020 as soon as I had kids I was trying to keep fit so I wasn't again I wasn't a standing star I wasn't going from zero but definitely not putting in the hours I was on the program did I read somewhere that there was some enhancement in certain

33:40parts of your ability or measurable enhancements yeah I got a personal best on the rowing machine after having kids the most measurable thing we can do in our sport is a two kilometre test on a rowing machine and I got the best time I ever got so compared to when I won the Olympics in London and Rio in my twenties three kids later and four and I mean Emma you must have an insight into what happens to the to the human body but I was really surprised because when I first started out I thought I

34:12probably won't get on the plane to Tokyo I probably won't make it onto the Olympic team but at least I'll have given it a go and shown my daughter that it's worth the try and I was really surprised I was getting these results was it the urgency of trying to keep the twins asleep it it was a big part there were silver in Paris so Emma what do we I mean first of all we have so little information about returning to medal winning performance in women after having kids because for so long athletes had their

34:45athletic career and they retired and had babies and it's not something you can do experiments on people you can't just say well I'm going to make you all pregnant so we really have to learn from athletes like Helen about what works and what doesn't and it is very individual and she's clearly a unique superstar from all different perspectives I think one of the things we always say because we work with lots of women across all different levels of performance is that it's not a badge of honour how quickly you get back Helen will have planned

35:18all of her training and her return with loads of support and that won't be the same for the next woman and if you're still in your pyjamas at nine months and you're not winning a medal that's also okay hashtag asking for a friend but we are learning more and more and I think what would be really brilliant in this country is if we were sharing information more widely across sports because what you tend to find is that one sport will really invest in understanding its athletes and their performance and they won't tell the next sport

35:51and we've got someone like Laura Kenny in cycling who's done the same thing and actually what we need to do is pull all of this really valuable information from women who are returning and doing remarkable things after child birth and see if we can learn any lessons but I will say that it has to be a really measured return because child birth is really significant Is there a crossover from this study of elite athletes into general health in the population? When we look at things like Formula One and how much of those features end up

36:25in road cars eventually is there an important responsibility of elite sport to inform public health? There's a lot of research on Parkrun so I've done quite a bit with Parkrun and there was an obstetrician a few years ago who wanted to investigate running in pregnancy in fact he was a parkrunner and someone said I'm pregnant am I allowed to run and he went I don't know there's no research because the ethics make it very difficult and he went oh I bet there's a load of parkrunners who are pregnant already and I'm

36:57not forcing them to run they're just doing their own thing so did this amazing bit of research got something like 2,000 participants which is really big for a study of that kind and found out what was happening and some women were running right the way up to the end of pregnancy and then coming back quite early as well but certainly what he found was that actually delivery was fine if not better for those who were doing physical activity right up to the end of pregnancy we've been really conservative in this country about pregnant women and

37:30we used to say stop doing anything and now we know that absolutely if you've been doing something before you can continue doing that and that's a really healthy part of pregnancy in terms of the future so you mentioned actually Steve you said that there's been a plateauing of performance so I was going to say I'm not going to say design but our physiology are we reaching that limit where you just so could there be a time when world records are really not going to get broken too much anymore well we're kind of hitting that now

38:04I mean again we've looked at the data not the physiology I'll leave that to the physiologist but in terms of looking at the data you're looking at some sports where really the records are not going to be broken for quite some time we're looking at where do we get to the 99.999% of the infinite limits we put a curve through it and it's years away for some events certainly some of the swimming events if we were to last if the modern Olympic Games was to last as long as the ancient Olympic Games then it will

38:37finish in something like so we think about in the next Olympics what's it going to be like will we have reached the limit by the year 3000 I'm pretty certain we will have reached the limit of performance and Helen you will yet again in the year still be an Olympic road I know it's an impossible question but let's say 100 metres where is it if I was to guess where is it 9.8 9.7 I you know you can go based on previous performance future performance the limit will be and we got down to something like

39:119.1 or 9.2 or something like this if you follow the data and you do a dotted line off what's the world record at the moment is it 9.5 Usain Bolt I think to start to really break records we're just going to have to break rules because and not through drugs perhaps I mean that is a way that people do break records but Eliud Kipchoge broke the two hour marathon a few years ago and it was a huge project years in the making that was to basically make a man run under two hours it had never

39:47been done before and he ran one hour 59.40 so they succeeded but it required him to run I mean they chose the right surface they chose the right time of day in the right climate with these shoes which had a huge energy return they had paces which were in a formation which made him the most streamlined he was an amazing physiological specimen there were so many components and actually his record didn't stand as a world record because it wasn't within regulations and so I wonder whether either the rules will have to change because I think

40:23the people at the top are now as close to being perfect specimens as we were going to get yeah I mean I agree with that absolutely I mean certainly with that to our record having a load of runners in front of him shielding him from the aerodynamics was a key feature of why he got under two hours Helen I just want to finish by asking peak and there's really nothing else you could do to improve do you get to that point where you think this is maximum performance I love this question because I think it's

40:59a really important one so I have experienced that once in my life after London we got the gold and I didn't feel I deserved it I didn't feel I been in the sport long enough I didn't have any ownership over the title Olympic champion I was going to go on for another four years to prove it to myself that that title belonged to me and I can say for four years I absolutely lived that lifestyle where every morning I woke up and I thought at that start line in Rio I have to know I could

41:36have done nothing more and I honestly say that I sat on that start could physically create and I'm really proud I'm so privileged that I had a four year period in my life where I could dedicate myself to being the best I could be but I would say that that was flipped on its head when I had three kids I was getting no recovery and I was still competing and performing so I think yes there's this absolute perfection and there's this quest I'm really lucky that I had this moment in time where I could do

42:12that but I don't think you necessarily have to I think there are other ways of doing it we asked the audience a question and today we asked them if you could add any sport or game to the school curriculum what would it be Hugh this is from Tressa and it says it would have to be rowing so Brian could be the cox I think so it says hopscotch string theory I think you might mean hopscotch quantum mechanics because you can have your legs simultaneously inside and out well your joke hasn't already been read out but

42:48it has been marked Brian I'm afraid has found it lacking so thank you to our panel Professor Steve Hake Dr Emma Ross Helen Glover and Hugh Dennis now next week we're going to be discussing science goodbye is that it it is because well it's because we don't know what the next broadcast is going to be but we do know because as you know the infinite monkey cage was born in November 2009 thus making it Scorpio and so I've looked up astrological prediction and it says next week we're going to be asking astrologists is it nature

43:24or nurture that makes them so bad at predicting the possible futures we'll we'll get letters for that yeah we should get letters goodbye in the infinite monkey cage turn turn out nice again hello Russell Cain here I used to love British history be proud of it Henry VIII Queen Victoria massive fan of stand up comedians obviously Bill Hicks Richard Pryor that has become much more challenging for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius

43:55do not catch up but if like me you quite enjoy it have a little search listen to Evil Genius with me Russell Cain go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed on ESPN and TNT starting as low as $4.99 no long term contracts are overpaying just live hockey at home or when you want it Sling lets you do that visit sling.com to learn more