Paralympic Athlete Lectures This Week’s Staff Training
For this week’s staff training, we de-camped into the labs to learn more about EMG (electromyography) – a way of recording and displaying the electrical activity in muscles. Our guide along the journey was Dan Gordon, a Paralympic World Record holding athlete who has also been a consultant physiologist for the UK Athletics Paralympic Squad (amongst others).
[warning - photos contain a disturbing depiction of male physicality :( ]
If you’ve been reading the blog for a short while, you’ll have seen that each week we ’shut up shop’ to get together for staff training – and that we regularly have guest speakers to deliver on areas of their expertise.
This week our guest speaker was Dan Gordon, world record holding Paralympic athlete and exercise physiologist.
Dan has competed as a GB athlete in three sports (swimming, track & field and cycling) and still holds a world record in track cycling. He has worked as a consultant physiologist to athletes from a diverse range of disciplines including GB Paralympic endurance runners, GB Lightweight rowers, GB cyclists, ECB/MCC academy cricketers, ultra-marathon runners and ultra-rowers. He has also been a team manager for GB VI track & field at a European level and his latest book “Coaching Science. (Active learning in sport)” was released in March 2009.
Our staff training session saw us decamp into Dan’s labs to learn about ‘EMG’ (electromyography) in more detail. If you’re not familiar with what EMG is, then it’s basically this – by carefully placing electrodes on the skin around a muscle, and by using a boat-load of computer-powered signal analysis, you can display various characteristics about the electrical activity of the muscle you’re observing.
This is all very exciting, because you can record the activity synchronised with video and categorically prove which muscles are (and aren’t) working at any given point in time during a movement.
If you were eating your food at the same time as you opened the photo of Andy flexing his enormous gun then I apologise – but what’s interesting about that photo is that during the session we wired up both of Andy’s biceps and you could visibly see on the computer screen traces that his right arm was fatigued (compared to the left) from all the showboating. Clever stuff eh?!
We’ve got some interesting plans to use this technology in some groundbreaking ways so watch this space!
PS: CAPTION COMPETITION – If you’ve got any humerous suggestions as to what you think Dan’s thinking in the last photo, then I’d be delighted to hear them (best submission wins a core cambridge t-shirt :)
