The School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences at Loughborough University was awarded a plaque by the Physiological Society in June 2024 to recognise it as a centre of excellence for physiology in sport, exercise and health science.
The Physiological Society’s Excellence in Physiology Award honours institutions that are centres of excellence for physiology in either discovery or leadership. This award is presented by the Board of Trustees following recommendation from the Nominations Committee.
The plaque unveiling will be followed by a series of presentations which showcased some of the School’s work in physiology.
Dariel Burdass, CEO of the Physiological Society – Introducing the work of the Physiological Society
Professor Mike Tipton, University of Portsmouth and Trustee of the Physiological Society, to talk about his relationship with the Society – 14mins 30secs
Professor Mark Lewis and Professor Clyde Williams – Physiology at Loughborough: From the early days to world renowned 26mins 30secs
Professor Vicky Tolfrey – Para athletes: A historical journey through physiological support for excellence 48mins 50secs
Dr Samantha Rowland – Breaking barriers: Exploring female physiology and performance in SSEHS 1hr 07mins 50secs
Dr Mark Burnley – Systems physiology of endurance and fatigue at Loughborough 1hr 22mins 15sec
afternoon everyone welcome thank you very much indeed uh for coming today um for those who don’t know me my name is Mark Lewis I’m the dean of the school of sport exercise and Health Sciences and really it’s my role to welcome you all uh colleagues from within L University and also our external friends and colleagues who’ve come to spend the afternoon with us to celebrate um L University’s excellence in physiology um many of you I know were just at the plaque unveiling so that was fantastic and and um great to join you for that we got a really interesting program today we’re going to hear from the physiological Society and we’re going to hear from a number of colleagues who work in the area um just to understand what a role that we we l University have had in in physiology over the years um the session chair for the afternoon um is Steve and Steve is going to do the housekeeping stuff if you want to do it now yeah yes sure um yes thanks very M much Mark and yeah I’d like to say I’ll be co-chairing with with Abby mlen who’s a PhD student uh in physiology focusing on cardiovascular and exercise physiology so um for those of you who don’t know me I’m Steven Bailey I’m the physiological Society representative for for the school and and just to reinforce Mark’s message it’s it’s a fantastic honor for us as a school to to receive this this award so huge thank you to the physiological society and thanks to all the many colleagues in the room who who’ve made such large contributions to physiology to allow us to uh achieve such a prestigious award also a very big thank you to Esther who’s been absolutely brilliant today of coordinating things she’s even left me notes cuz she know I’d forget so yeah exactly so I’m just going to read B them so again uh we’re not expecting a fire drill today so if we do have a a fire alarm please make your way through the fire uh and and we will uh convene outside uh the toilets for those of you are any external here they are just located through the exhibition area so once you work your way through the exhibition area you’ll be able to to find signs for the toilet and then after the the presentations today we’ll work outside then for the the networking reception so yeah very uh very um welcome to all of you today and we will start now with with the of presentations brilliant and I’m going to thank you very much Steve and we’ll crack on because I know some people got some things they want to do at 5 o’ I think there’s a football match on um so I’m going to hand over to darl B buris who’s the C chief executive of the physiological Society thank you thank you so much and um thank you so much uh for inviting um Mike and I here today um in my role this is one of the most exciting things that I do coming out into institutions and meeting members and what to today what makes today really special is this is the second of the plaques that we have put up and as Mike said in his introduction um to be awarded one of these excellence in physiology plaques means that you have shown to be really distinguished as a department in the delivery of sport exercise and health physiology and it has to all your impacts have to be reviewed by our nominations committee before it goes forward and the award is made so I’m really delighted to be here to celebrate this honor that um of the uh blue plaque for and and physiology so I’m here today to talk a little bit about the community a physiologist which we all make up and about how we’re trying to build our community how we’re trying to be more diverse and more inclusive and that’s in all of its facets in terms of geography in terms of discipline in terms of career stage if you are a physiologist the door is open we want you to be part of our community because together we are strong long no how do I Mo this does this point to move me forward so I think what’s really important when we look at physiology it it goes across from the basic research to the translational and the clinical and people are moving between those areas and we also have physiologists moving out into industry as well and all of this work has to be underpinned by excellent education training all the way through um research um and I think what was interesting we recently did a member survey and we found that um 50% of our members were doing engaged in research and teaching um and um another 25% in uh teaching so we have a large number of our members who are doing involved in the teaching of the discipline as well and somebody said to me my background is was well so many years ago but I suppose if you were saying where where do I come from in terms of science I was a microbiologist and somebody spoke to me what makes physiologists different and I was like well it’s a science and uh they went no no no no it is more than a science and I have since joining the physiological Society come to believe this what makes physiologists particularly special is they are able to work from the very small to the very big and back again so they’re asking these big questions and the other thing is they work across systems as well so I I do have another slide that I haven’t um put up but I think when you look at that how you see going from the atom right up to epidemiological studies and then across organs across systems it is really impressive so what I think makes physiologist an exciting group to be among is the way you ask these big questions and work together as a community to solve them so we are looking at the society how we can shape the future of physiology by connecting our community and we launched in 2023 our new strategy which underpins how we are going to do that but I’d like to talk to you about what I call uh the three piece of how you can get involved in your community and I actually saw this at the American physiological Society but they don’t use it anymore and I thought it was great it’s a three PS of being involved with your Society involved in physiology and you can publish with us you can present with us and you can participate with us and so what does that mean so we run meetings and we are changing our approach to meetings we have one main meeting and this year you’ll see we’re going to North Ambria and we’re doing that in collaboration with the Scandinavian physiological Society so we’re really collaborating in 2025 we are doing it through iups and europ Physiology again to try and beig build um a community of physiologists so 2025 will be a global event in frankfur which I think is going to be exciting so I please um implore you to present your work as our conferences and that gives you the ability to network on This Global platform but we listen to members members said um what they really wanted as well were these two-day Focus meetings I suppose they’re a little bit like a Gordon conference or a keystone conference and they are what I term they are by the community for the community and what I’ve done is I’ve pulled out some of those that are more relevant um to sports exercise health um and you can see since 20 end of 2023 through to Mid 2025 we’ve got one two three four five conferences that should be of interest to some of you and if we are not representing what you do up there you’ve got a great idea approach our events team because what we can do is we can help you to put on a conference and you could showcase your University we are going back into institutions where possible to Showcase those institutions and the work that they do um but I I think as Clyde said in his introduction when we unveil the plat that’s how he remembers those terrible oral Communications where quickfire questions were were were put toward you and I I think that’s what we’re going back to all the best bits of that so we’re making it small we’re making it focused and we’re making it an opportunity for you to network with those people directly involved in your area area and the other thing is publishing publishing is a key part of uh any academics career any researchers career and we have um three journals um the Journal of physiology experimental physiology and physiological reports and they all take papers in sport exercise and health physiology and um just to highlight in one this is is from experimental physiology since 2020 29% so just sh 30% of the papers are classed as environmental and exercise physiology and there will be other physiology within the other sections so um sorry there will be other exercise physiology within the other sections as well but you can see that um 30% is actually classified under the envir enironmental and exercise section and then um I’ve just put in these are the top uh five most cited exercise of sports papers in EP and the number of citations that they’ve received as well to show that we are you know this is definitely part of the community that we um are working with and then finally we’ve got out schools um special issues in the JP and experimental physiology so we have in EP it’s physiology in the Olympics and exercises medicine and in JP it’s the regulation of cardiovascular and skin tal muscle function in exercise so again if you have anything relevant please think about submitting to one of those special issues again if you think that we could be doing better with our special issues and we’re missing something please contact the editors and chief we have d I Bailey who is editor and chief of experimental physiology and Kim Barrett who is um editor and chief of the Journal of physiology so we really want to hear from you our members on what we could be doing how we could be improving what we do and then finally there’s the participation we can’t do what we do without our experts and you are our experts so it’s absolutely key that you help us to raise the visibility of physiology and there’s loads of ways that you can get involved serving on a committee we’ve just had a call out for trustees if you are a member I um uh could you all vote for the person that you would like to sit on our Board of Trustees we’ve got there is a an early career representative on the board that’s a protected position and a general trustee we’re looking for this year we’ve got trustee positions coming up next year if you’re unsure about whether you want want to be a trustee you can serve on a committee you can help organize sessions you can become a society rep that’s a great way of getting involved you can contribute to our policy reports which Mike is going to talk about and you can share your um research and career stories through either our Blog podcast or physiology news the member magazine so there’s lots of ways um that you can get involved with the society so if you just remember the 3ps publish um and participate and present and if you can do just a little bit of that together we will have a stronger community and be able to raise the profile of physiology because I think as we go forward to have a healthier society that is going to be able to add those 10 years of Health that the government wants us to be it does what it wants us to live sorry five years they want to add five years of health healthy aging and to be able to add five years of healthy aging with the amount of comorbidities that we are suffering from in this population it’s going to require physiologists to be able to input into that to be able us to change the story what we want to be able to see it’s not be surprised that a 70-year-old can do something or an 80-year-old that can do something I was in Japan some time ago and I was out walking and it was concrete it was a concrete um High ra EST State and yet everybody was out doing some form of exercise and they didn’t have any equipment they were using the benches they were using whatever was there but they were doing that and that improves people’s health and mental well-being and that’s the way we are going to be able to tackle some of these crises like we have such as um obesity and type 2 diabetes so I think it’s going to be a fascinating subject discipline to be involved in and I’m really excited to hear your talks and how you’re all contributing to some of the global challenges that we face today so thank you very much for listening and I will be around if anybody wants to ask any questions about how you become involved with the society thank you very much indeed next up is Mike tipon the president of the physiological Society thank you very much Mark and thank you um everybody for uh coming today to listen to what we have to say and um we obviously are here to celebrate Excellence that’s represented in this room and I thought it might be worth um talking a little bit one of the reasons I’m here is because I’ve watched lfra from afar with some Envy for some years uh and so I will uh I think we should just talk a little bit about that link uh and what the people in this room have achieved and then we’ll go on to talk a little bit about some of the similarities between what you do on what the physiological Society does now um if you are of a weak disposition don’t look at this slide um but this was State this is state-of-the-art equipment circa 1981 and I suspect some people in this room don’t even know what some of that stuff does um so let me just point it out point one you know I just pointed so in those days if you had a cricket bat you had to rub linseed oil into it otherwise it wouldn’t get through a it wouldn’t get through a season can you believe that um if you had a tennis racket state-ofthe-art Dunlop Max ply Mac and Row one Wimbledon with it um you had to have a little um press to keep it in because if it got damp it would walk um Tech the cricket balls and the rugby balls the rugby balls were not um you couldn’t hold them it was like a bar of soap when it got we there there was no sort of Dimplex on the on the on the rugby ball that Tri which The Barbarians scored against the old played with a bar of soap really and amazing um and so the the distance that we’ve come um in those days these were the state of-the-art socks that used to get every Christmas I still do Stan Smith the the near pornographic State ofthe art Fred Fred Perry no smart materials no enhanced evaporation no Vapor Vapor permeability and transfer and the same with your squash racket you have to put press for that as well and people in this room and people like you have completely transformed the sport not only in terms of the Tey what occurs in things like muscle how they’re fit what their nutritional requirements are how they function so sport is changed out all recognition in just a relatively short period of time uh and as a consequence of which we see better performance we see better spectac uh and that obviously that’s being challenged now particularly by external factors such as climate change but um let’s not underestimate how far we’ve come um I’m wearing this for the first time since 1981 this is mly college and I used to come to lafra and get beaten at L on a fairly regular time a regular occasion uh we beat them once I think in a semi-final of the college’s cup back in about 197 about 1979 but just other thing worth noting the pitch even that’s just been transformed out of all recognition so we’re not and it’s because in this room and people like you um how ironic that in October I stood on Hellfire Corner in red Ruth Ro watching L students play red red one at home and L students one here so any wants to come to cor and watch next year that’s why we’re here because you’re number one uh and I’m very happy to recognize that um and I’m sure you’ll hear more about it so I’m not going to Ste anyone’s Thunder it wasn’t a difficult decision to give an excellence in physiology award to L University and some of those advances I say here in muscle function in nutrition came from people in this room and I hope I’m looking very much forward to hearing you collaborate so you collaborate in these areas with um sport Sports Group in L I see George professor know you’ve collaborated collaboration is absolutely essential and it’s be going to become more essential as we grapple with the big issues of AI of climate change um of the way medicine is Chang and so I applaud you for the collaboration that you’ve involed course this is our kind OFA the extreme environment keep an eye on that I’m a bit off of that at the moment having just come back from the um Austrian Iron Man a little bit like this but I just make the point the oldest person who completed that IR man in something like 14 or 15 hours was in the 80 to 84 which has blown my CH get number we’ve mentioned climate change uh and I’m really pleased to see that there are people in the room working this is this is an existential threat um not just to humanity but clearly to sport as well um there’s five greater chance that the Paris Olympics will suffer a heat wave in 2024 than when it was the last there in 1924 and that heat wave it follows recent heat waves the well put the temperatures close or that is um a a threat to life and live uh and one which I don’t think the administrators have fully uh grasped done everything they could do about and that to answer those questions for exercise and health physiologist you mean un working with bists with designers with a whole lot of other people psychologists to make sure that we get the correct approach um as you’ve heard from Dariel I’m chairman of the policy um Committee of the physiological society and there’s some of the issues that we’re dealing with uh and Publishing on so artificial intelligence I’ve mentioned Precision medicine I’ve mentioned and climate change I’ve mentioned one of the tricks we miss as Sports exercise and health scientists is when you write that bit in your BR where you say about output you always say oh we will publish in a smart Journal why not actually produce a policy document uh and and that’s what the physiological Society can do one of the things that you can do with physiological Society is get in touch with the excellent policy team and say we’ve got this information we want to not just publish it in the in the you know scientific literature or in the grade literature we also want to do a policy launch at Westminster and we want to do a policy docum and so if we look at that climate change will pick because it’s topical there’s some of the um climate change documentation physiology and climate change the climate emergency bringing mechanistic understanding of real world impact Red Alert so these are policy documents that have been produced in the last few years by the physiological Society on this one up here I put in as well because it was the one that we produced because we were fed up with people talking about rip degrees and trying to pretend that Sport Science wasn’t a value to the community it’s an enormous value to the community not only in terms of the wellbeing ofers watching England football matches long now but also in um what it does in terms of Public Health and engagement with physical so if this is it your thing go and have a look at that and think about producing a policy document at the end of your Grant application and we have a plan this is not just a one off these things will go on and you’ll you’ll be seeing this we’re working very closely with the welcome C at the moment for a grant call later in the year on climate change in health and you can also go and have a look at the exercise physiology Hub as well if you want to uh and get involved in that the way you’ve just heard from dariio so that’s all I wanted to say really I’m a sort the light relief before you get the really good stuff the warm up um but the one thing I really want you to do because um Sport and exercise and health scientists are really good at it is celebrate don’t get all modest and you know embarrassed about your success you know getting an award from the physiological Society is no mil achievement trust me as said this was bar that you could try and you know get over when you were presented it was like presenting to a pack of lions and one go up and then another one and then they’d all over you i’ see people leave the stage in tears I was one um sport exercise and health scientists are very good at celebrating this is not the Scottish Football supporters there are people on this um people on this slide who I will not name for legal reasons you should know at least one very well uh and um so go and they all achieve pretty much all of them achieve greatness in the sport exercise and health field so um evening if you get the chance to celebrate your achievement today it’s well earned conrat chair come forward I’ll you back just yeah thanks very much for those excellent talks there by the physiological Society to set the scene and as someone who’s been a proud member of the physiological Society since 2011 I would really encourage you to look at the website there’s a lot of great resources there I got my first Pi Grant from physiological soci so I’ve certainly benefited a lot through interacting with the society so I would encourage colleagues to look at the the website and all the excellent resources that are there so we’re going to now move into the the talks that hopefully going to Showcase why we’ve been awarded this accad from the physiological Society so we’re going to start off with a a bit of a historical overview of the physiology development at at lury University and then we’re going to move on to some Talks by some some colleagues in the school to highlight the current state of play with some of the the the key areas that we’re focusing on in physiology I would like to apologize that we can only have three speakers we could have made an entire day of this showcasing but the three speakers will speak towards the end I’ve made a really good job of highlighting the contribution of various colleagues across these areas so uh I’d like to thank them all for for agreeing to to do this so the first presentation uh today in this afternoon session will be a joint presentation by Professor cly Williams and Professor Mark Lewis and they’re going to talk us through the the evolution of physiology at lebra uh it’ll start off with Professor Clyde Williams giving us an overview of the history and and track uh right through the latest developments in more recent Times by Professor Matos who’s the current theme of the school of schol exercise and Health Sciences so I’m sure we can all agree that there’s no one better uh place to talk us through the the development of physiology at that L than Professor CDE Williams so if you could all join me in welcome well thank you again uh to the physiological Society for this great honor in presenting us with the recognition of the work which has gone on over almost 35 years here at lfra and um I enjoyed seeing Mike’s uh slides but what he didn’t tell you is his leadership in all things aquatic especially in terms of prevention of drowning and the physic iology there is absolutely uh wonderful uh a wonderful experience of uh how you go from whole body to cell um so my my brief uh talk is um about where did we start and sorry I just mean so um as you can see from the slide in 1977 the College of Education which is on the the campus here uh merged uh with the University and at that time there wasn’t even a Road between the college uh and the university a road was opened up um once amalgamation was uh established the first professor of um uh uh in the department was Professor Harry Thomson and became professor of physical education Sports Council uh Sports he managed to attract a large Grant from the Sports Council on the understanding that it to be used to set up the first full-time uh research group in um uh Sport Science and uh the brief was um rather Broad and I’ll show you in this slide it really to look at athletic performance and um you can see I my pointer um and so the brief was fairly broad but we had to act is a a a central Hub uh for all things athletic both Elite and sub Elite so in designing the whole um menu of work or program of work we start off with athletic performance and dividing into Endurance Sports and Sprint Sports and within that uh Marathon running wheelchair racing and in the spring Sports um swimming and team games and we also towards the latter stages of our funding uh began to reduce population with walking and its impact on lipid uh lipid profiles and then also asthma and exercise now it’s um it would be easy to go through an in a smus board way and pick little bits and give you a story but what I like to do was to tell you about um uh one theme which we developed and and the theme was um uh uh about looking at the physiology of elad athletes and he was a famous athlete and by comparison um exploring the physiology of League athletes was relatively easy because we built up the tools which we um we amass from the literature and personal experience and I should say in dealing with Elite athletes there are two things major things we learned the first is that um uh in dealing with an lead athlete you have to be very careful if you take a thumb Thum sample of blood two weeks before competition and uh he Ender performs you to blame the second thing is that coaches will only give you a certain amount of their time to work on athletes and they get very impatient so even though you come in and work on Saturdays and Sundays um with the athlet athletic groups um it’s too much of the coaching time uh being taken out so as a result of that we developed the bleep test and we gave the the the disc to the a the coaches and they could run their own VI to Max and I should say when I see this Photograph you might think that’s rather special and it is special but the most important and nerve-wracking athlete we had to deal with was our vice Chancellor at the time who decided he was going to run the London marathon and he had to run it under four hours and if he didn’t then my job was at so um what we came to left was the endurance work was um relatively straight forward what was missing was um uh how do you deal with multiple Sprint Sports because the coaches from Team support to say well you know we’re not endurance athletes how do we train and uh can you you know can you um uh endorse our training methods so um I remember being an aine and being asked that question by a coach and I remember a paper published by um Rudolfo margaria who’s a paper and pencil uh physiologist in in Italy a famous One and he said that if you could if you run for 10 10 seconds flat out and have just 30 seconds recovery you can repeat it all day so I made the mistake of mentioning this at a coaching conference conference a year later at the same conference the coaches came back and said absolutely rubbish you can’t possibly do that and then I realized the mistake was when they were talking about maximum exercise they were talking about the exercise intensity which would elicit VI 2 max so we started looking for all kinds of ways of measuring Peak par output and a friend of mine coming back from The Windgate Institute in Israel uh gave me the a manuscript describing The Windgate test which we modified and used to our advantage so we explored this idea of um looking at um looking at the Peak Performance uh we use a cyclometer and we could biopsy and so on so forth and we did 6C Sprints with 30 second uh rest between the two now what we trying to do was get a model of something which would be acceptable to coaches and athletes and provide them with information on which they could base uh further training and activities I say six seconds because one of our undergraduate projects was to look at how long any Sprint in in several Sports would take and no in none of the sports um the team sports was anyone running that out for more than 5 seconds so we did these interesting studies on the um Peak power output recovery and you can you can see the um decline uh decline in power output so we’re able to investigate why that was and it was basically because of the phosphor crean stores weren’t recovering fast enough we measured the muscle pH and that wasn’t the problem we CH changed buffering and that didn’t do anything it is really how quickly you could um replace your phosphor creatin and uh we later on later went on to show that by doing the more aerobically you trained the greater your aerobic capacity the faster your fos so so we’re quite happy with this we nice neat little model we could do a whole range of studies we did the biochemistry scal muscle looking at um the glycolic Pathways and where the blocks are so quite quite happy and the coaches came along and said yeah but it’s not running is it so this is an example of how the end user can start influencing the research Direction so we said no it isn’t running so I came across um a a non-motorized treadmill being used in a in a in a health gym and so got one of the team Henri Lori to have a look at it and see if we could instrument it sorry sorry here is so all we did was get this nonmotorized threadmill um and fix it up we can actually mention measure the power output our strain gauges and so on so forth and that allowed us to um meet the criticism that um we could study multiple Sprints while running so um all went well and we did some interesting studies uh this is um John Brewer on the tread not sprinting Mary nille taking the measurements and so in these in the biopsy study we could look at the um ATP turnover in just 6 seconds and as you can see the 50% of the energy comes from glycogen about 48% from fos and a very small amount from at so he went on and did a whole series of studies looking at recovery looking at diet and so and so forth and we very content and almost smug because it was the it was the first non-motorized threadmill to be used in this way in the UK then the coaches came along saying yeah but it’s not real running is it just as we were settling in the feeling we could generate a lot of data unless we had to think again so what we did we modified the um the bleep test which allowed us to um over 20 M do a series of uh we designed the program so it to a mixture of um walking sprinting and running over 90 minutes so it wasn’t exactly the same exercise pattern you would see in a football game or rugby game but it was an approximation and um the people we had um to perform with athletes team team um games players and so on so were very comfortable with this and uh we were able to do a whole series of experiments uh everything from um looking at running um um performance changing their diet overnight running in the heat at different temperatures by heating up this huge Sports Hall and PhD students being dedicated people as they are with sleep in the sports sports Hall in order to make sure the temperature hasn’t uh Fallen uh too much and switch on the industrial heaters keep temperature up at 30° huge amount of personal sacrifice and we’re able to biopsy them and look at the changing glycogen we able to put nasogastric tubes in so that we could have a look whether or not the sport strink they were taking at the intervals actually got through to the muscles and we even set it up so we could look at um soccer skills and uh performance there so in a sense this little story is about how the end user can influence your research and we went from very cozy cyc gometry through to what we thought was a great running uh model uh through to uh this free running um uh model which allowed us to look at a whole range of uh different um um different factors influencing uh performance and so um many times uh it’s worth listening to the end user because at the end of the day they’re the ones who going to use the information and all this wouldn’t have been possible uh without this uh the research students all of which I say will have presented at least once at the physiological Society thank you very much indeed before you sit down F I wonder if you would mind just sharing everyone the anecdote you shared with me about um supporting uh the swimming the swimmers um at the time you guys were doing that stuff sorry I should have said we I mean on that overview slide there’s lots of stories I tell you and many of them are human stories about overcoming various obstacles and one of them in 1980 Mar the Prime Minister a b Olympic teams going way to overseas training and were based in Crystal Palace and so we were asked by the national coach we we worked with the swimmers short course and long course championships throughout the year we go Palace and we developed a rapid meth of getting blood samples from the e which very standard and so we take we use the length of the pool as our and take the blood dispense the Bloods put them into tubes jump on the train back to do the analysising almost all night back in the train to have deep with the coach and one one interesting thing was these couple of American Absol ter question we found in the US had recomended that if they want to get big and fast they should have high protein diets and the protein diet they thank you Clyde um and um my first experience physiological Society was I graduated 19 1990 from reading with a degree in physiology and biochemistry and it’s been really brilliant being here over the last decade or so to really reflect on where this started with Clyde’s great story and and and I’m going to tell you a little bit about where where We’ve Ended up and where we are today and I think what was really interesting we sit and talked to Clyde and you know he’s been fantastic since I’ve been Dean and always been a source of um information and an anecdote and and telling me it’s a stupid idea um most of that really um but to understand that at the time when where you know Clyde talks about the support of athletes it only just really started and it was it was the largess of the individuals and the university which enable them to support them um some of you are old enough to remember uh perhaps the Olympic Games in 1996 where um Great Britain had the worst um Olympic Games since about 1924 all sorts of of angst and what have you and that led to the formation of the national lottery and the support of athletes via VIA this program and really went talking to Clyde which really struck me of course at that time it was Clyde and his colleagues and people like you who were supporting uh those athletes and that kind of shifted well it shifted at the English English Institute sport UK Sport Institute who we still continue to do huge amounts of work with and Vicki’s actually very pivotal to that relationship with L University in Uki currently is that many of the people who then came here to learn about the stuff clein and other people were doing ended up being the support network they ended up working English Institute of sport you’ll know that um other sports um you know back then the only sport you could really make a living out of or there was money was was was was soccer football uh and maybe a bit of cricket and that’s changed so much in that time you know support here through through these kind of schemes but also the Prof professionalization of other sports and so people like Clyde supporting the athletes became people Clyde and others had trained and I think um as we continue the story we’ve seen that develop over time um Clyde talked to there all about um a number of areas this is a fantastic uh initiative which mean 2005 now wow feels like to a lot of people it feels like it’s it’s sort of new and still only arrived yesterday but the Peter Harrison Center uh a 20 plus year philanthropic donation um has led to the institution being internationally round for disability sport research and and the physiology contained within that I’m not going to talk about any science um in my talk because you’ve got uh my colleagues following up behind going to who are going to tell you about the stuff which goes in this area so you’re going to hear about you’re going to hear from Vicki after um what was really interesting as well through um the the journey if you like that that Clyde’s talked about is that if you looked at the study of illness and bad Health that had always been through the eye of the the lens of pathology I looking at stuff which didn’t work looking at illness looking at um you know what had gone wrong but actually people start to realize hang on a minute through the work of people like Clyde and all the colleagues at ler why don’t we study people where things go well in inverted Commerce why don’t we use that as a lens to look at health and wellbeing as opposed to disease as a as a as a lens for health and wellbeing and I think that was really um one of the sort of pivotal changes in the last or pivotal um developments in the last 10 or 15 years is because of the stuff Clyde and others had started um the research at ler was furthering our knowledge of athlete health and performance we’re also beginning to knowledge an epidemic of poor health and so why not use the rather than pathology and illness why not use wellness and health and and Peak Performance as a way to try and understand um the ways we might as well to intervene and so could our knowledge of athlete Health be applied to the non-athlete population to encourage up liftting health and wellbeing of the nation um and you know alongside Mass participation events know many colleagues who work with part run but you know it was only really in the sort of the early ‘ 80s that people were starting taking up uh the uh the the the jogging some of you are maybe old enough to remember that taking off in the ‘ 80s and people getting involved in recreational running so it really was a start of the translation of some of those ideas and knowledge that Clyde talked about to the general population and I guess um the real sort of epitome of this is kind of L linking again into sort of Olympic Cycles was the 2012 Olympic game London Olympic Games a massive Catalyst um for for change some would argue some would argue not but we’re here to debate that now but for us there was a massive thing we were involve in the National Center of exercise medicine um and the move to health I remember when I started here Clyde had been a champion of this from before those times saying yes we need to use the knowledge that we have to help to help understand health and how we can keep people healthy and this was um a project or was still a project uh30 million pound of capital investment to improve the nation’s Health through sport exercise and physical activity um still a major uh project that we’re involved in um the the money was to build buildings um as my colleague Rachel Thompson says fact is not included so we had to find a way to get the stuff within it working but this is the building the national Center for sport and exercise B building on our campus this is a collaboration with the universities of Nottingham Leicester Nottingham University Hospitals NHS trust University Hospitals leester NHS trust but also a network with colleagues in London and Sheffield as well where the whole dri was to apply the world class expertise and policies and practice and the sort of things that CDE was talking about to benefit the health and wellbeing of the nation um and Esther I can’t remember the numbers but can you can you remember how many people have now been um helped uh in in in uh she she’s went out of the room with just she not be able to answer the question but 10 years 10 years it’s been up and running we’re putting together a report of the 10 years and it’s tens of thousands of um um the general public who’ve been helped and been seen through the national Center SP exercise medicine Network so I think that’s a really pretty impressive Legacy of um the stuff that Clyde and his colleagues started being translated into general population and I think one of the things just to finish on now is that because of our work in the ncsm and and our reputation in this area in physiology and many other areas is the National Rehabilitation Center this is a um 500 million pound program including a defense medical rehabilitation center and a National Rehabilitation Center just a few miles from here on the stampf rehabilitation estate to transform outcomes for people who have suffered potentially life changing injury trauma illness by integrating research Innovation Education and Training with clinical practice and that could be anything from a road traffic accident to someone who had a major mental health episode we were asked to lead that as an academic institution because of the stuff Clyde and his colleagues started that’s why that’s why we were asked to lead the NCM and through that we’ve been asked to lead the NLC and I think of all the stuff that we hear about we’re going to hear about from colleagues today that’s a really amazing um Legacy that Clyde and others have started to be able to be asked nationally and there internation to lead the to lead these Ventures um we tried to get a photo of everyone together but that’s our recent uh Christmas jumper party um just before um just before christm stupid to say Christmas just gone um Esther I asked the question that you weren’t in the room um ncsm how many um patient visits have there been across the ncsm network since the foundation of the ncsm 10 years ago yeah 700 100,000 sorry that’s interventions which wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the ncsm and that wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for people like C and his expertise and Physiology and others so I hope you’ve seen that c I’ve tried to tell you a little bit of a story about where we started or where he him and his colleagues started and where we ended up now I don’t know when sebco or the people were standing in that sport Hall which I don’t think exists anymore heating up the room would imagine that we were going to be at the Forefront of multi-million pound National and international drives to improve the health and well-being of the of of of the world so um gives you a little bit of context I hope for the for the award uh why we rewarded it and I’m going to hand over to Steve now so you’re going to hear some some people about some science now and some of the things they’ve been up to thank you very much indeed again thank you very much for all coming along today and I’ll hand over to Steve I keep saying the wrong thing as usual um Steve and Abby sorry Abby Steve and Abby Abby fact Abby’s in charge it looks like that might um so thank you to Clyde and Mark for that really insightful discussion it is a privilege to hear them both speak about the development and excellence in physiology at lbra um and I’m now just going to invite Professor Vicky tolfrey up to talk about para Athletics and the development of physiology um in that field than much great thanks very much for uh being sort of a specialist topic uh today to sort of highlight uh the Excellence in physiology here at uh at lfra um I think I’ve read the script right because what’s fantastic is that uh I think I can see some really nice linkage already with the the speakers uh before me so I’m going to sort of start again more historical and then get to perhaps a little bit more the impact and the actual physiology and I have pinched the the picture that you’ve already seen um just using now the motto in terms of where history begins in all the sports Halls the sports centers here at lra we’re very proud of our presence in the sporting space and obviously now we’re very proud of our award uh around excellent in in in physiology but what I’d like to do here is highlight uh the groundbreaking research it was in one of Clyde’s slides around wheelchair racing now excellence in exercise physiology in wheelchair racing started here at lra and here we have a paper that was published uh in the of late ’90s so following the Atlanta games in 96 but a paper published by Ian Campbell Clyde Williams and Henrik lcom so we have the three individuals uh on just here Clyde’s perhaps quite modest as he always is but again I must Echo World leading research in the ’90s in wheelchair racing wheelchair racing being at the time the sort of Pinnacle of the par Olympics the blue ribbon event of wheelchair racing at the games we had Tanny gay Thompson a student here at L University who took part in these studies just like Sebastian co uh was taking place and sort of taking laboratory practices uh with with Clyde but what was the most important feature of This research in my mind again was the mind of Henrik developing a system which enabled power athletes wheelchair athletes to be tested at the same standards using gometry equipment in the LBA Labs so to me I took that two one and before this sort of plays the video um I just like to sort of show you again the historical influence that lofer played on me a student at Manchester metropa University but then coming to two one go hit it as hard as you possibly can come on keep it going come on that’s good keep it work for that final minute come on keep your M keep it keep pushing keep it going all the way through keep those arms going that’s bril let to go come on push it keep going all the way keep it going keep going stop hands on the side tremendous [Music] so that was me in the background a young PhD student um but being mentored by someone that Clyde had mentored a PhD student who graduated at L University who then embarked on their first lecturing post at Manchester Metropolitan University but the reason why I show that is the fact that we were putting bikes on top of tables we were taking the um the sort of the sidebar off the treadmill lifting athletes onto the treadmill not the most s of dignified way of doing testing of testing the uh the par athletes but that led myself to come to ler University sort of two years into the Peter Harrison Center being established at L University which again I know Clyde was quite Pinnacle in having those relationships with Peter Harrison and the Peter Harrison Foundation but what that led to was the establishment of a world leading research Center in par Olympic sport the mission was to improve uh the sort of knowledge about par Olympic sport and to gain and promote the substantial health and quality of life benefits that can be gained through participation in disciplin sport and physical activity so looking across the exercise Continuum Rehabilitation Community to high performance Sports the center was and is heavily involved in research but we also provide that Hub integrating with lofer sports around providing Sports Science support to several GB squads working with UK SI and the British par Olympic Association the physiologists that have come through the center are show on this slide here these are our graduates with phds that are now working with the British paralympic Association Great Britain wheelchair rugby Great Britain wheelchair basketball they’re embedded in that they’re embedded in industry and providing sports science at the top and World leading so what I’m trying to emphasize there is it’s not only this sort of the science of collecting blood and muscles and things like that is that we are the pipeline of talent in par Olympic High Performance Sport and I’m quite proud that that is a legacy of the 20 years to date of funding from the Peter Harrison Foundation the way that we do that is that we embed the practitioner during the PHD journey into the sport so here on this slide here we have Ben steon who is now head of physiology for the par Olympic triathletes but he’s here during an event with the head coach at the time offering physiological support during the events Johnny R the former head coach in this photo said the embedded practitioner approach created a foundation for two things worldclass support to athletes and collecting data to create useful and meaningful research so bends outside the lab bends inside the lab that embedded approach enables us to talk to the athletes talk to the coaches and get the right research questions addressed in the researching environment using exercise physiology we moved to wheelchair rugby we’ve adopted the same approach with wheelchair rugby not only now are we putting or we’re not putting the hand the bikes on top of the tables but we have an instrumented wheelchair aeter taking the sort of the philosophy of what Clyde was doing around non-motorized activities to look at Sprint performance but we’ve worked with loader and collaborated internationally with Dutch colleagues to develop this instrumed wheelchair gometer that enable us to look at wheelchair Sprint performance we have the scientist PhD students there at the games in Tokyo in Tokyo we won the first team sport gold medal but our athlet our athletes were coming to lofra being physiologically assessed we were looking at heat humidity cooling strategies we collaborated with George hav just like Mike said that we’ve got great resources for the ear ecomic approach around the environment that our para athletes compete in to optimize their warmup cool down and performance not only have we done that but we collaborate across disciplines and so here is a quick uh video that shows you how we work with sleep experts in the world of par Olympic sports the study that we’re currently conducting is really looking at sleep patterns uh of persons with a spinal injury and uh it’s quite common to note that some of the athletes that we work with do have problems with their sleep patterns so with this study and the participants have stayed in the hotel for a 24-hour period so we could measure their core temperature and their skin temperature and Margo have let us use their venue in partnership with them we’ve worked together to get the participants in the main measure we have is poly stenography which essentially is going to measure the brain ways of the athletes as they sleep and we’ll also have some core temperature measurements uh at 7:00 a.m. in the morning the participants will SW swallow a core temperature pill and this will then allow us to measure the temperature throughout the day and what we’d like to see is if there’s any association between the core temperature response at night um and the poly SN graphy brain waves and that we’re recording finding a solution for po sleep would be great if you know that you’re doing everything you can physically to be the best you can be even if it is just those tiny little margins you’re going to feel better you’re going to feel you’ve done everything all of our research here at ler really is underpinned Maybe by athletic performance but it has a wider impact to the everyday health and well-being of persons with a spinal cord injury so it’s very important to use that model to understand the differences to try and look at some interventions that ultimately might improve the quality of life so our work stretches like I’ve Illustrated not only around the high performance but also to health and wellbeing and in Rehabilitation as well interestingly around special additions and Physiology and things like that just on Saturday I went to pob Med and I just put in some key words I put in physiology and Olympics physiology and Paralympics now I know not all research articles are going to have those as key wordss and indeed there’s different intricacies of sort of saying that you’re doing research that has meaningful uh relations to Olympic because it could just that you’re looking at running but just for comparison here I just want to uh sort of draw your attention to the small amount of research as of Saturday that still exists in terms of the sort of different Focus around Olympic research versus the par Olympic research from an exercise physiology uh perspective obviously that’s very interesting given the fact that a person with the spical injury will have different GI different digestion rates um if you’re providing nutrition and fluid uh information or guidance through science of your non-disabled athletes it’s not going to be transferable to a person with a spold injury there’s going to be differences in FMA regulation a lot of the athletes that I work with Will effectively during competition if they swallow one of those City pills might actually get a body core temperature of around about 40° Centigrade so we’ve been working for several years looking at cooling techniques to try to optimize their performance and offset that rise in body core temperature there are also issues around the heart rates and the blun anded heart rate response during exercise respiratory all different aspects that again make working with par Olympic athletes very exciting to challenge the exercise physiology from what you might learn at an undergraduate level a master’s level to transfer that knowledge to training advice for athletes who might have the sort of impaired function from a fir regulatory perspective and all these other overarching uh factors because of the physiological consequences of a spinal cord injury so we very much take this individualized approach I know that happens in high performance sport anyway but we might obviously look at the impairment of an athlete and say let’s cool that athlete before they go on to court to offset that rise in body core temperature and let’s bring the ice vest at half time to a different athlete for a different reason at the timeline of their performance here we’ve done some work and actually this work did come off after speaking to people like Mike Tipton through talking to Jim house at other universities who Mike works very closely with where working with the wheelchair rugby athletes in preparation for one of their tournaments we introduced the use of a fan because the athletes were just water spraying their face putting ice cooling on their necks to make themselves feel less sort of straining in terms of the thermal stress but they weren’t it wasn’t lowering their body core temperature because it wasn’t evaporating the heat away from the body so again sort of international collaborations internal working with universities enabled us to provide some really good guidance for the British par Olympic Association when they were preparing their athletes for overseas competitions whether that be in a firm or neutral environment such as wheelchair rugby or outside working with wheelchair tennis and other sports but I think it’s been said before me it’s very very important that we must talk to the athletes work with the coaches and so we very much do as part of the Peter Harrison Cent’s research work through that embedded environment and make sure the questions that we answering are gleaned from the population and the sports that we are working with we use this sort of knowledge Action Cycle that a lot of you might have read if you work in high performance sports or indeed looking to translate your research where we obviously try to look at the the questions we look at tailoring interventions around some science we monitor the the the use of the the science we evaluate the outcomes we get new knowledge and we start again it’s a continuous activity that we do year by year accelerating the physiology that we might provide the athletes that we’re working with just one very quick uh experiment that I must highlight here is using this interdisciplinary approach of ergonomics and I’m a physiologist but working with the B mechanists so I want to draw your attention to in a moment what happened in the tent but this is work that we put together where we’re trying to optimize the wheelchair uh tennis players tennis serve in preparation for going out to Tokyo so we basically took the tennis environment to ler sport to the tennis courts we set up the Vicon through analysis to look at some tennis serbs from a threedimensional point of view that was pre we then undertook a game of tennis but in a tent and then we then re-evaluated the tennis serve and some Sprints after that period of fatigue so I’m in the physiology session here but what I’m trying to show is that collaboration with the biomechanics team with the Excellence of physiology not only gave an understanding of the tennis serve to the technical coaches what it gave us was an understanding around different strategies that we could ask the uh coaches and the players to implement when they were away preparing for Tokyo so I won’t go into detail on this but effectively there was a cooling strategy of ingesting sort of ice at intervals whilst the athlete was sprinting in that tent before they went back out and did some tennis serves so here’s one of our our athletes taking the ice on board here and simply what we were looking to do was offset that rise in body core temperature in the condition where they had ice versus the trial where they didn’t have ice as well as collecting biomechanical data to feedback to the coaches and hey Presto ice did have an impact and again there is a research article that people can read um about the reduction as a result of the timing of the ice slurry it was published that’s great but most importantly according to to Mike and how I work as well similar to Mike it had an impact unfortunately I was unable to attend the Tokyo games because of covid um but we can see here this is Gordon who meddled and here is his ice slowy that was provided to him in an ice cooling box for the intervals during the tennis game and he adopted the strategy we recommended for him little bit pushed for time because I like to throw things in but the last couple of slides is this is the health and wellbeing aspects so working with the high performance coaches and practitioners within Uki this was a slide that came from the health and well-being team which was around a sport I won’t mention it but a particular paralympic sport where they reported the number of days lost and the amount of occurrences of pressure SES broken finger upper respiratory tract infection Etc of some paralympic athletes through working with Rehabilitation specialists in exercise physiology we undertook some functional electrical stimulation to provide a stimulus in the paralyzed legs to increase the blood flow increase the the temperature of the lower legs increase um the sort of physiology in an area that the athlete was unable to activate themselves what that resulted in this particular athlete who had a lot of pressure sore instances was they were able to compete and not actually being drawn away to have bed rest as a result of precious SS so we were applying the physiology from Rehabilitation to high performance athletes and using that information as well so finally impact we don’t just want PhD sat on the Shelf so what I do do is not necessarily policy documents with fiz sock but I will consider that we produce infographics I’ve probably some in British Journal of sports medicine here uh with George hav around cooling techniques of wheelchair rugby players we’ve produced some for the sports around ice slurries and wheelchair tennis performance and we’ve produced some around caffeine for upper body exercise performance and how that might impact hand cycling and wheelchair rugby performance as well I have had impact on rules and regulations but I’m happy to talk about that during the networking session thanks very [Applause] much okay thank you to Vicki again for that really insightful um discussion it’s really interesting to hear about the high impact work being done in Paris sport at lfra and now to talk about another really prominent topic we have Dr Sam uh who’s going to talk about female physiology and performance in the school thanks Abby so I’m just going to start by going back a little bit and doing a bit of History before going into some of the content of what we do here at lra I thought this image was really interesting but because it gives us an idea of what was going on just 60 years ago so not long ago this was a scenario for a woman called Katherine switzler who ran the F who was the first woman to run a marathon it in Boston but in order to do this she had to hide in a bush before the start line she was constantly trying to be pulled away from the race as she was going through it and eventually managed to finish so we’ve come from this place where actually 60 years ago women weren’t actually able to do the marathon contrast that with where we are now and women’s sport is bigger and better than ever in 2024 and this has probably been helped by some huge success stories so whether this is the lionesses winning the Euros in 2022 setting the precedent for the men this this year or whether it’s Emily campable securing Great Britain’s first White medal as a weightlifting athlete what we can also see from an equality perspective is there’s certainly been movement in the right direction and for the first time in Olympic history there will be equal participation by males and females at the Paris Olympics this year and this summer which I think is fantastic so where are we in terms of the literature well despite these advances in women’s sport the field of research a still significant underrepresentation of Women Within that there’s definitely movement in the right direction and that sentiment is certainly held around the room and I’m going to demonstrate today some of the fabulous work that has been done in this space but there is definitely capacity for more work to be done in female physiology and female sporting performance and this is quite nicely highlighted by this paper which talked about the quality and quantity Paradox so what we have got and what we have had over the last few years is an evolution of people doing research in women which is obviously fantastic but some of that research has been Limited in quality with this paper suggesting that only 8% of the data is high enough quality was to make firm conclusions back into the applied World which as we’ve just heard from Vicki is fundamentally what’s important if we want to talk about informing practice for elite athletes or at participation level the quality of that work needs to be sufficient and I know everybody in the room is aware of this but why is it needed well clearly there are sex differences in body size and composition between men and women so whether we’re thinking about the cardiovascular system the muscular sceletal system the bone immune function gut microbiota the list continues there are sex differences there and it’s therefore good rationale that there may be differences between men and women to Simply applying previous research which has been done in men to women won’t necessarily give us the answers for our female athletes and females taking part in exercise so that then moves me on to some of the research that we’ve been doing here within the school I’m going to to start by detailing some of the work around the sex differences that we’ve been doing before moving on to women only based studies and I thought a good place to start with my third year dissertation supervisor Professor David stencil so as a lot of you in the room will know David is a expert in the field of exercise metabolism and appetite regulation David has conducted multiple experimental studies and written many review areas in this area so he’s much better place to speak about than I am but looking over his work it was quite clear that the consensus from his sex differences work is that actually the effects of exercise on appetite appetite hormones and appetite regulation may not be so different between men and women but he does allude in this review article to there being further research that’s needed in this space slightly different field but we have expertise in hydration research and Dr Lewis James is an expert in the field of hydration and is currently involved in several projects being led by PhD students who are in the room looking at male and females and how they respons to a hydration status May differ and one of the cool studies that we heard about yesterday in preparation for a presentation that Tom Cable is going to be doing soon is how physiological responses to dehydration may actually differ between men and women so Tom study is still uh in finalization but the data at the moment is suggesting that actually in female Runners dehydration may hit in pair running performance compared to being in a hydrated State whereas in males that dehydration doesn’t seem to be having such a detrimental effect and I’ve got an interesting finding that suggests this may be linked with usual ad lium energy intake uh sorry water consumption being different or their habits being different between men and women so that’s really cool and it gives a good Avenue for future research in this area which I know Tom and leis together will be talking about ideas but part of the press new research which I think is quite exciting in this space and then to jump to a completely different field obviously professor professor Jonathan fand is an expert in neuromuscular function and muscle morphology and as he’s conducted numerous work in SE difference work as well so in collaboration with British Athletics he recently published a paper which explains why men can typically Sprint faster than women now previous researchers suggested with limited evidence that height body fat and muscularity may explain differences between men and women’s performance but that evidence base wasn’t really there to support that and what Jonathan’s research has found that actually it’s a size of specific muscle groups such it’s the hip extensors and the knee flexes that enable Elite male sprinters to to outperform those of our female sprinters Jonathan is also interested in looking at injury incidents and whether there are sex differences in this and it won’t have escaped many of you in the room that ACL injuries are particularly common in female athletes and that’s been in the media particularly over the last couple of years so he wanted to explore whether that was anything to do with muscle morphology and indeed Jonathan observed that the knee flexors that help to stabilize the knee joint and prevent strain to the ACL are smaller in females compared with males and this might give us some explanation of why this is disproportionately reported in our female athletes compared to our male athletes and then again a different sort of topic area so what I’m trying to highlight here is the breath the C the department we’ve got research by Dr Nicola Payne who works in the space of immune and inflammatory changes to psychological stress she does this via looking at active methods such as mental arithmetic or stressful mathematic situations but also through pattern methods such as uh cpress tests which for anyone not familiar is where you put your foot or a wrist into a COR bath and you instigate a sympathetic response and as part of this work nicka looks at sex differences um to see if there are differences between men and women in their uh psychological stress response and in line with previous observations in this work that I’m presenting here Nicola has shown that males actually exhibit greater vascular and respiratory responses to a range of Psychosocial stresses compared to females and then we’re also doing some work that looking exclusively in female or women based populations so I thought I’d start by going back to the earliest part of the lifespan and talking about what we do from a pediatric physiology perspective in looking in children and adolescent girls and boys so Dr Keith tolfrey is dedicated to improving the Met metabolic health of both young boys and girls what we know and what some of Keith’s papers tell us is that sedentary Behavior increases throughout the lifespan and in childhood but actually physical inactivity becomes more of a problem in young girls and adol girls than it does boys so a lot of the work that Keith has been doing has been around how can we improve the metabolic health of this population with interventions such as high intensity exercise or whether it’s looking at the breakfast foods that individuals consume to see if we can create interventions to work for those adolescent girls similarly although in a different population Dr Bry Chrismas has conducted research in a katari population where cultural environmental and logistical factors typically promote a more sedentary lifestyle and particular particularly in females and her work has observed beneficial effects of breaking up prolonged sitting time on a range of psychobiological factors bro also partners with several uh women’s worth clothing companies and she operates and does some work with those too as part of her remit Dr Lee Taylor has done some work with Elite FAL athletes so he works across the environmental physiology perspective and he’s looking at different strategies to mitigate the effects of environmental temperature on performance Leah’s published work on the effectiveness of short duration low cost Al climatization Camp protocols and also cooling strategies such as iest pertinent for today’s talk but Tom Clifford has conducted some work looking at football players in collaboration with the Gatorade Sports Science Institute he has written a narrative review identifying six major topics for kind of concern and identification that are relevant to female football players and these include physical demands Talent ident ification body composition injury risk health and nutrition Tom has also been involved in experimental data collection with female footballers again in collaboration with gssi and some of this works that looked at differences in fluid balance and carbohydrate intakes of our football players and this found that actually carbohydrate intakes were below recommendations both in training and in matches for our females and therefore this highlighted a really good Gap in the literature or a gap for Applied practitioners to make change there so if our athletes aren’t consuming enough carbohydrate are they performing and training optimally of course they’re not so that gave a good option then for intervention at an applied level and Tom has also done some work recently with brighten H albian looking at wellbeing metrics and whether they differ across the menstrual cycle phase myself and stav conducted some work using dietr nitrate supplementation as a ogenic aid and we wanted to see whether actually nitrate may be more effic in a female population uh compared with a male population so as part of my PhD I looked at whether dietry nitrate supplementation would be more effective across different phases of the menstrual cycle or between pillar users and those with a regular menstrual cycle those works are still in uh formation at the moment and we hope to publish this soon but what has been borne out of this research is some really interesting areas for future Direction in female populations and particularly those that I’d like to mention are those individuals with endometriosis polycystic ovarian syndrome and preeclampsia all of these female populations have a heightened cardiovascular risk and we know that dietr nitrate supplementation can be beneficial in this context so for us that’s highlighted quite a nice area for future research that we may be able to do together we did get a paper out of this though that was relevant uh using females looking at a gut metabolite so this work is still embodied at the moment but we hope to move this forward and of course I couldn’t do a talk on female physiology without highlighting the excellent work that’s been done by Dr Emma dunnell Emma focuses specifically on female athlete Health performance performance and wellbeing she has done work across the lifespan in females so she’s worked with premenopausal women through to postmenopausal women and she’s focused on understanding how estrogen status can affect athlete Health wellbeing and cardiovascular health specifically and what I recently heard and Emma didn’t tell me on email because she’s probably too modest is that she’s actually part of a consensus group at the moment informing red strategies so Emma is collaborating internationally with colleagues and I know they meet on a Sunday afternoon at 4:30 because I heard it recently to kind of inform guidelines in this area so em is our leading expert in the cardiovascular health from a female physiology perspective so just briefly before I finish I just like to show you a little bit about what we’re doing at the moment so what’s in progress in the department so of course emmer is still leading in this space which is excellent so we’ve got ra doing some research with support of PhD students in a space of looking at uh menstrual function and menstrual dysfunction and cardiovascular health Dr Rich blro is also doing some work around menstrual cycle symptoms and your ability to train and compete depending on phase of the menstrual cycle and a Shameless plug for myself I’m also looking at whether gastrointestinal symptoms and permeability differ across phase of the menstrual cycle and with contraceptive use and if anyone’s interested in me speaking to them about that the networking session would be great we’ve got Dr Katherine Brook wavel who’s looking at osteoporosis fractures in female athletes Dr Laura Barrett’s looking at GPS tracking and youth athletes and we’ve got Steve mir’s looking at different hydration effects of different different drinks in different female populations so what I’ve hopefully highlighted over the last 15 minutes or so is the breadth of work that we’re doing here within the department across physiology ranging from appetite to hydration neuromuscular function cardiovascular health because a large breath in everything that we’re doing here at lra and my last slide then so I think it felt prudent to finish this talk by briefly highlighting the women in Sport Hub which has being led by Dr Emma Cullen and now the agenda of the women in Sport Hub for anyone that isn’t familiar is to enhance the interdis Clary research that’s conducted within the university to advance work that is conducted in women this is still at the early stages of development but as part of this initiative we do have a guest speaker coming to visit in July uh Dr Marissa bar barukas I’m sure I don’t pronounce that correctly but she’s visited visiting in July um she will be hosting a talk which I think the email has gone around about if anyone’s interested in speaking with Marissa please get in touch with myself because I’m arranging meetings on a a on toone basis thank you thanks very much Sam for providing an excellent overview of all the the great work that’s being done here in female physiology at at ler University and and I know we’re all delighted that you’ll soon be joining us on the staff uh so you’ll be able to move this forward I’m sure to excellent levels in the future not least because you don’t have me anymore as the PHD I can hold you back so I’m sure going to do great work in in this space so it’s now a great pleasure to hand over to Dr Mark Burnley he’ll be the last uh talk of of today’s session uh Clyde on his his early slides indicated one of the key themes was in endurance physiology Mark is going to provide a nice overview of the current work that’s being done in endurance physiology in the school so I’ll hand over to you mark thank you thank you thanks well for the younger members of the audience uh this is obviously a slide of our Chancellor winning the Olympics being chased by a BBC sport commentator um and of course at this stage in a race a commentator might say something along the lines of it’s who wants it more and I’m pretty certain by the look on his face that Steve tram wants it pretty badly but he’s not going to get it and the reason for that is physiology and lfra has a long history of excellence in the area of endurance physiology olog and I just like to update you with some of the work that is currently going on in this area now the first physiologist to really understand the relationship between human physiology fatigue and endurance is of course AV Hill and we are currently going through a centinary of his seminal work on human physiology and performance and one of the things he looked at and published in two papers in 1925 is the speed duration relationship and he know noticed that regardless of exercise modality the relationship between speed and duration was common so short races were conducted at high speeds there was a rapid drop off in speed which would then lead to a plateau or an ASM toote after about 12 or 13 minutes or so and what he was able to do was put Flesh on the physiological bones of this relationship and the way he discussed it is actually quite interesting in relation to how we see things today so some of the terms I’ve highlighted here are still common so a critical speed below which there is a genuine dynamic equilibrium which today we call a steady state above which oxygen up maximal oxygen uptake is inadequate metabolites are accumulating fatigue and exhaustion setting in and that’s not a million miles away from how we see it today and AV hill was a solid gold genius but we have updated it since and this is the if you like the modern conception of this we now know that critical speed or critical power is a submaximal exercise parameter above which no steady state is possible and that’s what you see in the red there reaching V2 Max with task failure or exhaustion occurring soon after below the critical power we see the attainment of a steady state heavy intensity exercise exercise can continue for a considerable period of time and the scientists who should really be credited with developing this model of V2 kinetics is the late great Brian J whip he was my uh PhD examiner so uh if you think about you know sitting in front of Brian and answering questions for two and a half hours that was every bit as bad as a fiz sock presentation back in the day but Brian was also a very talented decathlete in his earlier years here doing the high jump properly with an iron bar and a sand pit um but he was so good he was offered a place at lfra college and he did his first uh higher education qualification in physical education and I say that because lafra has a history not simply of training students but training future field leaders of which Brian was clearly one one of the things Brian said about the non-steady state and the V2 response in the non-steady state is that it’s actually an index of the ongoing fatigue process and we can measure that in a number of different ways and one of the ways is with high density EMG so we put electrode arrays on various muscle groups and we can decompose the signal and track what Moy units are actually doing during the fatigue process so here we have some data from Tamara valentic and yakob karabot and what they’ve done here is ramp and hold contractions at 50% of the maximal voluntary torque and then uh ramp down again and from the signals you pick up from the surface of the skin you can detect various motor units and track them as fatigue progresses and you can see a couple of elements of common motor unit Behavior going on so we take this motor unit here in the first contraction and compare it to what it’s doing in the second one it’s increased its firing rates we can also see another motor unit is recruited in that second contraction and those processes will continue as fatigue progresses and when you look at the motor unit firing rate uh what this paper discovered was that there’s a slight reduction reaches an inflection point and then systematically increases until task failure occurs and at that point the motor unit is not firing at the maximum rate that it could so we got a reaction to peripheral fatigue but also some Central fatigue curtailing maximal firing rate and if you think about what’s Happening Here of course there’s also motor unit recruitment going on all of that is going to increase the energy cost of the task the option and requirement of the task which might partially explain this slow component driving V2 to V2 Max but that process only occurs above the critical power so it’ be worth knowing what it is that causes critical power so that we can do something about trying to increase the scope of the work in which this kind of thing does not happen and there’s been some phenomenal work in this area done at lfra um this is with Emma supervised by Richard Ferguson what they did here was they took muscle biopsies and then determined muscle fiber type and capillary morphology with the data using uh imunohistochemistry staining um so using various antibodies you see the red um fibers there those are type one slow twitch fibers the blue are type two fibers and then the uh luminous green those are the capillaries and you can see here a participant with a low critical power and one with a high critical power and it’s visually obvious what the differences are when they correlated these you can see there’s a strong cor positive correlation between the critical power and the percentage of type one muscle fibers what they also found was there was an extremely strong correlation between the capillary contacts per fiber and critical power both for type one fibers and type 2 fibers now we know that the mitochondrial Zink if you like for oxygen is far larger than the cardiovascular system can supply and so if you want to maintain a high rate of oxidative energy transfer you need a high rate of oxygen transport and therefore peripheral oxygen delivery and that’s why we see this High capillary density in the muscle as well but we can also look inside the muscle itself and understand what that oxidative Machinery is doing and we can do that in a number of different ways we can take a muscle biopsy and we can make homogenate measurements of citrate synthes activity that’s our measure of mitochondrial volume density but we can also permeabilize the fibers and put them into a high resolution respirometer so we can actually measure the electron transfer system and and its maximal rate as well and correlate that with the critical power and this is work done by amongst others Don pedan um Steven Bailey and uh Richard Ferguson as well and so when we do that uh we first of all see the relationship between critical power and citrate synthes activity is a strong and positive correlation but what we really want to know is what’s going on in the electron transfer system and to do that uh we use a protocol where we provide various substrates uncouplers and Inhibitors so that we can determine both the coupled and uncoupled maximal rate of electron transfer across uh or in complexes one and two if you like the entry stages of the electron transfer system and then what you can do is take those data and correlate that with critical power and there’s no positive or in fact no correlation in those data it’s actually a nice negative finding because in this particular case what it means is if you want to improve your critical power you need to grow your met abolic Machinery you don’t necessarily to worry too much about the vagaries of or the intrinsic properties of uh the mitochondria themselves and of course what improving critical power will do is increase the scope of the heavy intensity domain if you like and the key difference there is that the fatigue mechanisms and therefore the the reason why you’re able to endure is very different from the severe domain so we’re talking about metabolic acute accumulation and depletion here we’re talking about many different things uh in this domain things like fuel utilization glycogen depletion fluid losses in the heat for example Central fatigue and muscle damage if the exercise modality is relevant and ler has done work in all of these areas in the past what I’d like to do is highlight one area of strength and that is environmental physiology and hydration and Lewis James has led on some work and I see Mark funnels also in the audience and this was an A A study that really highlights the rigor of work here at lra because when hydration studies are typically done to impose hypohydration that’s usually done by fluid restriction if you’re then going to have a performance measure in there the participant may be influenced by the fact that they know they’re getting less drink so it’s not blinded and so they might expect a worse performance and so you’re essentially generating a noo effect in all of your research and that needed sorting out so so what Mark and Lis did was set up a study where they both had a blinded condition and an unblinded condition uh for their participants in the unblinded condition the participants told exactly what was going to happen so you’re going to have a u hydration condition where we’re going to feed you drink and a an hypohydration condition where we’re going to restrict it and then we’re going to do a performance trial and we’re expecting it to be worse cuz that’s what we would expect then they had a blinded condition and they used a nasogastric tube here to feed the uh participants or to infuse the participants with the amount of fluid they wanted for each condition the key Point here is the participants were told that they were testing two different sports drinks and they didn’t want taste to get in the way of that and so that they would be U hydrated in both conditions so the participants were expecting the same level of hydration when they came to do the performance dve then they set them off on 2 hours of steady state cycling at 50% of maximal work rate in the heat which must have been fun and then they did a time trial of a fixed amount of work which would take approximately 15 minutes but they tried to complete that work as fast as possible and here’s what they found so in the unblinded condition as you would expect hypohydration led to worse performance than you hydrated uh condition but in the blinded participants those that thought they were U hydrated in both cases exactly the same effect on performance so this is the first work to show that hypohydration does have a negative impact on performance even when you think you’re U hydrated so it is not a no sio effect now thinking about uh so the reason I say that is because this is a really nice example of how lra often goes and usually goes the extra m m in trying to get to the right answer in this kind of work talking about going extra miles I’d like to finish off with what I think is the next Frontier in uh endurance physiology and that’s durability and physiologist being physiologist we have three names for this now so it’s durability fatigue resistance or resilience depending on which literature you read but it’s the notion that the parameters of Fitness we know about things like running economy V2 Max lactate threshold critical speed etc etc we assume they’re fixed so when you measure them in the fresh State those will be the parameters that last throughout any race but if you do enough exercise eventually those parameters will start to break down and in this case Michel zanini um supervised by Jonathan fand and Richard blro they were looking at the effect of long duration exercise on running economy so they had two groups running for 90 minutes at their first lactate threshold and then were measuring the oxygen cost of exercise as it went along and you can see that after about 10 kilm the oxygen cost starts to rise in both groups but in the high performance Runners it Rose Less in other words they were more durable you might then think well for the low uh low performance Runners what could be done to enhance that durability well there’s training obviously but there are other studies uh done in exitor uh where michelia has been for a while where they’ve looked at feeding carbohydrate and it turns out that carbohydrate feeding can improve durability in those that that lack it and that sort of goes all the way back to the beginnings of lra and uh its studies of carbohydrate metabolism so i’ just like to end by acknowledging just some of the people who are working in this area I haven’t included too many PhD students but I got to have two or three further slides with people working in this area so and this work continues and it is definitely excellent and one final thing to say on the subject of endurance today marks my 15th wedding anniversary so I would like to thank my wife for exercising tolerance thank you very much [Applause] excellent thank you very much there mark for providing an excellent overview for all the the great work in endurance physiology that is is done in the school so uh personally I think that’s been an absolutely fabulous afternoon there of presentations to really highlight the breadth and depth of quality of work that’s done in physiology as I said we could have had a whole day dedicated to this with different staff and colleagues presented but I think the colleagues who have presented have done a wonderful job of showcasing uh what what great work has been done here starting from the early roots that that Clyde has highlighted onto some of the the Milestones Mark pointed out to some of the the other work that that’s gone on uh we did have a pack schedule so we didn’t have time between the talks for any questions but what we do have now outside is is a networking reception so I hope some of you can join for a drink before many of you I’m sure will shoot off to the football so there’ll hope to be good opportunities there for for networking and and further discussions so it just remains me to thank our speakers uh today for their their great contributions and again I’d like to thank uh the physiological Society for honoring us with this this great award it really does mean a great deal to us to be recognized by by the society in this way and and I hope this has actually stimulated colleagues to think how they can engage more widely with the physiological Society moving forward so so that I’d like to bring today’s session for AO to a close and I’d like to invite you all outside to have have a drink and and celebrate this award for the school so thank you everyone for coming