Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/080392/08039936.000

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                                                                                OLYMPICS, Page 58

1992 SUMMER GAMES

Engineering the Perfect Athlete


The pulsating industry of sports science is pushing the outer
limits of human performance. The new formula: less pain, more
gain. But beware of the hype and the hokum. Sweat still counts

By ANASTASIA TOUFEXIS -- With reporting by Ann Blackman/
Washington, Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles and Rhea Schoenthal/Bonn


    From the time he took up the long jump at age 11, Mike
Powell showed great potential. But in his first 15 years of
competition he had trouble making it to the far end of the
sandpit. His jumps consistently measured in the 7.6-m-to-7.9-m
range, more than a meter short of record-breaking territory.
Then in 1988 he began improving rapidly. At the world
championships in Tokyo last August, Powell came into his own.
He bounded down the runway, hit the board and soared 8.95 m,
eclipsing by 5 cm the "unbreakable" record set by America's Bob
Beamon 24 years ago. A believer in nonstop improvement, Powell
thinks he could set another record in Barcelona.

    What accounts for his amazing metamorphosis from also-ran
to world-beater? Powell, 28, gives credit to a five-year
scientific training plan devised by his coach, Randy Huntington,
who goes by the nickname "Mr. Gizmo" and leaves almost no
technique untried in his exhaustive approach to training. Among
the elements of Powell's regime:

    -- To increase the explosive power of his legs, Powell
runs on the track with an open drag parachute trailing behind
him. For variety, he sometimes tows a sled.

    -- In the garage at his home in Southern California, he
builds strength by working out on pneumatic weight machines,
which precisely control the velocity of his movements to prevent
damage to his joints.

    -- To avoid injury and reduce the recovery time between
workouts, he performs dozens of water exercises in his pool. He
also stimulates his muscles by applying electricity to them with
a battery-operated microcurrent device.

    Powell is caught up in the brave new whirl of sports
science. Fast disappearing are the days when an elite athlete
was simply the product of hard work, a gruff coach and a little
luck. Today science has become an indispensable part of the
formula for more and more world-class competitors, who find that
the margin between gold and silver is often a centimeter or a
hundredth of a second. Helping mold athletes today is a growing
army of specialists -- from physiologists and psychologists to
nutritionists and biomechanists. Result: athletes who are
training not just harder but smarter. With some players already
working seven hours a day, six days a week, "it is physically
and socially irresponsible to increase the volume of training
any more," says Gerd-Peter Bruggemann, a professor of
biomechanics at the German University of Sports Sciences in
Cologne. "Science must think of ways to make training more
efficient."

    One of the biggest changes brought about by sports science
is the increased use of resistance training, which includes
workouts with weights as well as sessions on machines employing
everything from hydraulic cylinders to rubber bands. Such
training has spread even to the more skill-oriented sports,
including archery and target shooting. The reason is that
scientists have learned that muscle strength produces not only
power but also stamina. At the National Sculling Center on the
Occoquan River in Woodbridge, Va., Igor Grinko, a former Soviet
rowing coach who now trains the U.S. team, has had American Keir
Pearson doing 400 pulls on the oars with 200-lb. weights
attached. "When we slack off," says Pearson, "Igor screams at
us that Russian women can lift more weight than we can." Says
Jonathan Smith, 31, a two-time Olympic medalist who is pushing
for a third prize this summer: "The volume and amount of weight
we're lifting is two to three times more than I did before."

    The goal in most cases is to increase strength without
adding bulk. "We're trying to make runners and jumpers, not body
builders," says Dave Ash, weight-training coach at George Mason
University in Fairfax, Va. One technique is to do many
repetitions at low resistance, which takes longer to increase
strength but vastly improves endurance. As part of her
pre-Olympic regimen, Jamaican long jumper Diane Guthrie has been
doing 250 leg curls every day wearing 10-lb. ankle weights. The
20-year-old Guthrie, who trained at George Mason, notes that
when she slacked off on weight training, she hurt some of her leg
muscles.

    In resistance training, athletes focus on the muscle
groups now recognized as vital to their sport. Grinko's rowers
are spending one day a week concentrating exclusively on arms,
another day on legs and a third on the back. Swimmers are
working on building up their arms because about 80% of their
propulsion through the water comes from the arms' movement.
Cyclists now give more attention to their hamstrings, a group
of muscles in the back of the thigh. "The hamstrings stabilize
the knee and transfer mechanical energy between the joints,"
explains biomechanist Robert Gregor of the University of
California, Los Angeles.

    Even individual muscles contain different fibers that
respond to specialized training. The two primary types are
so-called fast-twitch fibers, which contract rapidly to produce
large amounts of power, and slow-twitch fibers, which generate
less force but don't tire as quickly.

    People are born with different proportions of the two
fiber types, and athletes tend to excel in events for which they
have the best muscle endowment. Sprinters, such as track star
Carl Lewis and swimmer Dana Torres, have muscles containing a
large majority of fast-twitch fibers. So, surprisingly, do shot
putters and weight lifters, who need not only strength but power
too. "They have to move a heavy weight very quickly," explains
U.S. Olympic Training Center physiologist Steve Fleck. "Weight
lifters in the clean-and-jerk event can move as fast as a
sprinter." Distance runners and swimmers, on the other hand,
have mostly slow-twitch fibers.

    Heredity has a lot to do with the muscles' makeup, but
training can play a part as well. "You can't convert slow-twitch
into fast-twitch fibers," says Fleck, but you can speed them up
a bit. Middle-distance runners who want to improve their final
kick can go through drills of bounding, jumping and sprinting to
condition their muscle fibers to contract more quickly.

    Since muscles can perform only if they have fuel,
scientists have deeply probed the role of body chemistry in
generating energy. They have developed various conditioning
programs to enhance the two basic types of energy production.
One is the well-known aerobic system, in which muscles rely on
oxygen to release energy from carbohydrates, fat and some
protein. Athletes in endurance events -- as well as fitness
buffs who run or do aerobics -- draw primarily on this system,
which functions for a long time. Breathing supplies oxygen
indefinitely, but eventually the stores of carbohydrates run
out.

    The other system is anaerobic, in which muscles use
reactions that do not depend on oxygen to produce energy from
carbohydrates and other chemicals stored in the muscle.
Sprinters -- as well as nonathletes dashing from the shower to
grab a ringing phone -- rely to a large extent on this system,
which provides lots of quick power but can operate for only a
short time. The reasons: depletion of the necessary chemicals
and buildup of a chemical by-product called lactic acid, which
inhibits muscle contraction. Middle-distance athletes depend on
a delicate balance of both aerobic and anaerobic systems.

    To help determine how well energy production is going,
scientists and trainers collect air exhaled by athletes during
workouts and take blood samples to test for chemicals such as
lactic acid. Speedy computer analysis enables the trainers to
get information in time to make adjustments in subsequent
workouts.

    At the U.S. Swimming Federation's International Center for
Aquatic Research in Colorado Springs, more than 10,000 swimmers
have been tested on a swimming treadmill called a flume, in
which their oxygen intake is measured and evaluated as they
exercise. Sessions in the flume showed that Dara Torres, a
specialist in the 100-m freestyle, needed to enhance her
anaerobic system with more sprint repetitions. Such evaluations
are also helping athletes settle on the right amount of
training. Swimmers reach a peak after 12 weeks of intensive work
and then need a tapering-off period.

    Just as important is the raw material the body uses to
produce the energy. Only a generation ago, when protein was the
breakfast of champions, athletes were chowing down on steak and
eggs. Now every morsel is evaluated. At the U.S. training
center's cafeteria, each food item is labeled with its
carbohydrate, protein and fat content. Large amounts of
carbohydrates, as much as 60% to 70% of daily calories, are the
mainstay of athletes' diets, because a storehouse of such foods
helps maintain stamina. Nutritionists advise players to limit
fat intake to 30% of calories, protein to about 15%.

    While athletes require more protein than do most people to
build new muscle and repair damaged tissue, they usually fulfill
their needs by eating more food rather than increasing the
proportion of protein. The typical American consumes 2,000 to
4,000 calories of food a day; a male basketball player or
long-distance runner may take in 8,000. Many athletes also
supplement their diet with capsules of amino acids, the building
blocks of protein, though there is no convincing scientific
evidence to support their use.

    Since top athletes constantly go for broke and wind up
straining or injuring themselves, physical therapy has become
a vital part of training science. Kinesiologist Linda Huey of
Santa Monica, Calif., devised a water exercise program to help
keep long jumper Powell in shape after he had an emergency
appendectomy just six weeks before the Olympic trials in 1988.
"On land, he could not have trained," explains Huey.

    Never getting out of condition is the best way to maintain
an athletic career. Top athletes now train year-round instead
of seasonally. "It's not advancing age that necessarily hurts
performance," says American physiologist Steve Fleck, "it's
deconditioning." Experts believe that swimmer Mark Spitz, 42,
whose technique in the butterfly stroke is still regarded as
ideal, failed in his comeback bid earlier this year in part
because he had been out of condition for 17 years and did not
do enough resistance training. Nonetheless, notes Fleck, "the
trend is in the direction of the better performances coming from
older athletes."

    Athletes are complex machines going through complicated
motions. Even a power event such as the discus throw involves
an elaborate, spinning choreography. The richness of the
variables has provided a fertile field for biomechanics experts,
who use infrared lasers, force plates, high-speed video cameras
and computers to isolate the motions and moments that make a
difference. Scientists have analyzed every type of athletic
movement, from a diver's twist to a runner's stride, from a
weight lifter's lunge to a rower's stroke.

    The success of American hurdler Edwin Moses shows how
critical changes in technique can be. Before the 1976 Games,
Moses, a physics major in college and a strong proponent of
sports science, analyzed his stride and discovered that it was
longer than most hurdlers'. That, he figured, could enable him
to shave a step from the traditional 14 that most competitors
took between vaults in the 400-m hurdles'. Moses won the gold
and wrote a paper on the biomechanics of running 13-step
hurdles. Four years ago, at the U.S. Olympic trials, backstroker
David Berkoff set a new world record in the 100-m race by
swimming more than two-thirds of the first 50 m underwater using
the dolphin kick. Today nearly everyone employs the maneuver,
which cuts drag, but only for 15-m, the maximum allowed by newly
set rules.

    In preparation for Barcelona, German hammer thrower Heinz
Weis, with his trainer and a biomechanist, have been poring over
video data on Yuri Sedykh, the Soviet thrower who set a world
record in 1986 that still stands. One element of Sedykh's
success, they believe, was his ability to generate maximum power
by keeping both feet on the ground as long as possible during
the three or four preparatory spins. Scientists at the U.S.
aquatic center, working with swimming coaches, have suggested
changes to American backstroker Janie Wagstaff and freestyler
Matt Biondi in their underwater pulling patterns. Biondi was
urged to keep his wrist cocked for one-half to a full second
longer at the end of the stroke to maximize his propulsion.

    At Pennsylvania State University, sports-science
researcher John Shea has developed the "Leaper Beeper" for
divers. The system uses sensors connected to a laptop computer
to measure elements of an athlete's dive; during practice, a
beeping noise code tells the diver in the air how high he has
jumped and how far down he pushed the diving board. "We want to
give the diver immediate and precise information about the dive
so a change can be made for the next attempt," says Shea.

    For fencers, German specialists have devised a
steel-plated dummy that examines competitors' attack moves. The
mannequin has a helmet-shaped head containing a high-speed
camera mounted behind Plexiglas. Its torso is wired at strategic
locations with tiny bulbs. When a hit is scored, a red, green
or white light goes on. Tests with the dummy have shown that
speed alone is not the crucial factor in a fencer's prowess.
Athletes are more accurate when they take time and move
deliberately in the moments preceding attack.

    The most ambitious technique-enhancing device yet may be
the robot that is helping prepare America's table-tennis team
for Barcelona. Dubbed R-4 and costing $50,000, the robot can
simulate the styles of the best Ping-Pong players in the world.
A computer-driven motor that spins at 6,000 r.p.m. can shoot a
ball at up to 60 m.p.h. "The robot eliminates the need to travel
to China and Japan to practice against the best players in the
world," says Olympic hopeful Sean O'Neill. "This is a training
tool that allows you to practice against them every day."

    Sports science undeniably contains some hype and hokum.
Even its advocates are wary of excessive claims and complexity.
Alois Mader, a professor at the German University of Sport
Sciences in Cologne, points out that the highly successful
Kenyan running program is as simple as can be. "It goes: run
every day from youth on. And run so that you still enjoy it the
next day. Everything else will follow automatically.''

    No one is sure just how much further science can help push
performance. In most events, improvements will get smaller and
smaller. "It's clear the curve of progression is flattening
out," says biomechanist James Hay of the University of Iowa.

    Yet some areas show immense possibilities for improvement.
"By 2054 we'll see a mile in the 3:30s [current record:
3:46]," predicts physiologist Jay Kearney, head of sports
science for the U.S. Olympic Committee. In swimming, "we're not
near the physiological limit," says John Troup, director of
sports medicine and science for U.S. swimming. "A fish is 80%
to 90% efficient in water, a world-class swimmer only 8% to 9%.
It's not out of the realm of possibility that in six to 10 years
we could get a drop of one or two seconds in the 100-m race. In
distance events, we could take 15 seconds off." Some of that
progress will be the result of athletes who were simply born
with greater natural talent. But it will also be science that
is pushing them to be faster, higher, stronger.