Meet the scientists!

I was born in Portsmouth in 1977, weighing in at a hefty 4 lb 4 oz (that’s about 2 kg). I have a twin sister born 8 minutes after me and she has been trying to beat me at everything else since. I grew up in Fareham and then went to university in Eastbourne (which is where the University of Brighton run their sports-related courses). I left there with a PhD.

My PhD looked at how the body responds to “warm up” exercise. To do this, I measured how the body takes up oxygen breath-by-breath and found that one of the effects of warm up is to increase the amount of oxygen the body can use. I also discovered that this is because the body gets more muscles working after a warm up than it did before.

Since my PhD I have studied a thing called “critical power”. Critical power explains why running slowly is easy and running fast is hard. We can also measure how the muscles become fatigued when you exercise hard, by stimulating the muscles with electricity and measuring what is inside the muscles before, during, and after exercise.

To help keep in touch with other scientists, I belong to the Physiological Society, the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences and the American College of Sports Medicine. I also do a lot of what scientists call “peer review” where I read papers and decide whether they are good enough to be published. I am on the Editorial Board of two journals: the Journal of Applied Physiology, and Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.

I’d like to develop a mobile phone application to introduce people to science because to my knowledge this has never been tried before. The idea would be to have an App that could be used by somebody actually doing sport as well as a spectator at an event or watching at home. Apps are really only limited by your imagination, so this app could really develop in any way we like, but here is an example of what it would do:

When you download the app, the first option you will have is to choose a sport. Let’s say you chose “running”. This would then lead to a number of other options, such as “world records”, “My running”, “Running for health” and “Pacing strategy”. Under “World records”, you could choose an event (say, the 100 m), and it would give you information on the current world records for men and women. Here there would also be an option to “Dig deeper”. This is the key to the scientific part of the app. Under this option, if you had chosen the 100 m, there would be information on the physiology, psychology and biomechanics of the 100 m, which would be pitched at the level you want to understand it at (e.g., GCSE level, A-Level and degree-level). The other options include “My running”, in which you would enter all of your personal best times and the app would predict scientific parameters from this (for example, you could predict your maximal oxygen uptake, maximal sustained pace and your “anaerobic capacity” from these measures (and the app would also explain why these predictions are scientifically limited!) – the app would also explain what all of these things mean. The “running for health” option would explain how regular exercise can be used to maintain health, and could include a pedometer/step counter function using the phone’s GPS and accelerometers (if it has them). Finally, the “pacing strategy” option would allow you to input your fitness parameters from “My running” and predict how fast to run a given even (such as the 800 m). It could even do this in real time, so if you run the first lap slowly it could predict how fat you should be able to run the next lap and, as always, it will explain the physiological reasons for this prediction with the “dig deeper” option.

As I asid in the beginning, there really is no limit to what this app could do. The money will therefore be used to build a Beta-version of this application with help from our computer science department in Aberystwyth, to be presented as part of a future “I’m a Scientist…” event. After this, a fully-developed version will be released globally.