The Science of Training
Did you know that there is relatively little scientific work examining how to write a winning training programme? For me this is particularly ironic, as I was initially motivated to study sports science in order to learn how devise more scientific and therefore effective training programmes. Instead I learnt that good coaching and the design of successful training programmes is currently as much an art as a science.
The good news is that there is now far more opportunity to bring a scientific basis to the training process than when I first started out in sports science more than 20 years ago. The capacity to gather detailed information on the nature of athletes’ training and their responses to it has increased to such an extent that they are now overwhelmed with data. The challenge now is not to gather useful training data, but working out how to make sense of it. This is a challenge that I have wrestled with both as an applied sports scientist working with the UK's best cyclists at British Cycling and now on a more theoretical basis with my academic colleagues here at the University of Kent.
Importantly there are more reasons to conduct training-related research than 20 years ago when I first started in sports science. No, I’m not referring to the chance to find a winning edge for GB athletes preparing for the London Olympic Games. Studying the training process need not only be an exercise in helping elite athletes to perform at an even higher level, but it could enable anyone who exercises to get more from his or her endeavour. About ⅓ of the UK’s 50 million adult population complete sufficient exercise to meet the Chief Medical Officer’s minimum recommendation of 5 x 30 minutes per week. For these people alone that’s over 37 million hours of exercise a week. Imagine the impact of being able to “fine tune” even a small percentage of all that effort. Further most experts agree that physical inactivity is a causal factor in some of the UK’s most common diseases, so the benefits for the two-thirds of the population who are currently under-active could be even greater.
A few months ago I was at a presentation given by the outgoing head of the medical research council. He was giving a talk about the needs from research for the UK's medicine in the future. One of the challenges he identified was learning how making sense of all the medical data that is now available. It seems that athletes are not the only ones overwhelmed with data. Indeed the challenge of making sense of training data has parallels with many apparently unrelated scientific and commercial activities. Twenty first century sports science in its many guises has the potential to have an impact well beyond the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
