Sporting extremes: The science of Olympic success
To mark the start of the Olympics, we're hosting our own science themed opening ceremony, centred on sporting extremes. We'll learn about potentially dangerously high temperatures at this year's Games and how athletes are reckoning with them. Then, we'll find out whether (really) cold therapy is the key to recovery, and what the mindset of a successful athlete should be. Then, it's the turn of a sport nutritionist to provide some tips on how to keep your body in with a chance of crossing the line in first place.
In this episode
01:10 - Olympic athletes risk serious harm in high temperatures
Olympic athletes risk serious harm in high temperatures
Mike Tipton, University of Portsmouth
There are concerns about the extreme heat at the Olympics. The summer games have been getting warmer, and heat physiologist Mike Tipton has warned that climate change is causing fundamental changes to the safety of Olympic events, with the risk of some competitors collapsing and even dying...
Mike - The Tokyo Games was labelled the hottest in history with an air temperature of about 34 degrees Celsius and a relative humidity around about 70%, both of which of course are very important in terms of your ability to regulate your temperature during exercise. The estimation is that the Paris Olympics could surpass that certainly in terms of temperature. That could mean we'd be looking at air temperatures in the 40's and, just to put that in context, the best air temperature for people who are engaged in continuous activity is around about 11 degrees Celsius. It's a challenge to the physiology of the body that can result in pathophysiological consequences.
James - Let's launch straight into them then. What health risks are we talking about when it comes to competing in extreme heat?
Mike - So the direct effects are simply the fact that you become hyperthermic. If you stop all the heat from leaving the body and ask somebody to exercise moderately, they'll reach a dangerous level of heat content in about 20 minutes. You tend to go through the sort of warning signs of heat disorders, which will include things like muscle cramps, heat cramps, which are obviously affecting performance...
James - While this programme is about sport at the extremes, this is a spectrum really, isn't it, when it comes to the effects of heat on our physiology? But all of them are detrimental to the sport because right at that less severe end of the spectrum: fatigue, those cramps, we're still going to see a diminished spectacle for the people who've paid a lot of money to come and see the events.
Mike - Yeah that's absolutely right and it's important to keep this discussion in the wider context. Obviously we don't want athletes to be injured or put in any way in hazard, but by the same token they also want to perform at the best of their ability. When you start to talk about things like heat cramps and feeling faint and lightheadedness and bad decision making because of cognitive impairments, then that all has a direct effect on performance. We tend to focus quite a lot on endurance athletes, athletes producing lots of heat, understandably. But some of these changes, some lightheadedness, poor decision making are going to affect all sports.
James - Exertional heat illnesses, heat stroke for example, what's going on physiologically, there, for in particular people like endurance athletes in extreme heats?
Mike - It's compounded by dehydration, which is very easy of course to achieve in a hot environment when you've got somebody exercising and producing 1-2 litres of sweat per hour. It's characterised by blood pressure being lowered, lightheadedness, nausea, vomiting, headache, and you start to lose cardiovascular function. You find blood pooling in dilated peripheral vessels, you have an impaired cardiac function, cardiac output, decreasing arterial pressure. It's not necessarily associated with a high deep body temperature. It's much more to do with cardiovascular impairment and the fact that when you perform in the heat, you are now obligated to send much more blood to the skin.
James - And these are obviously athletes with the most efficient cardiovascular systems in the world so that makes it all the more shocking. From the conversations you've had with these athletes, what have been some of the remarks that have stood out to you from how they feel about their requirement to compete in evermore extreme conditions?
Mike - It ranges from concern through to fear. If people go and have a look at the report that we've produced, you'll see some of the interviews with the elite athletes where they talk about actually the fear of dying. The tennis guys, Djokovic was talking about people dying, people talking about being able to fry eggs on court. Historically the climate really didn't feature very much in the preparation of an athlete. They tended to concentrate much more on their nutrition and on their training. But certainly now probably the number one concern on their list would be the climate. That's something that's changed pretty radically in the last 20 or 30 years.
James - We'd love to be able to solve climate change. We're probably some way of being able to do that. In lieu of that solution, what other actions can we take to make sure we maintain this greatest sporting spectacle on earth in the summertime, but keeping athletes safe at the same time?
Mike - Yeah, absolutely, the number one thing would be to mitigate climate change. Given that that's hopefully ongoing and very high on people's agenda, the next level you go to is the adaptation level. We can monitor the environments using WBGT, WetBulb globe temperature, which has a look at the radiant heat, the level of water vapour in the air and the ambient temperature. We measure the heat stress of the environment and say, well actually this should be postponed, this should be cancelled. Physiologically, the best intervention is heat acclimatisation, and within 7-10 days of about 90 minutes exposure a day, you can very significantly increase the circulating blood volume, which is essentially the coolant of the body. You can increase sweat production, decrease salt loss, people feel more comfortable, they can maintain lower skin temperatures, lower core temperatures.
07:23 - Why are athletes stepping into -120 degree cryochambers?
Why are athletes stepping into -120 degree cryochambers?
Gosia Bieniek, Light Blue Clinic
Proponents of cold therapies, like ice baths, say they help athletes’ muscles recover faster and can boost their mood. As experts will tell you, there’s credible rationale for these claims, but there are some gaps to be filled in the evidence, and then there are the unqualified benefits often bandied about: such as the purported link to improved immune function.
There’s also the danger of suffering cold shock in an open body of water during open water swimming, something avoided during a supervised session inside a cryo chamber: sleek and super cold contraptions which are set at -120 degree celsius and below.
In the name of naked science, I stripped down to my trunks at the Light Blue Clinic in Cambridge, where Gosia Bieniek took me through this treatment...
James - While my cold therapy experience was to be facilitated by modern means in a high tech cryochamber, the healing benefits of exposing your body to extremely low temperatures has been posited for centuries. That's not to say it's for everyone, though. When I booked myself in at the clinic, I was asked to fill out a medical questionnaire online, making sure I had no underlying health conditions that might make me unsuitable for the treatment. On arrival, my blood pressure was taken, I was given protective clothing to shield my extremities, including thick socks, hat and gloves, and then it was time.
The lovely people here at the Light Blue Clinic have made sure I'm fit and firing, healthy, ready to take on the cryochamber. I'm faced with this enormous fridge. I'm being told there's a prechamber, which is going to go down to, what was it again? -60 Celcius. That sounds quite cold enough if you ask me. But then I'll move on to the main chamber, which is looking at -120 degrees Celsius. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little nervous, but I've got a friend. Gary's here with me.
Gary - I am indeed. I've been into the cryochamber before. You're in safe hands. We're going to enjoy this experience and you're going to benefit from all the things that you get out of the cryochamber today.
James - Brilliant. Well, I can't take the recorder in with me. It'll explode probably, but here goes. I'll see you on the other side.
Setting foot inside the atmospheric main chamber, it took a while for the coldness to really make its mark, distracted as I was by the liquid nitrogen fog dancing over my body. A combination of nervous energy and the shiveringly low temperature caused me to turn into a bit of a chatterbox, which I was assured by cryo enthusiast Gary was a normal reaction. Thanks for putting up with me in there, Gary. It also meant that, before I knew it, my three minutes was up.
Gosia, I've just about come back round from my cryochamber experience. My breathing is back to normal. That was quite something. I'm no elite athlete, but athletes are using this technique to aid with their recovery. How does it work?
Gosia - So, cryotherapy puts your body into shock, which means we pretty much induce the fight or flight response. With the cardiovascular system, what happens is that the blood goes back essentially to the heart to protect internal organs and there isn't really much circulation to the peripheries.
James - So the idea is to reduce inflammation, am I right in saying?
Gosia - Yes, you're absolutely correct. When you come out, you get vasodilation, you get redistribution of the blood, so you get more nutrients in, more oxygen in. The pain threshold shifts as well because the inflammation goes down. If there is any muscular pain, for the next 24 hours, it shouldn't be that noticeable. From the endocrine system point of view, what happens is that we get endorphins in as well. It helps with regulating your mood in the most natural way that you can actually imagine. The only thing is that it only lasts up to 24 hours, so you have to reset your system on a more regular basis. But we have clients using it twice a week, we have clients using it once a week. With the athletes, we really want to get the timing right. Provided they do the right nutrition and sleeping and all of the basic recovery, then this can really elevate their recovery.
James - So improved muscle soreness, improved mood, better sleep. Is longer, better? You're talking about the athletes there and you wanting to get the time specifically right.
Gosia - With the gold standard, we're talking about 3 minutes 30 seconds, but we also check the skin temperature before you go in. That's one of the indicators, well, the major indicator for us to know if that actually worked. You're going to get all of the acute responses and benefits that we talked about, so we check the skin temperature on the knee and then we check it on your trapezius as well before you go in. We expect the drop to be around 10 celcius when you come out. But the skin temperature is the indicator for us that tells us if the 3 minutes worked or if we have to try and encourage them to go in for another minute.
James - That huge chamber I was in was very high tech, very cool. What's the advantage of a cryochamber over an ice bath, say?
Gosia - It's optimising the time under which you have to be uncomfortable in order to get the full benefit.
13:40 - The psychological strain of sport, and how to overcome it
The psychological strain of sport, and how to overcome it
Jim Taylor
We’re going to take a closer look at the mental attributes that athletes need to perform at their absolute best. In recent years, greater emphasis has been placed on sports psychology among professional athletes but, in the mind of our next guest at least, it’s still a relatively underappreciated field. Jim Taylor is the author of Train Your Mind for Athletic Success and he has worked with some of the top teams in US sport…
Jim - Everybody will say that the mind is as or more important than the physical and technical aspects of a sport. Yet if you look at how much time and money they devote to it, it's a very small amount if nothing. Unfortunately, athletes are not approaching mental training the same way they do physical training. Too often people come to me when they already have a challenge, they already have a problem, but that's like going to a conditioning coach after you've got an injury. I try to convey to the athletes I work with in all my writing and speaking that the mind is made up of muscles and that, just like physical muscles, mental muscles can be weak, they can be strong and they can be injured. But they need to be trained just like physical muscles.
James - Why do you think that we are so far behind in this domain? Is it because it's harder to measure the psychological benefit you're endowing? Is there good evidence that mental training really works?
Jim - There are two issues here. First of all, just the stigma of psychology. That's why I call it mental training because when people think of psychology they think of mental illness and lying on a couch and getting shrunk and all those kind of things. There's sort of a cultural bias against it. Then, James, going to your next point, the point you made about the fact that you can't measure it: if you think about conditioning or technical work, you go into the gym, you see how much weight you can put on the bar, you see how high you can jump, how fast you can run, you can see it, you can feel it, you can touch it. Whereas the mental side, it's like grabbing onto fog and because it's not tangible, you can't see confidence, you can't see motivation directly, you can't measure it. A lot of my work is making the intangible tangible, and the fact is there is a large body of evidence that various types of mental training works.
James - What techniques do you work on?
Jim - First, I do an assessment and just like conditioning coaches do physical assessments, I do a mental assessment where I have a list of what I consider to be all the major areas that impact athletic performance and I see where their strengths and weaknesses are. It might be maybe they're not as motivated as they can be despite being at a high level. Maybe they lack confidence to fully commit themselves when it really counts. Perhaps they get too anxious pre-competitively; difficulties focusing, dealing with strong emotions. Then, just through consistent training, mental training, getting these areas to become stronger, whether it's goal setting, positive self-talk, emotional regulation, physical regulation, visualisation.
James - One of the most interesting things I find about sport is when someone does break onto the scene and you'll hear commentators say they've got this freedom or they're playing with no fear and in a sense that's their psychological advantage: that they don't come to it having suffered setbacks as much.
Jim - Absolutely. When you have a young athlete who comes onto the world stage, they have nothing to lose because nobody expects anything of them. But expectations are one of the most important areas that I work with athletes, and this is what I'm doing with these Olympians I'm working with heading into Paris: it's okay to have goals. Several of them have the opportunity to medal. I encourage them not to deny that fact because you can't. The media's going to be covering them, talking to them about the possibility of medals. But for me there's a big difference between expectations, which creates pressure, and goals, which is something people want to strive for. It's a very different psychological, emotional and physiological reaction. What direction do you go when you're threatened by something? You run away. When you're challenged by something, what direction do you go? You go toward the challenge.
James - We've heard about the extreme conditions that are likely to be in place for the upcoming Olympics, the heat being the most obvious. That will no doubt have an impact on how athletes feel physically, but how do higher or maybe in some cases extreme lower temperatures affect the mind and how athletes approach their event?
Jim - Well, here's the interesting thing about this, and I just literally finished an article about this talking about adversity, difficult and challenging external conditions like heat, cold, wind. The fact is that these extreme conditions, they're not the issue. I'm a high level age group triathlete. I've never been in a triathlon where there was only a headwind on me or it was only hot for me. Everybody has the same conditions, so it's not the conditions that matter, it's how athletes respond to them. It's really the attitudes that athletes have: 'Okay, yeah, it's going to be hot, but it's hot for everybody. How do I deal with it?'
18:32 - Protein bars and pickle juice: the breakfast of champions?
Protein bars and pickle juice: the breakfast of champions?
Caroline Collard
The final aspect of sporting science we want to explore is the fuel that athletes run on. Sportspeople are, like the rest of us, what they eat and extreme nutrition plans are very much part and parcel of modern sport. But, as I found out when I went to meet Caroline Collard who is a Cambridge-based health coach and writer, the dietary needs of the athletes we so idolise are being used to sell us food products we don’t really need. And Caroline was kind enough to provide some samples for me to try to illustrate her point…
Caroline - My triathletes, we are very much focused on consuming whole foods as much as possible where we can. We’re talking about slow release energy which they need at certain times of the day: breakfast, depending obviously on what time they’re training, or what time they might be competing. We’d be looking at having an oat based breakfast: things like overnight oats maybe with fruit, things like bananas which are really good. And then, throughout the day, because triathletes burn so many calories, they need to be considering fats because they will go into that fat burning stage much quicker than your average exerciser who mainly will just be using up their carbohydrates whereas triathletes’ bodies have adapted so we have to make sure in their lunches they’re getting healthy fats like avocado, meat, fish, eggs, but also more slow release carbohydrates: things like whole-grains, legumes, things like peas. Then, they have to think about fast carbohydrates just before the event. You can think of things like gels, those are going to get into their system extremely quickly. Nuts, fruit, things like that. And then of course you have things like protein bars which can keep them satiated, they also have a good mix of carbohydrates and fats in them.
James - Interesting you mention protein. It feels like something of an overnight sensation where companies are using it as a marketing ploy. They’ll have it front and centre of their packaging, advertising the protein content, pitching it at people who are doing a lot of exercise or looking to improve their fitness.
Caroline - High protein diets are becoming a little bit of what I would actually almost describe as an extreme diet. Obviously there have been all sorts of extreme diets over the years: juice diets, sugar free diets, raw paleo diets. We've also had things like this is the super food, this is the food you need to eat. We go through these phases and it's often all down to marketing. Protein, it is extremely important and more so as we age because we just need to retain more muscle mass. But for people who are either athletes or just your general exercisers, it is not going to help you to gain muscle unless you actually do the work, obviously. Most people get enough protein in their diet in general, and they're essentially getting too much and all that is giving them is extra calories.
James - Can you give advice on what products for those false friends that we might come across in the supermarket, which ones to avoid? Is there potentially anything in the box of goodies you brought along today that might provide some tips?
Caroline - As you can see, I have a really big box of examples that I use with clients. I've actually got an example here of a protein flapjack, which is cherry bakewell flavour. It contains 17 grams of protein, but obviously when you look at the ingredients list on the back, it's full of extra sugars, additives, fats that you perhaps don't need in your diet. In comparison, a protein flapjack that I might make for myself. I've bought an example here with me today for you to try, James. So it has got oats, it has got fruit, so mixed berries, and it has got a scoop of plain soya protein powder. Why don't you try to see how that tastes?
James - You're very kind.
Caroline - I know there is a massive difference between what that tastes like, that you are eating right now and obviously the cherry bakewell protein flapjack that you can see in front of you. They taste so sweet and our brains are automatically telling us: this is a really delicious product. But actually when we compare it to what you've just eaten, there...
James - Which is delicious by the way.
Caroline - Thank you. So kind. We get used to that hyper sugary taste and so therefore doing something like the homemade one that you've just tasted there is just not as appealing because it's not setting off those happy hormones in our brains that are telling us, 'This is extra amazing.'
James - That's been very illuminating. I've learned something new there about protein and the various ways in which it's being sort of weaponised in selling us products. There's one more sample on the table and I have to admit it's made me a little bit apprehensive just because of its pungency.
Caroline - So this last taster for you today, James, is actually pickle juice. In the UK, we tend to say it comes from gherkins. It is actually something that athletes have used for a very long period of time. One of the things that's beneficial for is cramps. So cramp has been very much studied a lot in the past and there's never been many really solid conclusions as to why people actually get cramp.
James - People who aren't familiar with a cramp, that sudden pang, what's the physiology? What's the mechanism? What's going on in the muscle when a cramp occurs?
Caroline - Essentially it is when your muscles are getting tired and they're contracting as hard as they possibly can, which is actually quite painful. Vinegar that's in the pickle juice really does help with rapid pain relief. The other thing that is hydrating about something like pickle juice especially is that it also contains electrolytes. So electrolytes are really good for helping to get water into muscles and providing essential minerals that we need in the muscles to recover.
James - It feels like we've put it off long enough. Here goes...
Caroline - Just think of all those electrolytes and antioxidants.
James - Oh wow. That's quite something. Along with the whole raft of health benefits you were mentioning one of them was pain relief <laugh>. I mean, is it part of the equation that you're just distracting yourself with a different kind of unpleasantness?
Caroline - Yes, and I think what you've got to remember is the majority of people who might use this as a tactic for hydration really have extremely good discipline and they will be consuming that neat. They actually have to drink around a third of a cup probably. There are certainly more than what you can see in this example.
James - For reference, I managed a measly sip.
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