How can you achieve these targets in sport: "Faster, Higher, Stronger"?

Very often people in this part of the world wonder why some developed countries do very well in Olympics and other International sporting competitions and get the maximum number of medals/cups. There is a secret here. If you don't know it yet, we are going to unravel it for you in big letters:

SPORT SCIENCE!

Yes, it can take you to great levels of Citius, Altius, Fortius.

Sport science is a discipline that studies how the healthy human body works during exercise, and how sport and physical activity promote health from cellular to whole body perspectives. The study of sports science traditionally incorporates areas of physiology (exercise physiology), psychology (sport psychology), anatomy, biomechanics,biochemistry and biokinetics. Additionally it also deals with injuries and other medical issues like mechamisms of performance, pathology. adaptation, aging and exercises, blood and drug tests, hormones (Endocrine System), illness, acclimatization to various environmental conditions during high altitude sports, heat acclimatization, jet lags ( as sport persons have to travel all over the world), excercise induced injuries, metabolic conditions, drug abuse and doping, drug and supplement use and their side effects, nurtritional aspects of sports persons, heart conditions and sudden deaths in the field and several other things associated with sports.

It enlightens on how better tracks or equipment can help people in the sports arena.

If you want to run or swim faster, it helps you how to do it without injuring yourself. What type of boots can take the pressure out of your leg joints while you are doing your best in the arena (trust the research that comes out of un-attached research institutes instead of the ones that out of commercial establishments). What running technique suits you and the track! How can you overcome the wind force and moisture (in the atmosphere) and water drag in a pool. What type of clothes you should wear to beat these forces of obstruction. How should your feet land while running or jumping.

How to boost your stamina and fitness. Why fatigue happens and what limits one's performance.

This limitless field of sport science can take you to several unknown lands and makes you wonder why we are not using it to its full potential to give tough competition to the best performers in the world!

There is some idea in the public domain - that you slow down because you run out of oxygen, you become anaerobic, lactate forms and “poisons” the muscles, or you get too hot and your brain says “stop!” The good old books explain how muscle becomes fatigued as a result of these chemicals that build up, caused by a lack of oxygen delivery as you get closer to the VO2max (the maximum or optimum rate at which the heart, lungs, and muscles can effectively use oxygen during exercise, used as a way of measuring a person's individual aerobic capacity), where you can’t use any more oxygen.

But how can you speed up in the last leg of running despite all these adversities? When you are supposed to run quite a lot faster than your “anaerobic threshhold”, which is always defined as the speed/intensity above which you start to accumulate lactate to beat others?. One thing we do know, is that in a 10km race, with 1km to go, there’s a lot of lactate in the system! Similarly, you can be pretty much guaranteed that with 1km to run, the calcium channels are at their most leaky, the phosphate and H+ ions are at their peak, and the body temperature is at its highest and your muscles are becoming weaker and weaker because of chemicals like lactate, or a lack of oxygen! Then how to go through the opposite when you have to get slower according to Nature rules?

According to a new theory which is called “Anticipatory Regulation” by its proponents ...

During exercise, the brain regulates performance to balance all the body’s physiological systems
Fatigue (or the slowing down in pace) is the result of this regulation, which happens BEFORE any physiological “failure” can occur
Therefore, rather than slowing down AS A RESULT of lack of oxygen, high body temperatures, high lactate levels etc., you slow down IN ORDER TO PREVENT THEM.
Performance and fatigue are regulated to prevent the potentially harmful limits from being reached. These “limits” to exercise are real. If your body temperature is above 41 degrees, you’d stop and be in serious trouble. If you did accumulate too much hydrogen, it would be bad news. But when exercise takes place, they don’t happen because the brain is in control, and it regulates the body specifically to protect against that damage. At the same time, it’s trying to balance protection with your own desire to perform as well as you can, and that produces a constant balance between two potentially conflicting goals.

In this theory, then, you get what is called a “pacing strategy,” which is the output by the muscles, as part of this regulation. Performance is regulated, not determined, by the physiology.

And years of practice and exercise makes this possible!

Oxygen provides energy for most living objects. In the atmosphere, oxygen is 20.95% of the air we breathe at sea level. Normally the athletes are breathing 20.95% oxygen, 78.09% nitrogen and about 1% other gases like CO2 and argon. If the athlete works out at high altitude, he will face a different situation. Because the density of the air is thinner and the volume of oxygen available to the lungs is less. In time the lungs adjust to thinner air. This may be the reason the U.S. Olympic Training Center is located in Colorado Springs, CO. Where the volume of oxygen is less than found at sea level. Training in Colorado Springs conditions a person's lungs to function normally with less oxygen. Living at altitude boosts red blood cell concentrations, allowing them to supply oxygen to muscles at higher-than-normal rates. As a consequence, VO2max should improve, enabling athletes to perform better – and for longer. Viewed in this way, altitude training is a legal form of ‘blood doping’. Although altitude training is positive , it also has negative impact! The problem is that while altitude chips in a few more red corpuscles, it also chips away at overall fitness because of the lower quality of training which is carried out at elevation. This viewpoint is also a reasonable one: scientific research has shown that when athletes journey to altitude, the quality of their workouts usually declines significantly, unless they are 100m sprinters involved in nothing more than short-duration highly intense training.

Conversely, if training or competing at sea level, one can breathe a higher volume of oxygen to increase performance.

One trick some of the athletes employ is - increase their blood oxygen level before they compete. For example, if they bring their oxygen level up to 99 or 100 percent they will have more time before they need to stop and rest. Pre-exercise oxygen has been studied in athletes like 800m sprinters, 200m swimmers and weight lifters, and generally the results have been positive. That is, breathing in pure oxygen before the start of a high-power exertion seemed to shorten the time required to cover a fixed distance or lift a set number of weights. But athletes cannot take oxygen tanks to their start lines. In the studies where oxygen boosted performance, the athletes involved knew that they were breathing in pure oxygen, and thus a powerful placebo effect may have enlivened their performances. No ‘double-blind’ research has ever linked pure oxygen breathing and heightened performance in a convincing way. The one time when breathing in extra amounts of oxygen can be very helpful is during exercise.

Yes, using natural oxygen levels in the atmosphere by your body to the optimum levels can be helpful. Special exercise makes this possible. The issue isn’t how much oxygen we bring in. It’s how much we utilize. Bringing in more oxygen isn’t actually adding to our ability to utilize the oxygen we do have, according to experts. There’s no real justifiable physiological reason for doing it.

So the best way to improve one's performance is to focus on one's training, nutrition and recovery. The large majority of benefits and the ability to compete at high levels are going to come from your daily training regimen. This is the bottom line, according to recent research in science!

Energy drinks normally contain high levels of caffeine, sugar and other chemicals that provide energy. Not considering the negative aspects of their ingredients, it is proven that oxygen provides 80 percent of the energy required by the body and only 10 percent of one's energy comes from what they consume.

All this knowledge can help a sports person if s/he is trained and assisted by experts in a right and legal way.

However, Some sport persons use extreme games of biology and indulge in illegal methods. Fake abilities can be obtained by Blood Doping. It refers to a handful of techniques used to increase an individual's oxygen-carrying red blood cells, and in turn, improve athletic performance.

Three widely used types of blood doping are: blood transfusions, injections of erythropoietin (EPO), injections of synthetic oxygen carriers.

Illicit blood transfusions are used by athletes to boost performance. There are two ways to do this:

Autologous transfusion. This involves a transfusion of the athlete's own blood, which is drawn and then stored for future use.

Homologous transfusion. In this type of transfusion, athletes use the blood of someone else with the same blood type.

The most commonly used types of blood doping include injections of erythropoietin (EPO), injections with synthetic chemicals that can carry oxygen, and blood transfusions, all of which are prohibited under the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) List of Prohibited Substances and Methods. EPO is produced naturally by the body. The hormone gets released by the kidneys and causes the body's bone marrow to pump out red blood cells. Red blood cells shuttle oxygen through a person's blood, so any boost in their numbers can improve the amount of oxygen the blood can carry to the body's muscles. Then end result is more endurance.

Blood transfusions involve drawing out your own blood and storing it for a few months while your body replenishes its red blood-cell supplies. Then, before the competition, the athlete would re-inject the blood back into his or her body. The outcome is similar to that of EPO — a bump in red blood cells. WADA suggests there has been a resurgence of blood transfusions with the introduction of an EPO-detection method in 2000. For athletes, the extra bump can mean the difference between a gold and silver, or whether or not you break a world record. It is clearly enough to give you a substantial edge in international competitions if you are an elite athlete.

Microorganisms have been developed to produce human recombinant EPO, which appears very similar to the body's natural EPO. In low quantities it is good enough to enhance the performance but becomes difficult to detect! Some of these compounds have short-acting periods of time in the body, but the biological effects, the positive effects on performance, can be weeks or months.

Synthetic oxygen carriers. These are chemicals that have the ability to carry oxygen. Two examples are: HBOCs (hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers), PFCs (perfluorocarbons).

Synthetic oxygen carriers have a legitimate medical use as emergency therapy. It is used when a patient needs a blood transfusion but when human blood is not available, there is a high risk of blood infection and there isn't enough time to find the proper match of blood type.

Athletes use synthetic oxygen carriers to achieve the same performance-enhancing effects of other types of blood doping: increased oxygen in the blood that helps fuel muscles.

So for every unusual performance, there might be a reason of misuse of science.

But serious health hazards await sports persons using these performance enhancers. They get addicted to it without which they think they cannot perform. The blood count gets too high, the blood gets too thick, and it becomes hard for the heart to push the blood around the body or that somehow this high blood count contributes to somebody having a stroke or a blood clot. 

Testosterone, an anabolic steroid, is another popular drug for abuse (3). Anabolic steroids may block the effects of hormones such as cortisol involved in tissue breakdown during and after exercise. This would speed recovery. Cortisol and related hormones, secreted by the adrenal cortex, also has receptor sites within skeletal muscle cells. Cortisol causes protein breakdown and is secreted during exercise to enhance the use of proteins for fuel and to suppress inflammation that accompanies tissue injury. The real effect of anabolic steroids is the creation of a "psychosomatic state" characterized by sensations of well being, euphoria, increased aggressiveness and tolerance to stress, allowing the athlete to train harder. Such a psychosomatic state would be more beneficial to experienced weight lifters who have developed the motor skills to exert maximal force during strength training. Diets high in protein and calories may also be important in maximizing the effectiveness of anabolic steroids.

But users livers get effected adversely. They might also suffer from anemia, renal insufficiency, impotence, dysfunction of the pituitary gland, hyper tension, bleeding, hepatocellular carcinoma ( cancer of liver), compromised immune system and loss of hair (4).

Other abused biological molecules include synthetic versions of human growth hormone and luteinizing hormone, which is involved in testosterone production. These hormones present challenges in detection to antidoping researchers.

But science is catching up with bad science users. Most of the methods for detecting these doping agents rely on biochemistry, chromatography and mass spectrometry.

Genetic manipulations: Gene doping is certainly attractive to manipulate muscle, blood and pain-perception systems – anything that enhances the ability to train and to deliver blood to exercising tissues and to increase endurance or explosive muscle function. If an athlete were ever to be in a position to add an extra gene of EPO or growth factor, they can gain a significant advantage. And although it isn’t yet reality it is definitely on the radar of WADA and science is racing ahead of cheating athletes in this regard. There have been some high-profile instances of very prominent athletic trainers making attempts to obtain genetic tools, like the viral vectors that express transgenes. There is a case of a German trainer, Thomas Springsteen, who was arrested and brought to trial in 2006 for making attempts to obtain Repoxygen, a drug that was in preclinical trials to put an erythropoietin gene into patients suffering from bone marrow failure from chronic kidney disease or cancer.

Since the late 1990s, researchers have shown that, by inserting genes into mice and other animals, they can swell the animals' muscle mass, help cells repair themselves faster and boost the production of oxygen-toting red blood cells. The genes can be injected directly into the muscles of the target animal or slipped into the animal's own DNA by means of viruses. Gene therapy is called “gene doping” when it is used for enhancement rather than treatment.

Gene therapy  when used can have very serious health risks, such as toxicity, inflammation, and cancer. Moreover, the athlete's immune system would need to be suppressed, so the body doesn't try to fight off what it identifies as a virus. It's a dangerous process that will take a long time to perfect.

WADA researchers have some interesting concepts in the works, such as looking for the molecular signatures of doping. “When an athlete dopes with a substance or a cocktail of substances, she or he is looking for a physiological impact. It’s to enhance transfer of oxygen, muscle mass and other different physiological capabilities. These create an imbalance in the body’s homeostasis that they believe will be reflected at different -omics levels. A challenge researchers are facing is distinguishing between signatures caused by physical exertion, which elite athletes do intensely, and those signatures caused by doping (1).

New research suggests that a small, constrictive band that wraps around an athlete's arms or legs may lead the next wave ofperformance-enhancing fads in competitive sports.

A study published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise (5) demonstrated that highly trained swimmers that used a blood pressure cuff to restrict blood flow to their arms a few minutes before maximum-effort time trials improved their performance in a 100-metre race by 0.7 seconds. The study team was led by Greg Wells and Andrew Redington at the University of Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children.

So, in just a few minutes' time and with minimal effort, athletes were able to significantly boost their performance, making gains that -- according to the authors -- would normally take an average of two years of intense training to accomplish. It was earlier found that ischemic preconditioning to protect the cardiac muscle during a heart attack made less damage to hearts and recovery periods small. This technique is being used to protect different types of muscle tissue from the stress and damage that occurs during another type of ischemic event, like exercise. The researchers found that the subjects performed better when they underwent ischemic preconditioning before the exercise trial, touting gains in both maximum power (1.6 percent) and peak oxygen consumption (3 percent). All of the researchers investigating ischemic preconditioning seem to agree that temporarily reducing the blood flow to a tissue causes protective molecules to be released into the bloodstream. Ischemic preconditioning may cause vessels to dilate once blood starts flowing again, increasing nutrient and oxygen delivery to the formerly deprived tissue. Scientists think altered metabolism of mitochondria -- the energy powerhouses of muscle cells -- may contribute to more energy available for exercise.

Fitter, Faster, Higher and Stronger

Are you a medal monger?

Aim to be a dream competitor?

In pursuit of  right honour?

Want to be in the field longer?

Science can assist you with all the knowledge it can garner!

While Biomechanics will remove your worry

The field that  makes you a super man is Biochemistry

Provide the best boots that can prevent injury

And impress the public jury

Take all the cups you can carry!

To make your  rivals fury!

Now we are about to deal with complex part of sport science and it takes a bit of prior knowledge and more concentration to understand. I tried to explain it in as simple terms as possible but couldn't go beyond certain limits. Sorry about that. But go ahead and read it if you really want to add more matter to your knowledge kit.

Biomechanics is the study of the structure and function of biological systems by means of the methods of “mechanics.” – which is the branch of physics involving analysis of the actions of forces. Sport biomechanics is an interesting field that helps sports persons. It is necessary to have a good understanding of the application of physics to sport, as physical principles such as motion, resistance, momentum and friction play a part in most sporting events. In relation to sport, biomechanics contributes to the description, explanation, and prediction of the mechanical aspects of human exercise, sport and play.

Main aspects of Bio mechanics (6):

Mass: Mass simply means substance, or matter, and is typically measured with the units of pounds (lb) or kilograms (kg). People often interchange mass with weight, but scientifically these terms mean two different things. If an object has substance and occupies space, it has mass. Mass is the quantity of matter that the object takes up. Weight, on the other hand, is this quantity of matter plus the influence of gravity or, more precisely, gravitational force. So for all our studies on Earth, where the acceleration (measured in meters per second squared, m/s2) due to gravity is pretty constant (at 10 m/s2), weight is simply mass multiplied by the gravitational force, 10. For example, someone with a mass of 100 kg will have a force of weight (measured in newtons, N) of 1,000 N. So for coaches, athletes, and sport scientists, mass is the most common term we should use, and weight is the force this mass generates.

 We frequently talk of some sportsmen being massive or having tremendous body mass, indicating that the athletes are enormous and have plenty of muscle, bones, fat, tissue, fluids, and other substances that make up their bodies. Athletes who want to perform well in their chosen events carefully monitor their body mass. They know that too much or too little mass can seriously affect their performance. For all of us, checking our body mass is a means of assessing our general health and fitness. When we get on a scale, the dial gives us a reading that we associate with the amount of body mass that we carry around. 

Weight: In mechanical terms, an athlete’s weight represents the earth’s gravity pulling on the athlete’s body. The readout on the scale represents how much pull or attraction exists between the two. The earth pulls the athlete downward. So an athlete with more body mass compresses the springs to a greater extent than an athlete who has less body mass. 

Inertia: Inertia means resistance to change. If an object is motionless it will “want” to remain motionless. If it’s moving slowly it will want to continue moving slowly, and if it’s moving fast it will want to continue moving fast. If we are looking at something moving, then the mass of the object will directly relate to the inertia. Which is harder to throw, or get moving, a men’s shot put (16 lb or 7.3 kg) or a tennis ball (2 oz or 56 g)? Naturally, the shot put is harder to get moving; so the greater the mass an object has, the more inertia it has too. We must also consider one more important characteristic of inertia. Once on the move, objects always want to move in a straight line. They will not willingly travel around circular pathways; it’s necessary to pull or push on them to produce a curved pathway. A ball thrown by an outfielder would travel in a straight line following its release trajectory were it not for air resistance slowing it down and gravity curving its flight path toward the earth’s surface.

The more massive an athlete, the more the athlete’s body mass resists change. A giant 300 lb (136 kg) athlete needs to exert great muscular force to get his body mass moving. Once moving in a particular direction, the athlete must again produce an immense amount of muscular force to stop or change direction. Athletes with less body mass have less inertia and therefore need to apply less force to get themselves going. Likewise, they need less force than a more massive athlete to maneuver or stop themselves once they’re on the move.  Heavy athletes must apply tremendous force to get their body mass moving and then apply a huge amount of force to change direction or to maneuver the great masses of their opponents.

 In sports like squash or badminton, it’s possible for the immense mass and inertia of huge athletes to work against them. It’s no good being massive when sudden and varied movement changes are required unless you have the power to move your mass quickly and to control it once it’s moving. Massive athletes tend to have a poorer strength-to-mass ratio than do smaller, less massive athletes; so they have a tougher time stopping, starting, and changing direction. That’s why badminton and squash players are lean, lightweight, and anything but massive. If you’re a small, lightweight squash player, you can get a lot of pleasure from making your massive opponent crash into the side walls. You have a friend helping you in the court—your opponent’s inertia!

 An interesting example of inertia at work occurs when athletes are in flight. Consider two athletes who decide to bungee jump from a bridge. One athlete is twice as massive as the other. They step off the bridge at the same instant. Surprisingly, they accelerate toward the earth at approximately the same rate. Because the earth attracts the more massive bungee jumper twice as much, you might think that this athlete would accelerate downward twice as fast. But this same athlete has twice the inertia of the other thrill seeker and so resists being accelerated by gravity twice as much. In this situation, air resistance plays a negligible role, and the two athletes accelerate downward at approximately the same rate.

Inertia as an enemy when an athlete wants to get moving. To defeat this enemy, it’s good if the athlete’s mass is made up of powerful muscles that are able to generate the required amount of force. Once the athlete is on the move, inertia can become a friend because the second characteristic of inertia is that it wants to keep the athlete going. The difference between resting inertia and moving inertia causes athletes to expend much more energy at the start of a 100 m dash than when sprinting in the middle of the race. The two characteristics of inertia, resistance to motion and then persistence in motion, are seen not only in linear situations in which objects and athletes move in a straight line, but also in rotary situations when objects such as bats and clubs are made to follow a circular pathway. As long as the athlete makes a base ball bat travel around in an arc, the bat will try to continue moving along this circular pathway. If the bat slips out of the athlete’s hands, it will immediately go back to its initial preference, which is to move at a constant speed along a straight line.

 In linear movement, mass is synonymous with inertia. The more mass, the more inertia. The characteristics of inertia are described in the first of Isaac Newton’s three famous laws of motion. We commonly call it Newton’s first law, Newton’s law of inertia, or simply Newton I. This law also applies to rotary situations. But rotary inertia (also called rotary resistance or moment of inertia) involves more than just the mass of the object. We also need to know how the mass is distributed (i.e., spread out or compressed) relative to the axis around which the object is spinning.