 Thank you very much. It's an absolute pleasure to be here virtually and to share with you my thoughts and elite sport performance and challenge you to think around your own performances maybe and is there a form of a success. So to start off with let's look at some examples of optimal performance and I picked triple jumping to start off with. So here's Jonathan Edwards jumping over 18 meters. And I could name on one hand the number of people who can jump over 18 meters so it's really really challenging, even though all the athletes train really hard. Very few can achieve these ultimate levels of performance and that starts to pose questions in our heads as to why that might be. And then one of the sports have done lots in cricket, you know bowling at 100 miles an hour again. Not so many people have achieved it. But why is that. And then if we move on to baseball, where they can throw a ball slightly faster, but without the run up. So they get up to just over 160 kilometers an hour. And clearly paced almost knocks him out there. And then on to a sport closer to home perhaps tennis where the world record here from someone that probably nobody on the call has heard of. Interestingly, in other words the best performers aren't always the ones who can serve or smash the fastest. Indeed, I thought I would look up what Angie Murray's fastest service and it's 10% just over slower than the fastest in the world. And then finally, in terms of examples to the sport that I play, which is badminton, which is the fastest racket sport, and they get well over 400 kilometers now, although I'm not going to tell you how fast I can smash but it's nowhere near that. So I'm a biomechanist at Loughborough University. And as a researcher I love to ask questions, but the area of study that I use is mathematics. So I use mechanics to try and understand and explain movements in sport. So why is it that those athletes can achieve those incredible levels of performance that perhaps we could only dream of. In particular, I try to identify factors that are critical to performance in one way of respect, or from an injury point of view as well. And these two go hand in hand, you know, if you're injured you can't perform so you can't just concentrate on one without the other, but this presentation in the main will think from a performance point of view. The philosophy from a biomechanics background is that in elite sport, there are some factors that I'd expect all elite athletes to do for that particular activity. When there's lots of other things that are less important and are perhaps down to individual preference or coaching that don't really stop that elite level of performance from being achieved. By a mechanist, I'm trying to find what those factors are that are critical to elite performance. So, is there a formula for success? Well, that's a pretty challenging and far reaching question. I'm not going to necessarily promise to give you a magic formula by the end of the presentation, but it's tempting to think that the best athletes are the strongest. The length can mean lots of things and I'm just going to talk about it very generically here. But is that the case? If we looked at those elite performance in those different sports that I just showed you, are they the strongest? Or does technique have an important role to play alongside that? Then if we think around an individual perhaps yourself or others, can we work out what the limit is for an individual? What are their physiology and their technique? Would it be possible to establish that? Because if we could, that would be really useful information I could provide to a coach so that a coach doesn't try and coach someone to be something they can never achieve. And then is optimum in each sport the same? Or is it that someone's anthropometrics or their physiology or their ranges of motion or their basic technique? Does that change what optimum looks like? Again, something that, you know, do you coach athletes one way? Or is it far more individual than that? And the last question is, and I'll come back to this for the very end of the presentation, could you have been an elite athlete? What are the strategies that maybe some of you might recognise? So that's the background to what I'm going to try and cover. And then in terms of the examples I'm going to use, I'm going to start off with some experimental work we've done in cricket. We have a really strong relationship with the national cricket team here at Loughborough, who are based here from a science and medicine perspective. So things from a very different perspective, completely theoretically, using computers and simulations and seeing can we look at and understand limiting performances in gymnastics tumbling. And then I'm going to come back to Baminton the sport that I play as the third example. And I'm lucky enough to represent England as a veteran. And this was earlier in the year in January, just before the lockdown, where I was representing England in the annual match against Scotland. And I'm afraid on this occasion England managed to win. So sorry about that. So let's start off with cricket. Well, for those who aren't familiar with cricket, here's a video clip to start off with. So here at a national cricket performance center in Loughborough, the boulder runs up with a straight arm propels the ball as fast as they can within reason towards the stunts at the opposite end and tries to get the batsman out. But obviously this is training environment. So that's the activity. And there's a broad range and if you can bowl over 80 85 miles an hour, then you'd be very much faster as elite. There will be plenty of examples of people who aspire to do that, who just can't. So the questions I'm going to address from a fast bowling perspective are, if across a group, you know, a wide ranging group of bowlers. Are there some characteristics, some factors that the faster bowlers all do. And can I identify them and understand how that mechanically relates to performance. So the question which we didn't start off to answer but came out of the research we did was, do you need high forces to bowl fast because often elite performance of the limits of what you can do is associated with being on the edge of getting injured. Well, is there a relationship there from a high force perspective in this particular activity to bowling cricket. So this is my laboratory, if you like. So this is the National Cricket Performance Center at Loughborough, which I am lucky enough to be able to convert into a biomechanics laboratory from time to time. So this is one of our annual data collections where we set up all of our cameras. So we've got a complex motion analysis system which I'll show you how it works in a second. In the background where the bowlers going to run up and jump a bowl from to record the bowler performing. And we've been very fortunate over the years. Some of you might recognize these two bowlers on the screen. So these are two of the best fast bowlers ever arguably the best to, and they've been part of the data collection over the years. So we can see the reflective markers we stick on and we stick those on because we can track those really accurately. So we can track each of those markers as they're bowling to within a millimeter or two. And from that we can then understand what technique the bowler is using. So here's a bowler running up. And we record what they're doing very accurately with the system around them. What we see is those reflective markers that are stuck on the body. And you can see that looks like a bowling action, but it's a bit hard to identify each dot. And I'm sure many of you did dot the dots when you were a kid. Well this is 3d dot the dot. So it's a bit harder and my students enjoy sometimes doing this, but essentially identifying which each one each of those dots is where it was positioned on the body, because we know where the skeleton is relative to those. And so we can drop a skeleton onto those dots, and then we can then do the calculations and find out what's happening. Well, once we've got it in this computer environment, we can make it visually look a bit more like the environment, the real environment. So this time with the wickets, et cetera in one of the things that we provide back to the coaches is how is the technique of a bowler changing over time. So if they've been working on some sort of technique, we can look in detail to see if what they think they've been changing has actually been happening or not. So that's how we collect the data. And let's go back to the question. So the first question was what characterizes the fastest bowlers. So if we look at a range of fast bowlers and across a cohort of good fast bowlers we find that the ones who bowl faster run up quicker, which probably isn't too surprising. But that was a very simple first result. But we added to that and said well, if we compare a typical faster and slower bowler in that cohort, then the bowlers who bowl quicker look more like the one on the right. And this is what we've called delaying the bowling on hopefully you can see my mouse on the screen. And you can see that this arm is less far through, it's going to end up over here as they let go of the bull, whereas the slower ballers are further through the reaction as this front foot gets in contact with the ground. And this was an important attribute and timing. The third factor that came out in this cohort was that those that drive their trunk through more physical trunk flexion between front foot contact and ball release bowl faster. So we can see this line of the trunk, how far it's moved forward. And if they managed to bring their trunk through further before ball release, they're going to bowl faster. The last factor is a ball release. And this is what's happened to the front leg. There's a lot of force coming up through the body six to eight times body weight. And the bowlers who resist that, who having an appropriate geometry in their leg, don't collapse bowl quicker. Whereas this bowler here collapses, they lose some of that momentum and energy. So just these four factors were found to explain a lot of the variants in ball sleep. All of the factors size, shape, strength, etc. Well, how good were these four factors of predicting speed? So I'm going to plot a graph here, which is the actual bowling speed against the predicted one. And if this was perfect, then we'd get the line y equals x. In other words, these four factors would explain all of the variants in ball speed. Well, it was never going to be that good because we ignored lots of other things. But what we find is that we can explain three quarters of the variance, which is really powerful with ignoring all of the factors. And the interesting thing here is the bowl who bowl quickest in the study was a bit of an outlier compared to the rest of the group. And he was getting more out of his bowling action than our predicted variables would explain. He was one of the most powerful bowlers in the study as well. So it's thought that the reason he can bowl quicker than the rest of the group due to these factors is because of that different musculature. And bowlers or sorry coaches think about shapes, you know, they think, you know, what's that shape of bowling fast. And we found one variable was on its own was the most indicative of that in bowling. What was this shoulder angle. And so we see here in the bowler who was the quickest in the study, obviously we can see the straight leg driving the trunk through etc. But this big shoulder angle, driving the trunk through and leaving the arm behind them as they're letting go of the ball bowling to the right here was really indicative of bowling fast, whereas the bowler on the left who bold slower, you can see it's almost like he's trying to pull his arm through because this angle is smaller. Because if the angle is bigger, this was linked to pace. If we put that into a video. Again the same faster bowler on the right slower bowler on the left. And you can see some of the differences there. So we're starting to understand the mechanics and the techniques required to bowl fast. But is it inevitable. The second question that you need high forces to bowl fast. Well, here's a skeletal image of someone running up. This is the force plate in the ground measuring the force and got a big yellow arrow. Is the force rises up through the body. That wants more. This is around six to eight times the bowlers body weight. It can be potential problem from an injury perspective. Well, here I've plotted a typical force trace. So this is the force that yellow arrow that you've just seen, and they're split up into two directions. There's a vertical force acting up through the body and then a horizontal force if it's negative it's breaking. And so we've plotted that over time this is front foot contact when this foot first comes down in contact with the ground through to ball release which acts over here. And when we look at those force traces and there's a few key variables that we can pull out. The first is simply how big is the biggest force so in this case in the units of body weights, getting up to close to eight body weights. Then secondly, how quickly does that force rise, because if it rises more rapidly. The literature would say you're perhaps more likely to get injured. Then the third measure we often use is what's the sun Asian of the force over time, what's the overall amount of force that's been applied over a period of time, and that's the area under the ground. The other three measures we then looked at across a cohort of bowlers, some bowling quicker, some bowling slower. And here I've plotted two typical graphs, one from the right, typical faster bowler in the study, and one on the left, a typical slower bowler. And then we looked at those three variables, and quite surprisingly, we found that those that bowl faster. We had lower peak forces. Here we look we're up a close to eight body weights with a slower bowler here, faster bowler has a much lower closer to four body weights peak force. And then the load loading rates were also slower as well, or lower quicker bowler. Well there must be something that's bigger, and what was linked to pace was the overall amount of breaking force. Those bowlers who bowl faster and managed to break their forward momentum and convert that in our impart into ball speed. And that was the mechanism. So you didn't need a big peak force, you needed to be able to break, but over a prolonged period of time to then generate pace. So I come back to the title of the presentation. And with this example of cricket. Is there a formula for success. So here is a picture remember the faster bowl on the right or slower bowl on the left. Clearly technique, because that's really all we spoke about here is critical. And strength although it's important to remember this ball on the right, who was the fastest got more out of his bowling action. There's much more about his technique, and it is about his strength. So of these two variables technique is the clearly the more important variable. So onto my second example, which is completely different. And they're going to look at things from a theoretical perspective, rather than experimentally tumbling in gymnastics. In gymnastics, a double layout somersault is a pretty limiting movement in gymnastics. So they run up, and then they managed to do two somersaults in a layout straight position. Well, the question I wanted to ask here was, could they do any more than that. Is that the limit to what they could do, and within gymnastics, that's pretty much seen to be the limit. I'm ambitious, and instead of doing two somersaults, two and a half is no good they're going to land on their head. So, can they do a triple layout. Is that humanly possible. Well, I can't answer this question experimentally because I'm going to break a few gymnasts along the way, but could I answer this theoretically in a different way. And in doing so, how important or is it technique that has to change to allow someone to do a triple layout. Do they have to be super humanly strong. Or do they have to do something different perhaps in their approach and run up most faster or slower or something. So I wanted to answer this question not experimentally, but to answer it theoretically. And so that's what we did. So I built a computer model a simulation model of the final takeoff phase and tumbling. So here's a computer graphic of the person ready to do that tumbling never run up and the turn backwards in this flip flaps backwards. What's going to happen during this final takeoff phase. Well, this movement is relatively simple. So I don't need too many physical representation segments to represent the body. In fact, five is sufficient for this movement. And because of the left and right hand side of the body doing the same thing, I can average those two sides. So it makes it a bit easier for us to understand what's going on. So we've got five rigid segments represent what the body is doing. But at each of the joints, we've got muscles. And so include that as a torque generator at each joint because muscles produce a force that there's a moment arm at each joint and the force multiplied by the moment arm gives us a talk. So we represent that by a torque generator it each of the four joints in the model. And then they don't tumble on a concrete floor and drop their tumble on a tumble track or gymnastics floor, which is has some compression so we need to include that in the form of springs. So those are the features of the model that we need to include. Well at the moment that model represent anybody on this call, because mechanically, we're all basically the same. But what I need to be able to do is to now take this model and represent the individual athlete that we've just seen in the video. Well to do that, I need to calculate three sets of parameters. Firstly, I need to calculate the segmental inertia parameters. So that's the length of each segment how much masses it is, etc. And that's relatively straightforward to do. But more challenging is to measure and incorporate in the model how strong each joint is so that this gymnast isn't superman, it's limited to the strength of that gymnast. And to do that, what we do is we take the gymnast and here is the gymnast on a complex weights machine called an iso velocity diameter. And as the name suggests, iso velocity, it controls how quickly the gymnast can move their arms. So here we're measuring at the shoulder, and this is one end of the range of motion through to the other end of the range. And what the machine does is, as by controlling the velocity of the crank of the machine, we can calculate or measure the maximum torque this gymnast can exert. So the gymnast tries really, really hard. You can see in that top picture, they're grimacing as they pull really hard. And we measure the torque as a function of the angular velocity. And then we repeat this for different angle of losses. And that gives us a time history of maximum torque at the joint. What we can then do is to put that and fit it to a curve. So we can calculate the parameters which define how strong that gymnast is at that joint. And in doing so, it means that the simulation model represents that gymnast. So if I did it, the curve might be much lower, for example, or if a bodybuilder did it, this curve would be higher. The curve represents their strength. And then during the simulation, the model can use up to this value of torque as it changes a function of angular velocity, but no more. So at this point, I built a simulation model of be a built a computer game, if you like, that represents that elite athlete. Is it any good? Well, I've got some reference data. I've got the gymnast performing the double layout somersault. And that I'm going to show across the top here. I'm then going to ask the model with the constraints of the masses and the strengths, etc. Can the model start off and do what the gymnast did. Because if it can, I can then don't need the gymnast anymore. I can then run simulations with the model and see what would happen under different situations. Could they produce a triple layout? Well, here's the comparison. The actual performance across the top and the completely theoretical forward dynamics across the bottom. And as we can see, it looked very similar throughout. And there's just a few percent difference. But from a performance perspective, I can now use this to do some calculations. So I'm happy that the model works. I've done my due diligence and confident that the model is going to give me realistic simulations. So I can go to the model. I don't need the real performer anymore and said, perhaps your technique wasn't very good. Even though I've collected data on an elite gymnast who's trained for years and years optimizing their performance, perhaps the model can do better. So I'm going to keep the strength of the model and the approach characteristics the same. I don't do any better. Instead of doing two somersaults, the model does two somersaults. Well, this was really reassuring when I got this result, because if I'd managed to produce a lot more at this point, I probably wouldn't believe it because the athlete we collected the data on was an elite athlete, and therefore it would be very surprising if a simulation could do so much better. The model, which supported the evaluation, but it didn't help me get to a triple layer somersault. Well, the next thing I wanted to look at was strength. So this time, I made the model as strong as I thought was possible, or even beyond the limits of what was possible. So I made it 50% stronger at every joint, and that was easy. I programmed that very quickly. Whereas in reality, imagine how long that would take in the gym for an athlete who's already really well trained. It might be almost impossible. But if I do that, and if they ask the model, can you do any better? Instead of doing two somersaults, what could you achieve? And instead of two somersaults, oops, it does a little bit more, but this is clearly no good. Unfortunately, this is all a computer model, so I'm not going to have broken anyone, but it's not going to get me to a triple layer. So strength, in fact, what we find in tumbling is not the limiting factor at all. So we quickly move on. So I put the strength back to what it was back to 100%. And then started to think, well, in tumbling, which is different to gymnastics tumbling, they have a longer approach run, and the data I collected was on a gymnast. We've got a restricted run because they have to do the gymnastics movements on the floor. And we looked and said, well, realistically, we could increase approach speed or approach velocity by 50% up to 150%, and still be able to do the tumbling movement. So we put that in as an input condition, increase the velocity, but kept the strength back where it was, and then ask the model, how much more can you do? And this was the result. So instead of two somersaults, the model did three. But the gymnast had never done this. So the question was, well, and nobody done this in the world at this point. Was this possible? Was this realistic? So I went back and thought about it from my biomechanics point of view. Is this realistic? Or I could just produce something that's not possible. Well, if I think about elite performance in sport, yes, it's a high level, but it's also consistent. In other words, if I took a gymnast and asked them to do the same movement 10 times, within reason, they'd do it 10 times and they'd all be successful. As if I asked the computer model to do the same movement 10 times, it does it exactly the same to the machine accuracy that we've got. In other words, it's perfect. In fact, it's too perfect. And what we need, if it's going to be a solution in the computer environment that's realistic, is that it's an optimum solution that can cope with errors. It can cope with noise, because if we ask do anything 10 times, it's different every time, but each time it's successful. So what would happen if I took that triple layout somersault and perturbed it added in some variation, would it still manage to do a triple layout. So I did that, and I perturbed and here's just six examples. On the vertical axis here we've got the reduction in performance. And if this was a good solution for that triple layout, all of the bars horizontally will be very small. So just whatever perturbation I threw at the model, it wouldn't make much difference and we'd have a successful outcome. Let's look at this graphically. Instead of three somersaults. Back to just over two. So in other words that solution I found to be a triple layout wasn't realistic. Because if I added some perturbations couldn't achieve the triple layout. I wouldn't be able to explain why we can't do a triple layout. Or is it because I've not asked the computer to find the best solution. So in that first optimization what I'd done was I'd asked the computer to find the best solution in terms of rotation. I had asked it to find a solution that was like a human. And computers are silly or stupid they only do exactly what you asked them to do. I went back to the computer and said find a solution that is robust to noise. And when I did that and reoptimized, I then managed to reduce these bars so that across all the perturbations, I only had a small reduction in performance. Question was, was this a triple layout. So I do that. What do you know, I get back to the triple layout. Of course, I still have the question I've mathematically shown that this was realistic and achievable, but there was nobody doing this. So it left me in a bit of a dilemma. However, someone came to my rescue and sent me a video. Some are running up fast. Some are running up fast, and producing a triple layout. But only just. In fact, you'll see the land on their heads will move on before it gets ahead. But then more recently was this person. So a second example of someone now been able to do a triple layout. I got my theoretical prediction, completely theoretically, and now a couple of examples of people managing to achieve that. But it's very much at the limit of what's possible. Well, how have they done that. Clearly done that through having really good technique. And in this case for this movement running up fast while still been able to do the movement and strength really isn't a limitation here in many respects. So that's two of my examples. The third one, the sport that I play badminton. Well, there's lots of different movements in badminton, but the one that is perhaps the one that's most exciting is the jump smash. So here's some data to start off with in a jump smash. This is one of the best players in the country in England, performing a jump smash. If we look at their technique, and then compare it to another, this time a top singles player can see that techniques are a bit different. So of course, that asks and ends up wanting to answer questions. If we think about those two techniques, how close to optimal they could we find out. I asked the coaches or asked a range of coaches some might say one thing and some might say something different. Could they smash any faster. Just like the tennis serve we saw earlier, you know, if Andy Murray was able to serve faster, would he have won more grand slaps. And then why some people able to smash so much faster than others, even at the elite end of the game. Can we understand that and how could we possibly use that information. Well when we started this study there isn't so much funding in badminton so our first data collection in badminton was actually in my dining hall at Loughborough University I'm fortunate to have a big dining hall. I won an award and one of the halls of residence and when all the students aren't eating their tea, I'm able to set up a badminton court if I asked very nicely. So that was our starting point and we can see the markers on the body, just like for the experimental cricket study so this is going to be an experimental study here. And we tested a range of athletes from some that are very young so this was actually my youngest son having a go we all play badminton in the family. It's much better seeing his smash than mine. So this was quite a few years ago and he's turning into a nice little player now. But this was his smash through to this is at the all England championships a few years ago now and this is one of the top few players in the world. So again, we've got lots of really high quality data on the jump smash. Here's some other data we collected this time one of the top females in the country. This guy's got an Olympic medal. In fact, we also came up to the world championships in Glasgow so we were fortunate couple of years ago to come up to Glasgow. And here's one of the top Scottish players, Alex Dunn getting part getting getting involved in the study. So this is really slow motion video. But you can see for each of these players the techniques are very similar, but they're also a little bit different. Well, you should all be experts and what we see now. So what we see in the raw data is those dots. So we accurately understand what the player has done students then go through and join the dots up labeled. We can put a skeleton on top. So if we do that for a range of players and we've got states and probably over 100 now in badminton. What do we find out. Well, impact location and outcome the outcome of the smash. Well the first thing to say that badminton is the fastest racket sport in the world. And so the shuttle changes from going basically at zero kilometers an hour to if they're good 400 kilometers an hour in one millisecond. So that was pretty challenging, but we managed to do lots of equations and curve fitting to work out what was happening. So we're able to accurately work out where the shuttle is hit on the racket and what's happening afterwards. Nobody else have managed to do that. So if we took a range of subjects and just pick their fastest smash we collected about 40 on each player. Then this was the pitch map on the racket of where the shuttle may contact. If we added in those that were the top you know within 5% of the best we start to get a really nice picture of what's going on. And then I conclude a few more. So make that what we find is, they don't quite hit in the middle, which was a bit surprising. And what we find though is the pronation supination of the forearm influences where they hit on the racket. So that they actually hit slightly off center, because in that place, the racket is moving slightly quicker due to the pronation. It's only just a centimeter or so from the middle. We can see there the sort of the deviations for standard deviation perspective as they move further and further and where the data would. So that's our heat map on the racket in terms of speed. If we also do the same thing in terms of direction. Again, we see the darkest area is just almost one string from the middle if not one and a half or two. The effect of that on where the shuttle goes is quite substantial. So if we take those one two and three standard deviations in terms of impact location on the racket, we can see how far the shuttle will deviate before it lands. In other words, you'd have to be a brave person to go for the line and you often see that in racket sports, the player just misses. Well, that could just be down to a very small change in where the shuttle or the ball hit on the racket. What about this build up of speed? So how do we get to 400 kilometers an hour? Can we understand that? So let me see. There's a sequence and you'll see different parts of the body coloring as they get faster. So here's a typical jump smash and you'll see the first part of the body to really light up from here going forwards is the trunk. The trunk is being forced forwards. So the movement starts at the center. It then travels down the arm to make the racket go really fast. So we have a pick out those places. And so the importance of the trunk in terms of building the speed up through the arm is critical. In fact, what we find is that those that smash fast have something that we found in other sports as well if increased axle rotation, they're driving twisting their spine if you like to achieve the high speed, but also like in cricket, they have increased trunk flexion forwards relative to the others. So you can see between these two positions was a change in that lecture. Well, what else came out as important or one of the most important variables which you hear about in all racket sports is shoulder internal rotation. So I've plotted here for the cohort. So this is between the start of the movement and shuttle contact with the racket, and this is the internal rotation angle. The thick or the bold line is the average and this is the standard deviation across the whole data set. And we can see that they all follow a similar path in that there's some counter rotation of the shoulder so externally rotates and then it rapidly internally rotates up to contact. And on the right here I've just picked out the quickest and the slowest smashes in the study. And what we see here is that the quicker one has a much more rapid internal rotation at the end was the slower person tries to internally rotate and starts earlier, but can't get up to that same sort of speed. So it's much slower. So the technical difference between those that can smash faster and those that can smash slower is quite clear. Then the X factor. Again, we have the same sort of plot from the beginning through to contact the average and standard deviation. But if we focus here, we can see the person who smashes faster, manages to counter rotate their trunk much more before then recoiling. And this value is in clearly linked to pace. And the last one I will show you is in terms of racket acceleration. And so here again we've got the average and standard deviation, and we can see nothing really happens for most of the time. And the speed suddenly increases at the end, a very fast acceleration, the slope of this graph acceleration. And if we compare the fastest person and the slowest, just like with shoulder internal rotation, the slower person, or the person who's smashed slowest but still pretty fast in the study, started earlier, and had a much less deep curve. Whereas the person who was able to smash fastest left it much later, quite a substantial bit later, then had a massive acceleration to achieve a much higher racket head speed and therefore shuttle speed at the end. So we understand the technique behind what people can do. And what's not clear at this point is if could you take this person who smashes slower and through training and coaching, and let get them to here. And that's, you know, for another day. So, I've shown you lots of information on the smash there so I'm going to pose a question to the audience at this point. There's two sequences here from a study this is for with some data with some Malaysian elite players. The top sequence and the bottom sequence are in no particular order, the fastest and slowest smashers in the study. Which ones faster. I've told you what important now from a technique perspective do you think it's a, or do you think it's three. So make a mental note have a look, which do you think of these two people smash is faster. Because this could be the difference between being a world champion and not making the final or even just being elite but not really elite. And hopefully you finding it really difficult to tell. But if you've guessed, and you've guessed a, then give yourself a pat on the back because that is the quickest person in this study. The first in the study is at the bottom. And the thing that some, you know, coach is often look at this position here, which is the fourth, if you can see my mouse I don't know if you can but the fourth one in was the interesting bit all happens at the end. So if you look at this next to last image, you can see, just like think of the cricket where the arm was more there's a delay in the arm. The arm here, and the racket particularly is further back. In other words, there's a bigger range of motion that the rackets got to go on to get to the same sort of position of contact. And that's where the speed comes from. So, in summary, I've shown three studies. In all three technique has been critical. I've always been much less important now all of the athletes in the studies have been strong, of course they have. But at the elite end of sport, everybody's strong, but probably differences far more down to technique than it is to pure strength in terms of elite performance. So is there a formula for success. If I had to be a betting man, I'd be putting it down to technique far more strength. Hopefully what you've seen is the presentation that you can understand what the limit is for performance using computer modeling. We've not done that in a broad range of sports, but we've done it in tumbling cricket and a lot of other gymnastic skills. We can understand what does optimum look like. And what we find is that across a range of people that the optimum is similar. But it's subtly different, but it has that same characteristics, the same factors that are critical from person to person. And of course, you've got to now answer this question. Could you have been an elite athlete, just like some of these Scottish performers. This sort of work is not possible without a lot of support and help. And I'd like to acknowledge the following organizations and also all the staff and students that have helped me on this journey to understanding optimum performance in sport. And I hope you've enjoyed and made you think more about elite sport than previously. And thank you. We've got quite a few interesting questions in. And one of the very popular questions, Mark, is, do you think the fastballers would be equally talented at javelin and vice versa. And that's the question for Maureen Cunningham. But it's also been backed up by Leonard who's asking, and what's the technique for golf or fly fishing. So we're very versatile. Brilliant. So, absolutely, there is a very strong link between the technique using fast bowling and also that used in javelin. In fact, I can give you a real example of someone who came to Loughborough, who in the end stopped bowling fast because they had too much extension of their arm. They have to bowl with a straight arm for those who know cricket, whereas in javelin you don't have that same restriction. And they've now become an absolutely outstanding javelin thrower. So they transferred from one to the other. And when I used to sit down with the elite fast bowling coach at the ECB, he had a sequence bit like I've shown you here of the best javelin thrower in the world and said that's the perfect fast bowling action. So there is a very strong resemblance between javelin and fast bowling, absolutely. Now in terms of fly fishing and what was the other one, golf and golf. So the X factor that was originally first looked at in golf. So that movement, that twist of the torso to counter rotate the body and then to recoil has been very clearly linked to hitting the ball a long way in golf. And we found the same to be true in cricket batting and batting and golf are very similar, but it's also true it would appear in some of the overhead racket sports as well. And it's not unsurprising that, you know, the mechanics of these different sporting movements are linked. Essentially to generate pace, you know, you have to either be able to exert force very very quickly, or you have to be able to extend the time over which you can exert the force. So the reason that the X factor comes out as important in golf and batting and some of these overhead skills is you have a longer range of motion over which to exert force onto the object to make it go fast. Fly fishing, well, I actually go I'm a fisherman myself, you know, it's my downtime I go fishing, although I'd love to come up and try some fly fishing in Scotland, but yes, there's not so much of that round here. But it's the same sort of principle, you know, if you think about the put for those that the fishermen on the call that pulling back and leaving the line floating in the air gives you time to that range of movement over which to generate the speed it's a whiplash type movement. And that's how you crack a whip in the same way. So yeah they're all linked one way or another. Okay, on this similar theme, someone who doesn't give us the name is asking, did the jump smashers all use the same equipment and how much difference does the racket make. So that's a great question. And it does make a difference and we played around very early in the study with the one where I showed my son smashing the in my dining hall but with not with him but with other people at that part. So we tried them using a control racket, as well as their own, but it takes time to learn to use a particular racket. And so in more recent data collections we've asked them only to use their own racket, but we've also looked separately as to how much contribution does the racket make, because it does make a difference. If you're going to use the wrong racket or the strings aren't strung properly, then you're not going to perform as well. But it's of the order of left around five or 6% difference. In other words, it's not going to take someone like me who can't smash that fast unfortunately, and make them into a really super duper smasher. So you look at other sports so Nadal in tennis I'm pretty sure he increased the some put the weight in his racket head, because if the all else been equal if you could make the racket head move at the same speed that you have more mass or effective mass in the racket head, the resulting projectile will go quicker. So it does make a difference but it's it's fraction compared to the technique of the person. I'm probably going to move through these questions in the order in which they've been put in, or that they've been upvoted. I don't have quite a range of them and Dallas Carter has asked to potential athletes have to start training at an early age, and if so how early is any age to young is probably trying to avoid any encouragement for him to get out and do something. Well, there's certainly been a tendency in the last 10 or 15 years for people to become or put more pressure on youngsters and we've seen examples in tennis and other sports of, you know people very young becoming very, very good. The literature tends to and it's not my area specifically tends to say the opposite though, you know so having a broad base of activities, you know and doing lots of sports when you're younger is more beneficial that rather than professionalising and focusing on one sport when you're really young. To me, I think it's about not getting into too many really bad habits when you're young. In other words, then whatever sport you do at whatever age, you know you're always improving always practicing good things. And so having really good coaches in in schools and in sports at young age I think will help people achieve their potential, but you have to remember not everybody can be a world champion. And I think the danger at the moment in sport is, you know we see lots of people, you know, almost as young youngsters 1213 training for hours and hours and hours on a daily basis, they burn out. And you're almost setting them up to fail. And I think if you forget the enjoyment side of sport, you know people should primarily play sport to enjoy it, I believe. And then if they're any good great, and you know set them on a pathway to improve, etc. And, you know, what that requires, but don't put too much pressure on kids. I think there's too much and you see lots of kids so lots of people so I still play badminton and love playing now and then 49. There's very few people who I used to play with when I was 18 still playing. Most of, you know, you know, stopped in their early 20s. And there's a multitude of reasons why they did that. But sport is that to me is, you know, it's a lifelong thing, and not just about, you know, being the best some people will be the best and absolutely we should put them on the right pathway to achieve that, but we shouldn't be putting too much pressure on kids. Excellent. So there's hope for us all yet. Absolutely. Come and join me in the vets. Whatever your age. And Pat Monaghan asked, does your modeling of optimal performance include the risk of injury? It's a really good question. And injuries are challenging because they're multifactorial. So you could have the best technique in the world and the best conditioning in the world and play too much and get injured. So in other words, there isn't one factor, whereas, you know, in terms of performance, maybe there is one factor in some of these which is speed, whereas for an injury perspective it's multifactorial. Now, having said that some techniques are clearly more likely to result in injury than others. So if you look at the one I showed you here on the ground reaction force, if you've got eight or 10 body weights coming up through your leg, and you do that repeatedly, it's ending, it's not going to do the best, you know, good to your body. So whereas if there's an equivalent technique which allows you to achieve the same performance but with much less load on the lower limb, and you're more less likely to get injured. But if you weigh these two things up against each other, performance has to come first if you're wanting to be an elite athlete. You know, because otherwise you'll be in the pack, you'll never achieve that level of performance, but how much you can train and how much you can compete may vary, dependent on your technique. So you might think of having some athletes having some sort of, you know, they're really prone to injuries then you wrap them in cotton wool, but when they perform they perform to that high level. And you see that in cricket now where they've got the shorter format of the game called 2020 cricket. And there are some people who specialize in that because they can't play all day because their bodies let them down. But the modelling itself, I've got other examples I could have shown you saying tennis where we look to tennis elbow injuries and essentially where we stop is we look at what are the techniques that are linked to increased load and those are the ones that are more likely to be injured. Thank you. And it's just gone. Ian McLoone has a question asking, is the shape and size of the body not an important contributory factor, and could it be a limiting factor in achieving elite status? I think the answer is a simple answer is yes to the second part of that question. And quite early in some of my research we looked at what's the relationship between size and shape and technique and performance. And what you found is the same basic factors were important, but the timing and the particular, you know, individuality was made that the techniques were slightly different. Now there'll be some activities like running where your total body mass is important. You know, if you're, if you can do the same but with 10% lighter, you'll, you'll clearly, you know, run faster. In other sports, it's not so important. So in terms of limiting performance, the sort of activities I've looked at, I don't think it limits, you know, where if it's a one off movement, if it's more endurance based and I think it has more of an effect. But technique person to person definitely changes, but it's based around the same theme and factors I've shown are important. We have a couple of questions about the triple tumblers. Do you have any information about how they develop the techniques? This is from an anonymous attendee. And do you know if they were aware of your results? And then Neil Monaghan is asking, well he's saying the triple jump is a more complicated jump than the long jump. Does that mean that your kind of analysis could do more to improve triple jump performance down to the long jump? Okay, so I think there are two questions in there. We've got ones to do with the tumbling and the triple layout, and then we've got ones to do with the triple jump. So if I think of triple jumping and long jumping, the question is quite right to say that the triple jump is a much more challenging activity than long jump. And, you know, because you've got to almost do three jumps in one in the triple jump, whereas in long jump you just do one take off. You know, quite a number of years ago Jonathan Edwards, who was the video clip that started the presentation off with, said that the reason he didn't jump over 18 meters more often was because it was really difficult to get the technique right. And there's something that, you know, a colleague of mine at Loughborough did a model of triple jumping, which I haven't shown here. The attempt explained how Jonathan Edwards managed to jump over 18 meters in essence, and it's to do with how you use your arms. So at each of the take offs, you have a double arm shift, which is unnatural because it breaks the left right and natural running motion. So both arms are doing the same thing. Whereas if you think of when you run, when you run, one arm goes forward, the other arm goes back, bit like your legs. But to achieve optimum performance in triple jump requires both arms to do the same thing during each of those take offs. So it's technically very difficult. But if you get it right, you can achieve that much more. So that's the mechanism behind triple jumping. But interestingly long jumpers surprised my where, although it's not something I've looked at a lot recently, don't do the double arm shift. And I think that's because in long jumping run up speed is so much more important, because if you have to change your arm position to achieve the double arm shift, then I think it means you can't run up quite as quick. And in that sort of performance, the run up speed is so important. So they're running up in it well in excess of 10 meters per second. And then back to the the tumbling the tumbling is interesting. So that work was part of my PhD. So it's quite dated now. And by the time I'd got the results, the gymnast who was this, the subject in my study had retired. So there was no opportunity to, to, in fact, I got critiqued at that at a conference many, many years ago and said, Well, did you apply it did they then do a triple lay out and I said, I'd love that to happen. But of course, it just wasn't possible. But it was very nice to see that, you know, there are a couple of examples of people now doing that movement, which at the time nobody was and it's, it shows you how we and we've used it in multiple sports now we can start to understand the limits of human performance. The other problem not problem but observation there is that sort of work is really costly. So we don't do, you know, work with athletes on a database today basis with that because even with the athletes we have done it takes a two to three months turnaround to take the data on an athlete make a model, and then get the results back to them. There's far more being used in understanding movements in sport, although we have done it with real athletes in cricket and helped improve their performance. So I didn't show you here but we've gone for a couple of years now, models of cricketers bowling, and then the coaches use that information in their coaching to help them improve their performance. All right, thank you. And I think I know the difference now between a jump and a tumble. Right now Rosamund Carmichael is saying you didn't touch on the psychological components of success and the reaction to stress and she'd be interested to hear In sport, this is critical. And it's a completely different discipline to buy mechanics. And, but it's, it's, it's in, you know, at the top end they often say it's the psychology that makes the difference and mentally strong and resilient etc etc. And, you know, I've got wonderful colleagues at Loughborough specializing in this. What I'm looking at here is what they can achieve under ideal conditions. Like that. Now, the modeling touches on the psychology a tiny bit in that when I looked at being robust to perturbations. What you'd expect under a stressful environment is that, you know, more errors or other things would come into your technique and have you got a technique there that can cope with those perturbations. It only touches the surface. So in essence, in most of my work, I'm assuming things are optimal. In other words, when I asked my model to improve technique. I'm not restricting it based on psychological influence. But it is clearly a very important part of sport at the top end. But yeah, it's outside of the boundaries of what I do. Someone else who's not giving us the name but saying most most people who take part in sport are not elite athletes. Do your studies have anything to offer to the club player who's keen to improve. I say so because I'm showing you what's important generally in sport. So if, you know, you know, I'm in some respects, you know, I play, you know, a club level of badminton, you know, it's a youngsters age versus now an elite level at the veterans. And, you know, if I look at the people around me, they all would like to smash a bit faster. I don't smash anywhere near as fast as the elite doesn't matter, but the sort of understanding that I can gain from the elite can help people at any level, one would argue, be it in cricket or badminton or tennis or any sport. So understanding what's important and then help them. And part of the work we're doing at Loughborough now is to say, how can we take what we've done with elite and we've looked at elite athletes in many sports. How can we use that knowledge and get it out there to a much broader population base, because everybody would like to be a bit better. I'm sure those on the golf course tomorrow morning would love to be able to hit the ball just that little bit further, or a bit more consistently, and are tweaking with things all the time. You know, as they, as they try and learn things, and the understanding that we can gain from biomechanics can help with all of that. An interesting question in again from Leonard, asking about the effect of drugs on illegal or legal, I think they're all illegal in sport. Does your analysis take any cognisance of that? Not directly. I've never knowingly done any work with people who've been taking drugs. But what I can show is, you know, it's interesting the drugs because often the drugs is going to influence the strength. But it also influences from a recovery perspective is my understanding, so that if you are taking performance enhancing drugs, you're able to train harder and more frequently, which might mean you can improve your technique more. Or does it improve your strength? So I think that the simple answer is no. But if someone produced performances that were had impossible strength characteristics, then in theory, I would be able to show that that was beyond human limits in some way shape or form, but not directly. And Colin Miller is asking with similar elite athletes do different anaerobic thresholds significantly affect their performance. So, you know, this is more from a physiology perspective so anaerobic threshold is sort of the level of performance you can achieve say if you're doing a 1500 meter race. And what's the level of technique and performance that you can maintain without tipping over the edge. Yes, it's, it's, there's an interaction between physiology and biomechanics here. So it's not an area that I focus in because the sort of sports I'm looking at are looking at these one off performances where an anaerobic threshold doesn't matter, because there's time to recover. If you pull back and some of my colleagues will look at say, middle distance running, that's the simple example of cycling, and there's a link between how much power or muscular force you can exert before you tip over the edge and get into that anaerobic zone. So, there is a link there between optimal running technique, for example, that link then back to your anaerobic threshold, but it's not something that I directly look at. And Alison's asking something along similar lines, is there a point at which the physiology of an individual will limit their progression to elite students. The simple answer is yes. And I think what's interesting from my perspective is to try and understand what the limit is for performance of the individual in front of me. And that's something we can do by understanding what their physical capability is alongside, you know, what optimum technique looks like them, so that a coach doesn't try to do, get someone to do something they'll never achieve. You know, so they might try and try and try and try to coach them to throw the ball further, but if they're at their physiological limit. Then they're never going to be any better. And that's, you know, you're asking them to do the impossible. I don't think where we are at the moment can well define that. Currently, but that's what we're trying to get is one of the next steps on the journey for us in understanding techniques to say, can we understand the talent and potential of the individual, and at what age. So if you took someone to say Chris Hoyt, and if you looked at him at age 10, could you have predicted he would have achieved the success he had, possibly not at this point. But could you in the future, maybe. Or someone else who's not given us the name is saying when using reflective dots, as you do, what portion of the bowlers body action do you miss, for example, with knowledge of how their feet or toes, perhaps, not anything useful. So we what we so there is a limit to what we can glean from the current motion analysis and sometimes we need to use different techniques. So some of my colleagues in sports tech, for example, we use a speckle effect on trainers to then plot the stresses and strains through the feet for different trainers, because different people need different shoes, you know if they're going to support their body appropriately. But at the level that I look at which is at the whole body, this sort of marker set which gives the main features of each of the key segments in the body tends to be good enough. But sometimes, for example, if I'm wanting to think how important the fingers in a particular set was dart throwing one of my colleagues love starts. And so there they would stick markers on each finger separate to try and understand that. So it's, there's a generic starting point which understands how the whole body moves. But then sometimes we need to go beyond that to look at specific areas. So one of my colleagues in cricket, for example, has a much more complex marker set on the lower back, because one of the injury issues is stress fractures to the lower back, and how those individual movements in the lower back move relative to each other is really important. So he has a more complex marker set that's built on top of the standard one that we use. Now I can't just say the question but somebody was asking about instrumentation in shoes, and shoes are an important factor. They are, whether they limit performance is interesting and you know there's, you'll have seen one of the key manufacturers out there introduced in the last year, some different sort of running shoes and then the one guy broke the two hour marathon barrier, and in part that was possibly down to a, you know, a carbon insert in his shoes is my understanding which returned more of the energy. So, in some respects trainers and shoes can make a difference, but in most cases in the sort of activities that I'm looking at then I don't think they do. But instrumentation, be it in clothing or be it in shoes is becoming more and more useful in day to day sport now at the elite level. So you'll see a catapult type unit, you know in the rugby if you watch the rugby all the players and the referees have this unit between their shoulder blades at the top of their back tracking their movements so they get more accurate performance analysis data on, you know, how they performed within the game. And also then starting to have some real time information, you know can they spot when a player's getting too fatigued and they need to replace them and have a sub, for example. So instrumentation within real life performance is getting more accessible than it certainly was 10 years ago. And then the challenge of course is how to use that information to the best effect. There'll be so many questions on this. There are lots and lots. And Allison is asking in multidisciplinary discipline sports, how do the various techniques for each event affect each other. So that's such as in a triathlon or something. It's another great question and I think what you see there is that if you compared any of the one individual, say you took triathlon and you took, say the swim or the cycle or the run separately and compared them to the very best athletes in those individual sports, the triathlete wouldn't compete, you know, in most cases maybe they would in one of the events out of the three. And what you're seeing there is that difference between specializing in one versus, you know, having to spread across multiple. Now maybe that means that they couldn't have achieved more in any one. I don't know. It's just because of the challenges of having to train across a multitude of sports. So in, you know, if you looked at a tassel or not a tassel on, you know, you'll often see that the athletes, you know, sometimes they try and compete saying the long jump in the main event and then they'll also then do the tassel, but they're unlikely to be able to compete at the very best level in all of the different events. And some of that will be down to the training. There will be a bench and cricket and someone is saying, does your research have any lessons regarding tactics, the team sports. It's probably not something that I think too much about in my day to day in terms of tactics and team sports. So the simple answer is probably no to that one. But maybe it's something I'll reflect on. And on a similar theme, does modifying technique help amateurs more than elite professionals. And the questioner is saying, does changing an elite athletes motion risk reducing performance. So the answer to the second questioner is yes. There was a period in biomechanics and working with sport where there was a temptation to you must change something to improve. And I think more recently, people are far more hesitant to change where biomechanics is most useful is building up really good robust techniques in the young athletes who's coming through. So that when they reach the top end, they've got that good technique that that good foundation and base and athletes then find their own way to their own optimum, I think at the very top end. Whereas, you know, there are examples in sport and in movement for example in golf they changed his golf swing, because he had some injuries I don't know the specifics. He wasn't the same player. He never performed quite so as well. So where I think we are in sport now is, if we understand the injury risk of an elite athlete, then we can manage their workload and maybe get make sure they're strong enough to cope with the the rigors of the sport, without affecting their performance. Because performance is the critical thing that's their point of difference. And it maybe we have to manage injuries and manage workload and keep them conditioned appropriately to achieve that high level of performance. Right, just two more questions for you, Mark. Okay, Rosamund Carmichael is asking how important is height in different sport. So, you know, it was interesting a few years ago I went to a pre Olympic conference in China. And we went round one of their local training at high performance centers and you walked into the gymnastics hall, and all the gymnasts were very small, very, very short for one to bed is great. And then we went into the basketball hall, and they were all seven foot whatever. And, you know, different sports have different requirements quite clearly. And mechanically, if you're shorter and you're you can rotate and spin much quicker. And therefore that's why divers and gymnasts, etc, tend to be smaller. Whereas if, you know, you're a basketball player or other sport, height is more important. And so there is certainly you can talent ID based on size and shape and some countries do that. So they'll look at you and say, well, you're more likely to be good at this sport than that. And there's some truth in that. And from a single turn is asking, are elite athletes born, not made. The million dollar question. I think it depends. And I think there is, but I think what most people don't realize is that elite athletes train really, really hard. And there's, there's some, you know, thoughts out there that, you know, they don't train hard, but look at Stephen Hendry in snooker, you know, or whatever. They've practiced and practiced and practice. They may have had some good natural abilities, but at the elite end of sport now, they train really, really hard as well. Right, well, thank you. And with apologies to anyone whose question wasn't included. I think you've answered on a great range of topics, both directly within your field and some slightly out with it. So that was excellent in my view. And I hope I rode and share that. So thank you ever so much, Mark, for, well, certainly broadening my interest in sport, and hopefully adding to what everyone else knew.