Know Your Own Stats

Alex Teuten explains how ordinary athletes can gain an edge by undergoing performance testing

- Alex Teuten

With the notable exception of the well-documented new midsole technology that now features in many performance shoes, the improvement in times across all running disciplines from 100m to marathon has been almost solely down to knowledge. This is ironic considering one wouldn’t think you need your brain to run!

However, it is our understanding of the body in terms of nutrition, equipment, conditioning and how best to extract every ounce of performance that I believe has led to such drastic advances worldwide. One only needs to look at the recent marathon performances (where Eliud Kipchoge ran inside two hours in Vienna and Brigid Kosgei’s world record in Chicago) to highlight this.

Sports performance testing is very prominent now. For elite athletes it is something akin to commonplace and there are many cut-price options for the brainy runner looking to gain an edge through statistics and knowledge.

The most frequently used laboratory tests for athletes assess the physiological responses to a series of submaximal exercise stages, as well as quantifying the upper limits of an individual’s physiological responses, as assessed during maximal exercise. For runners this test is typically carried out on a treadmill and can be undertaken as two separate tests. That is, a sub maximal test and a maximal test, or as a single, combined test, where after a series of sub maximal exercise stages the runner immediately progresses into the maximal test (without recovery). The advantage of the second approach is that it is more time efficient (for the athlete and the scientist) and has little effect on the data obtained.