Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
what's up everyone
season two of nova now is officially
back in action
and what better timing because there's
so much news happening right now
and headlines they don't really make up
their mind they're like your favorite
home team which sometimes wins sometimes
loses and just leaves you with a lot of
questions
well that's where we come in we're in
search of facts
we just want the answers and in every
episode that's what we're going after
and we do that
by finding the science behind the
headlines now as you know because you're
faithful listeners
it's been a minute it's been a few
months and a lot
happened during the pandemic the world
health organization today declared the
coronavirus a global pandemic now gyms
were among the first businesses to close
in the pandemic major events have been
cancelled or postponed for the first
time in many years
from the tokyo olympic games to football
matches fields
arenas and stadiums will be empty for a
long time to come
but hey we got creative even without
gyms
being serious i was doing pull-ups on
traffic signs people drove by and
they're like that guy's kind of weird
but kind of not because we're in a
pandemic and you got to do what you got
to do
and then in a clutch fierce match round
science got the knockout the scientists
have done it and they've used the virus
itself to perform a kind of biological
jujitsu
to turn the virus on itself in the form
of
a vaccine whether it's tossing a ball or
wrestling on the mat
young athletes all over are eager to get
back to playing sports
whether you used to run marathons or
compete professionally as a crossfitter
or just walk around outside
around people the pandemic forced most
of us to slow postpone
or cancel altogether our physical
fitness routines
to minimize the risk of viral spread as
infection rates drop and quarantine
restrictions are lifted
we're using this episode to explore both
the science behind our bodies and sports
what happens when we take a break and
ideas that might help
all of us get back into the game this is
nova now
i'm a location
[Music]
right on
i typically cycle about five days a week
five to six
you know i train 12 hours a week if i
count the strength training and
the cycling and a lot of it is indoors
steven seiler is a researcher and
professor of exercise physiology
at the university of ogder in christian
sun norway by way
of texas and he's telling us about his
impressive stats on zwift
basically a training app i am coming up
on
1000 hours wow on zwift
you may not exercise that much and with
covet 19 lockdowns and restrictions
there is a good chance your fitness
routine completely became unhinged
now let's turn to seiler's expertise to
better understand
exercise physiology and how our bodies
work you know running is maybe what
we're
best designed to do walking running it's
built into our neuro
biology we have this pattern you know so
children
you don't have to actually teach them
how to run it just kind of happens
but we've got a tremendous
potential for getting more out of that
genotype you might say
genotype refers to the dna passed on to
an organism from its parents
in other words an individual's
collection of genes
and most genes contain the information
required for our cells
to synthesize or make proteins
and by exercising we can actually alter
protein synthesis
how cool is that and we can change the
synthesis rates of different proteins
and what results
is things like the blood volume
increases which means the cardiovascular
system becomes more efficient it pumps
more blood per beat
we start synthesizing more mitochondrial
enzymes the mitochondria aka the
powerhouse of the cell
these aerobic factories that convert
uh the carbohydrates and the fats that
we eat
into the energy currency of all of our
cells
and so very quickly when we get out the
door and start doing some of those
runs we start to increase the production
of that machinery so we have more
mitochondria
the body starts to actually build more
tiny capillaries the tiniest of those
blood vessels that
in that cardiovascular tree that starts
with the
aorta coming out of the heart and all
the way down to just
billions of tiny capillaries well that
network of capillaries
gets even more dense and thick and
that's good
uh so just a tremendous amount of stuff
starts happening
the brain changes to a certain extent so
you know we
start to get better at the actual
running mechanics
and one of the things that probably
people who first start running
will observe is they get sore uh the
first few runs you know they're like
this is
awful how am i going to keep doing this
but but it gets better because
stretching that happens with muscles
when you run it actually
kind of tears apart the membranes of
those fibers
but that also triggers more synthesis of
proteins
in the connective tissue so the muscles
get more resistant
they literally get tougher then you
don't get sore
from those same runs that you were sore
from the first few
days so there's just this whole
cacophony of
of adaptations that kicks in pretty fast
and the net result is that you don't
lose your breath as quickly when you
start
jogging there's adaptations to the heat
you you sweat faster you sweat
more so you thermoregulate better so i
mean
exercise is just one of the most potent
stimuli for changes in our physiology
that exists
for millennia even before the first
olympic games of ancient greece
in 776 bce humans have recognized the
importance of exercise and physical
activity but in the late 1800s and early
1900s
we started gathering and analyzing the
data documenting its impact on our
health
and these early epidemiological studies
show that physically inactive people
were more likely to have coronary heart
disease than those with more
active lifestyles translation humans are
meant to move
and it kind of reflects the reality that
we are designed for regular activity
that should be our baseline is
genetically we come from
a a history of moving pretty regularly
pretty often
every darn day because we just we had to
it totally makes sense
and i think a lot of people including
myself saw the
negative effect of sitting still sitting
on our railroads
all day long during the pandemic and
just kind of feeling totally out of funk
from your perspective what kind of
physiological changes
can you expect to see in the average
person who just hasn't been able to get
out there and get
moving as much well the adaptations fade
the body is amazingly efficient but what
the body basically says is i don't need
this anymore
this organism is no longer asking me to
do this work and as quickly as that
stress
resolves as soon as you quit doing this
when people go
into space and gravity is eliminated
they also
lose bone mass they lose muscle mass all
of these things because now that
stimuli is not there that's one of the
big challenges with with space fly
to the international space station as
all of my family and friends know i love
to run when i'm on earth
astronaut karen nyberg was a flight
engineer aboard the international space
station for expeditions 36 and 37
in 2013. luckily we have the capability
to run here on the space station too
in fact it's one of the three exercises
that we do on a daily basis
to help keep our hearts and our bones
and our muscles strong
while we're here without the gravity
pull of earth
affecting our body every single day in a
way we've had a kind of a space flight
situation because people were
forced into their homes they couldn't
get out on their bikes they couldn't run
you know in the worst scenarios what we
were seeing in italy and in france and
perhaps part
areas in the united states was man there
was just really strict curtailment of
the opportunities for exercise so that
puts a damper on
your jogging and your your fitness
training and now suddenly
you do not have that stimuli for
adaptation
and you lose some of the adaptations
that were hard fought for
with your regular jogging trips your
trips to the gym to do strength training
and so the muscle mass went down the
cardiovascular fitness got
poor and probably you were used to being
able to eat
more and you kept eating more and so
probably
quite a lot of people gained weight we
saw an overall a big change in body
composition
less muscle more fat and so as people
try
to kind of reshift and regain their 2019
body compositions if you were the
personal
trainer for over a billion people would
you recommend people just go back out
to their old routines or use this moment
for a little
reinvention if you will well it's not
either or i do think that
we learn from some of these situations
the good news is if i'm the coach of a
billion people i'm going to say
hey you know what that same body is
there that same capacity to adapt is
there
don't think you have to achieve it all
in a week just get back out there
get the routine started again then
everything else is going to happen
but i do think that one of the problems
that we're going to see
is that people they're going to be in a
hurry
to get back what they've lost and then
we're going to see
various kinds of injuries and so just
ease into it a little bit folks
so that we don't replace one reason not
to be able to exercise with a new reason
is because you've got a
you went out there and ended up tearing
something and i think easing into it
is probably key for the majority people
who haven't been hit in the weight rack
in about a year and a half but what
about the physiologic effects of the
stress
that you mentioned on our body is that
something that
people also need to take into account
well stress is an interesting concept
but there are many different ways it
gets triggered
and i think for a lot of people exercise
was a healthy release
for this stress mechanism
and when it gets taken away then for a
lot of people it was psychologically
challenging you know they
they needed that their bodies and their
brains had developed a certain
dependency
stress is accumulative it comes from
many different directions
and we generally have ways of mastering
in it but when we have these routines
and they get
abruptly changed and dramatically
changed that
that really challenges people it
challenged my daughter
who's a distance runner and boy olympic
athletes who are perhaps some of the
most
uh regimented the most structured in
their lifestyles
they were really hit hard
a lot of athletes were really struggling
psychologically
[Applause]
you look at these professional athletes
elite level athletes and a lot of them
stand in this hero space
shayon arigon is a biomechanist and
chiropractor
they start to feel like i'm invincible
they start to feel like
this doesn't affect me and so then they
start ignoring how much this pandemic
really did set them back because really
they were lonely they were sad
they were stripped of the one thing that
they pretty much did the most
consistently all day so a lot of times
that's their
outlet a lot of times that's where they
release
that's where they have the most fun
that's where they interact with the most
people adigan's also a two-time olympian
who competed for nigeria in the 2012
summer olympics
and 100 meter hurdles and in 2018 i
competed in the winter olympics
as the driver of the first ever bobsled
team for the continent of africa
making me the only athlete on the planet
to compete in both the summer and winter
olympics for an african country
through all this she was struggling with
some serious medical issues
so anyone understands the body and mind
of an olympian athlete
under stress even the idea of feeling
like
gosh i can't do the things that i know
that i'm capable of doing
or i can't be called on to perform in
the ways that i know that i can perform
there are a lot of residual effects from
that uh
mentally that a lot of athletes are
dealing with right now
and it's not only athletes we all have
felt the force of the pandemic
in our bodies more on all that after the
break
[Music]
well a very good start there by adegan
of nigeria and she leads shot at the
moment
during her career as an athlete shenyo
arigon became a two-time
two-sport two-season olympian and you
may think she
started off as track as her first sport
and you'd be wrong
funny enough i was actually a basketball
player but i happen to be
what i like to call hood fast which
means
you you could beat everybody with your
shoes off in the middle of the street
head back elbows flying
so uh when i got to uh my senior year in
high school
that was when i i really decided that i
was gonna do this track thing
for real you know i didn't really start
running any times worth a division one
school
noticing until right before the the
month before going to college
within my first season as a collegiate
athlete qualified for the national
championships and we all realized that
okay
maybe these legs were kind of made to
run i ended up becoming
three-time national champion for nigeria
and then a
summer olympian it just kind of sprung
upon me
after having friends in track and field
that went into the sport of bobsled
so my friends that were competing in
winter sports cheering for them seeing
the sport i was like man i think i can
actually do this sport you know maybe
i'm not
done with sport but done with track so
yeah i ended up uh getting into the
sport of bobsled and making the us team
that 26 in 2016 and that's when i
realized that
i needed to go ahead and do something
bigger which was to
start the first african team i do have
to ask
you you know what it was like
transitioning to bobsledding as a track
and field star and what you did to
prepare
and the reason i'm asking this question
for our listeners out there is because
of a very legit
video i saw about you building a
training cart
for bobsledding yes today's uh
monday september 7th labor day 2015.
i am trying to find the supplies
to build a sled that i would practice
with
in houston so i went to the hardware
store and i picked up a bunch of wood
and i
built a sled out of wood in my garage
and it
ended up becoming not only the most
useful
tool to help me stay competitive that
season
but then it also became the most
important tool at creating the nigerian
bobsled team
i'm about to build a sledgehammer and
adigun didn't stop there
after all this she combined her love of
sports
with her nerdy science side and became a
biomechanist and chiropractor
so i needed to understand every single
part
of what it takes fundamentally to
execute a sprint a jump
a throw whatever movement that we're
trying to do
what happens to the anatomy when we are
trying to perform at our best so i've
been a biomechanist
for about 10 years now a little over 10
years and really just understanding
the shapes sizes forces angles
the way that you move and how that
translates to
injuries injury prevention and
production of excellence and so i
translate
the things that you do well or the
things that you're inefficient at doing
as an athlete and show you now how to do
that
as a chiropractor i look at making sure
that
everything from the joints from
the head to the toes are all in optimal
functional
positions i think one can absolutely
empathize with some of her patients
when she got to the 2012 games she
herself was struggling with an injury
i learned that i had a short tibia
and that was my lead leg for my hurdle
leg
and at the games i had a stress fracture
in that leg so this leg was at any given
time ready to snap in half
and i thought to myself what could have
come of my career had someone
noticed before the olympic games
that i had an anatomically short leg and
i had been able to
train and adapt to an actual performance
life
with whatever i needed to be to be able
to be the most efficient i could be
so i work a lot with nfl athletes mba
athletes and olympians
because what i have to offer
is not just limited to what i've learned
academically
reaching the pinnacle of sport twice
hey i understand i get it and and i can
envision what it is that you need as
well as help you get there
watching you compete at the height of
your track and field career
looking back on that were you listening
to your own body like when when it came
to the stress fracture how did you
as an athlete how do you juggle pushing
yourself too hard versus
listening to the physical signs the
physical manifestations of injury in our
bodies
so what i did at the peak of my career
was i learned my body's language i knew
before they the doctors even told me
that if i got an x-ray
that i had the dreaded black line there
was a definitely a crack in that in that
leg
for sure i knew when i hit the ground i
was like this leg
is a goner that year because of
everything i had gone through mentally
emotionally physically with my health
and all of my entire career was
essentially built up for that year
so me and my body had a very clear
understanding of what was going to
happen that year
we were going to keep going and we were
going to leave it to god to
tell us that this leg was not going to
make it
because at that point i was willing to
allow my leg to snap in half
before i was done there was no way i was
going to
willingly accept defeat
so my body and i we had conversations
are we going too far
are we not we were getting treatment
every single
day acupuncture laser massage therapy
i had a chiropractor that i was seeing
then i would wear a sleeve
i would tape it every day like i was
doing whatever i needed to do
to push out the inevitable
which was that there was a crack in that
bone
so yeah i i had to rise to another state
mentally in order to achieve what i did
that year
a lot of us were sitting around and
saying well how is the pandemic affected
training i'm curious how it would affect
a hurdler
i don't think you can practice jumping
hurdles like in the living room or at
equinox so could you give us an idea
using
you know running hurdles as an example
of what it was like to train during the
pandemic
but people were riding their bikes
people were swimming
doing pool workouts running in shallow
ends just to get their sprint endurance
up with low impact
people were taking mini hurdles you know
like these little wickets and putting
them in the backyard
and running through those you know
people were trying to get as creative
as they could but there's nothing like
actually
jumping a hurdle or hurdling a hurdle
training as a professional athlete in a
hurdler specifically
comes with repetition right even when i
had my stress fracture
and was unable to train the things that
i
leaned on was visualization a lot of
athletes who did not have the
opportunity to train during
the pandemic could only really rely on
their visualization
numerous studies show that some of the
firing patterns and neurological
responses that come from
visualization are also really useful
when it comes to learning a complex
motor skill
it's not just about doing the physical
motion a lot of what people did during
the pandemic honestly was a lot of
nothing
right it was a lot of at-home crunches
at home push-ups
at home um uh squats and
sit-ups and you know just things that
were like oh you know we'll be back at
the track in a week oh we'll be back at
the track in a month
and so now you've got people trying to
get ready for the biggest year in track
and field
and they're coming off of basically a
year of very inconsistent to minimal
activity
when you go to a gym or a track or you
train with your coaches every day your
body creates this like muscle memory
so when you break in that consistency
your body is trying to adapt to what
this new reality is
were there any specific mechanical
changes you saw in your athletes because
of the pandemic because of the
inconsistent training
a lot of misfiring of muscles
people were sitting for much longer
right
and so with sitting you get a lot more
shortening of like your hip flexors so
super super tight hip flexors and glutes
were just not
firing properly glutes being the
strongest muscle
on the entire back side of the body
they're supposed to be your power
they're supposed to put in all of your
explosion and now you've got people who
are not able to really generate the same
forces or powers that they were doing
so they're over compensating and so now
i'm seeing so many more
uh hamstring and groin strains and
now also getting people who are having
these twinges in their knees
because of of the way that these muscles
insert into these different joints
and one of the things that i was most
nervous for was that
this year there were going to be a lot
of
injuries everyone's background training
was was weak
and they just kind of came up out of the
dust and were so eager to get back to
sport that they just jumped back in
perseverance is kind of like your
entire mo yep what do you say to people
who feel
completely defeated by the past year or
more than a year
you know especially the athletes out
there how do you motivate them
i had the privilege of staring death in
the face twice
what it did was it helped me value
everything that i was experiencing while
i'm still breathing
it taught me that every moment and every
opportunity
should be maximized i survived it
so what am i going to do with my time
here now and that was really what became
my driving force
opportunities only come once in a
lifetime and if you spend all your time
trying to question whether you should do
it or not
you're wasting your time just go for it
just do it you're here
is that a process of dealing with fear
that anyone can apply
to anything that they may be afraid of
because of the pandemic and life
after the pandemic what that is is that
common thread
between everything that you've just
heard right the broken leg
whether you're gonna make it out of the
pandemic successfully or not
like this is all about conquering that
fear of the unknown
because you don't know what's on the
other side of the door but you won't
know
until you try and the issue that people
have it when it comes to the word fear
is that they allow it to
disable them i just wasn't going to
willingly give
up everything i had worked for for that
past three and a half years to make it
to the olympic games when i
knew that i had done everything that i
needed to
to get there don't allow fear
to prevent you from trusting yourself
because that's what fear does
it eliminates self-worth and self-trust
and self-belief fear is just an
opportunity to grow
back to the pandemic many athletes both
professional and amateur
like yours truly spent weeks months or
even more than a year
inactive we all went through something
scientists call
d training you know the term we use is d
train they're losing that fitness
but to a certain extent it wasn't a big
deal because the
all the big races were called off anyway
here again
is steven seiler nobody was able to
compete so
everybody was in the same boat and the
boat was just basically sinking nobody
could do anything
you know when the olympics were delayed
and world championships were not held
but there's a chronobiology that
develops our biology kind of starts
tuning in to that ebb and flow of energy
and so forth and then all of a sudden
that's taken away
so everyone has been dealing with this
in different ways
but if i stick to what i know best which
is sports and training
i think the psychological trauma was
even bigger than the physiological
the good thing about being an athlete
and having trained for years and years
and years
is there are some neuromuscular pathways
there are some adaptations that
they don't go away very quickly so that
when these athletes have come back
after some months they they get it back
and and we do too
you know if you've learned how to play
tennis if you've learned how to swim and
you've got that technique
well unfortunately that's in there those
pathways are
they don't disappear easily at all they
get rusty and you got to shake the rust
off with some workouts but you quickly
say ah you know
okay i can still ride a bike what's the
take-home message for
the person who isn't necessarily a
competitive athlete but just wants to
work out four to five times a week
it should be pretty enjoyable it should
feel you know
there should be something nice about
getting out there and getting up to that
steady state
where you're you know yeah you're
breathing yeah you're sweating but
you're in a rhythm and you feel like
you are in control of the exercise the
exercise is not in control of you
it's about intent and understanding that
we have to
balance you know is having that rhythm
and my daughter calls it a training flow
we're in this for the long haul folks
and what gives results for us
as exercisers is continuity
is staying healthy not getting injured
not getting burned out and being able to
get out there
regularly are we going to push ourselves
sometimes yes
don't get me wrong that's good if you
can do that but it can't be every day
sometimes you need to be kind to
yourself
that's part of that sustainability
compassion is key
not just for us as a species but for our
muscle
coordination strength i love it dr
schuyler thank you so much
thank you i've enjoyed this nova now is
a production of gbh and prx it's
produced by
terence bernardo ari daniel jocelyn
gonzalez isabel hibbard
sandra lopez monsalve and rosalind
tordesillias
what muscle group are people not paying
attention to
that's a generalization glutes your
gluteus
maximus it's the biggest muscle of your
body 90 of people that walk into my
office go to not firing or are
weak use it which means go a little
deeper on squats
do lunges because that big muscle
will fade if you don't use it julia
court and chris schmidt are the
co-executive producers of nova
dante graves is director of audience
development suki bennett is senior
digital editor
christina monan is associate researcher
robin kasmer is science editor
lorena lyon is digital production
assistant and devin robbins is managing
producer of podcasts at gbh
our theme music is by the dj who always
lifts me out of an inactive state
dj kid koala i'm alok patel we'll be
back in two weeks
which is plenty of time for you to go
rock climbing square dancing surfing
make snow angels
do parkour go spelunking jump into
qriket match chase squirrels
do pull ups on scaffolding in the street
it doesn't matter it's plenty time for
you to get out there and move
[Music]
gbh