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

Introduction

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

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TV Lovers

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BBC Sounds

1:39BBC 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.

2:10We 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. And afterwards, he did kind of go, how come you haven't died?

2:43And 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 with encyclopedias.

3:14And thus, I am buff.

3:17And 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.

Building Athletes

3:36Today, 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? And 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?

4:10And 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 to 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.

4:404Gs, 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. I 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.

5:13Women 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?

5:27And 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. And 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,

5:58which was quite excruciating. But once you reach the finish line, it's all worth it. It 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.

6:23The 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... Holding 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.

6:50So, yeah. So, I'm Hugh Dennis, I think probably best known as the winner of Channel 4's Pottery Throwdown.

6:59My 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. It'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.

7:30But 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.

Panel Introduction

7:49And this is our panel.

7:53I 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. Yeah, lots of ice cream. There's the secret. So, if you take away one thing from listening to this show, eat more dessert.

8:27Now, 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. That was a more serious answer than you were hoping for.

8:57No, 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. But, yeah, honestly, there's something for everyone, and it's actually really refreshing,

9:29because 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. For some people, we want them to have a lot of speed and strength and power, if they're

10:00a 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. So, I think when you look at the individual, you have to make sure the whole ecosystem around

10:30them 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.

10:49Or 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. So, 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

11:26training 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 have 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,

11:58but 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 makes 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.

12:29And 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 before 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.

13:00There'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 really 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.

13:32But 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 life 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,

14:04this 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. And 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.

14:34And 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 dream 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

15:06who 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. I was by far the smallest person that was tested and measured that day. And a really important factor was the coach,

15:38who 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,

16:10but really, who's got the fight? I didn't realise that because I noticed at the end of every race you did, you're always given a little treat.

16:20So, 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,

16:52if we have a piece of technology, is it actually going to work? 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,

17:22but 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. If 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.

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Technology in Sports

22:22This 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. But 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,

22:52I 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. Every sport is levelling off in performance

23:23and 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

23:55and 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. So, 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?

24:27So, 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 backwards 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.

24:58I'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

25:28was not particularly good. So, then as time went on swimsuits got smaller and smaller and smaller and then 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.

25:58Whoever 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 overnight 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.

26:30Which 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 at 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

27:01would 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 for me actually limiting technology universally it doesn't limit the sport itself.

27:33Like 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 well. So I think it really is sport by sport. It depends on the sport because for some sports the tech is

28:05like 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 you'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

28:35having 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

29:05but 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

29:36support 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 and 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

30:08engineers 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 of 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

30:39look at the data and shut my eyes and imagine what was going on and my daughter I remember my daughter 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

31:10as 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 training 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

31:41of 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 your 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

32:12so 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 now 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

32:44and 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 never 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

33:15what 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 benefits 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

33:45and 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 Ben 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

34:16didn'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