In an effort to maximize performance and minimize health risks to athletes and non-athletes alike, experts in exercise physiology and biomechanics work together at the College’s Sports Science Center to analyze the human body in motion and examine the effects of physical stress on the body.
Biomechanical researchers at the center employ a wide array of equipment designed to measure the forces involved in producing or opposing movement. For example, a system that turns high-speed video into digitized images on a computer has been used to analyze the repetitive motion of baseball pitchers in an effort to understand the causes of pitching injuries. The center also frequently cooperates with sports equipment manufacturers to analyze the dynamic mechanical properties of new products, from tennis rackets and baseball bats to synthetic playing surfaces.
Exercise physiologists at the center deal with the functions of the human body in response to stress. Among their many projects, they have examined the effects of different types of fire retardant clothing on firefighters and looked at changes in resting metabolism and the resulting nutritional needs of HIV-positive women.
The center maintains a mutually beneficial relationship with the elite figure skaters training at the College’s world-renowned Ice Skating Science Development Center. The skaters frequently participate in the Sports Science Center’s research studies and directly benefit from the results. For example, center researchers were the first to document the energy cost of the long program in figure skating competition and have developed the aerobic and anaerobic training programs now used by elite skaters around the world.
Using pressure-sensitive inserts linked to a data recorder, center researchers can determine the location of pressure points within the skating boot. This information contributed to the development of a new figure skate at the center. The skate has a lighter, more flexible design that reduces stress in the ankle and foot joints. Analyses at the center have determined that skaters wearing the new boot land their jumps with approximately 30 percent less force than they do in conventional skates.