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94 JULY 2012 • HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
sport. Athletes are realizing that themore
you leave these kinds of things to chance,
the more you’re going to be missing your
goals by tenths.”
Weightlifters who train with sensors
on their spines, for example, can hone
their posture to be perfectly vertical for
maximum thrust, says Neil Schell, direc-
tor of business development for the 3-D
motion-tracking company Polhemus.
“They know there’s an optimal path for
that barbell, which is almost straight up
and down. You don’t want to move it back
and forth, because that’s
wasted energy,” says Schell,
whose firm’s products are
also used by Olympic gym-
nasts. “The crux of why
people are using motion
tracking is that the differ-
ences among elite athletes
are so small now. And it’s not
as clear to the naked eye, or
even to an experienced
coach, what those subtle
differences may be.”
New motion-analysis
cameras can see movement
at as fast as 250 frames per
second, almost 20 times
the speed of the naked eye
and five times as fast as HD
cameras. “Nothing gets away,” says Joseph
Jimenez, co-founder of themotion-capture
company Performance 3D. “And in sports,
where there’s also this backlash against
performance-enhancing drugs, people
want to utilize their God-given talents to
the best of their ability, but in the bestway.
So a lot of coaches andplayers are catching
up with the science.”
Not all Olympians are happy about
this. “You have the guys who blow off the
science, where it’s ‘I’m the man.’ There are
a lot of egos,” says Ali Boolani, a profes-
sor of kinesiology and exercise studies at
Oklahoma City University who studies
carbohydrate and electrolyte loading
and how it affects fatigue and focus, and
who works with several Olympians as a
strength coach. “But the biggest thing they
want is to get be er, and they’re very, very
driven. Whatever they’ve got to do, they’re
going to do it.”
Ego is not entirely a bad thing in a
world-class athlete—or a coach, for that
ma er, says Clay’s jump coach, KevinReid.
“But you’remissing the boat if you’re inten-
tionally staying away from some of this
technology,” he adds. “I would be foolish
to think I could catch everything I need to
catch on those last three steps on the long
jump without needing to slow it down.”
Most Olympians are part of a new
tech-savvy generation that embraces
this, Verstegen says. “It doesn’t intimidate
them,” he says. “They view themselves as
athletes much more like something in
Madden,” the bestselling football video
game series.
The next frontier? Training above the
neck. That’s the mo o of Axon Potential,
which uses touchscreen technology to
help those Madden-schooled athletes
increase their reaction times by, for
instance, responding to an object coming
toward themon a tablet at high speed. “At
the super-elite level of sports, the differ-
ence between the competitors is so small
that, when you think about it, it’s ama er
of the entire body functioning,” says Jason
Sada, the company’s managing director.
“It’s physical skill, strength and endur-
ance, but also cognitive skill and cognitive
strength and endurance.”
Scientists are also studying athletes’
brainwaves to determine the best mental
state at the key moment—an archer, say,
at the second he releases his arrow—then
trying to reproduce it. “What we haven’t
tapped into is the psycho-
physiology of sports: the
brain waves athletes have
when they’re in the zone,”
says Gregg Steinberg, a
psychologist who has done
research in this area.
Some of that work is
under way at the University
of Maryland, where Brad
Hatfield, a professor of exer-
cise and sports psychology,
has already found that top
athletes focus their brains by
unconsciously tampingdown
the static of emotion and
other nonmotor processes.
Nowhe’s trying to find a way
tohelp themdo it onpurpose.
“Your act of faith is that that can trans-
late to the real world,” Hatfield says. But if
it does, he says, “your focus is going to be
be er and your communication with the
skeletal muscles is going to bemore delib-
erate and efficient. The coach of the future
will be a coachwho has a theoretical view
of elite performance, just like a scientist.”
Back at the trackwithBryanClay, BMW
engineer Cris Pavloff says he’s already see-
ing that up close onhis videomonitors and
in the readouts on his laptops. “To see how
athletic and how amazing these people
already are, and the things they can do
with their bodies,” Pavloff says, “it really
rams home the fact that they are finely
tuned machines.”
LITHUANIA
16
VENEZUELA
11
TRINIDAD
AND
TOBAGO
14
AZERBAIJAN
16
CHILE
13
ALGERIA
14
COLOMBIA
11
PAKISTAN
10
SCREEN PLAY A pitcher undergoes “athletic
brain training” at the Axon Potential lab