NOVA

What 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 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's happened during the pandemic. But hey, we got creative even without gyms but being serious, I was doing pull ups on traffic signs, people drove by and they're like, that guy is kind of weird, but kind of not because we're in a pandemic and you gotta do what you got to do. And then in a clutch fierce match, round 10, science got the knockout. Whether you used to run marathons or compete professionally as a cross fitter 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 in sports what happens when we take a break, and ideas that might help us all get back into the game. This is NOVA Now. I'm Alok Patel. 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. Stephen Seiler is a researcher and professor of exercise physiology at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, 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 1,000 hours on Zwift. Wow You may not exercise that much. And with COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, there's a good chance your fitness routine completely became unhinged. Now let's turn to Seidler'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 neurobiology. We have this pattern. So children, you don't have to actually teach them how to run and 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?

SS

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 powerhouses of the cell. These aerobic factories that convert the carbohydrates in 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 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. 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 the first few runs. You know, they're like, This is awful. How am I going to keep doing this? 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, 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 this whole cacophony 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 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 showed 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 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 rear ends 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 spaceflight.

NASA

Welcome to the International Space Station. As all of my family and friends now, 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. In the worst scenarios, what we were seeing in Italy and in France and perhaps part of areas in the United States was man, it was just really strict curtailment of the opportunities for exercise. So that puts a damper on your jogging and 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 a lot of people gained weight. We saw an overall 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 an 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 went out there and ended up tearing something. And I think easing into it is probably key for the majority of people who haven't been hitting the weight rack in about a year and a half. But Dr. Seiler, 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 mechanisms. And when that gets taken away, then for a lot of people it was psychologically challenging. 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 it. But we have these routines and they get abruptly changed and dramatically changed, that really challenges people. It challenged my daughter, who's a distance runner. And boy! Olympic athletes who are perhaps some of the most regimented, the most structured in their lifestyles, they were really hit hard. A lot of athletes are really struggling psychologically. You look at these professional athletes, elite level athletes, and a lot of them stand in this hero space. Seun Adigun 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. Adigun's also a two time Olympian who competed for Nigeria in the 2012 Summer Olympics in the 100 hundred 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, Adigun 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, 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. During her career as an athlete, Seun Adigun 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 could beat everybody with your shoes off in the middle of the street, head back, elbows flying. So when I got to my senior year in high school, that was when I really decided that I was going to do this track thing for real. I didn't really start running any times worth a division one school noticing until right before -- the month before going to college. Within my first season as a collegiate athlete qualified for the national championships, and we all realize that, OK, 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. Maybe I'm not done with sport, but done with track? So, yeah, I ended up getting into the sport of bobsled and making the US team 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, it's because of a very legit video I saw about you building a training cart... for bobsledding,

AMBI FROM VIDEO

and so probably a lot of people gained weight. We saw an overall big change in body composition

Today is uh Monday Sept. 7, Labor day, 2015. I'm trying to find the supplies to build a sled that I'll practice with 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 slide y'all. 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 ten years now, a little over ten 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. Adigun 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 able to be the most efficient I could be. So I work a lot with NFL athletes, NBA 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 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 it, were you listening to your own body? Like 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 in the peak of my career was I learned my body's language. I knew before the doctors even told me, that if I got an x ray, that I had the dreaded black line. There was definitely a crack 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, or 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 had to rise to another state mentally in order to achieve what I did that year. A lot of us are 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. 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. 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 and 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 squats and sit ups, and just things that were like, Oh, we'll be back at the track in a week. Or, 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's 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 your hip flexors. So super, super tight hip flexors and glutes were just not firing properly. Glutes being the strongest muscle on the entire backside 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 overcompensating. And so now I'm seeing so many more hamstring and groin strains. And now also getting people who are having these twinges in their knees because 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 weak. And they just kind of came up out of the dust and were so eager to get back to sport that they just jump back in Perseverance is kind of like your entire M.O. What do you say to people who feel completely defeated by the past year or more than 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. 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 going to 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 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 de-training. You know, the term we use is detraining, you know, they're losing that fitness. But to a certain extent, it wasn't a big deal

because all the big races were called off anyway. AP

Here again is Stephen Seiler. Nobody was able to compete. So everybody was in the same boat and the boat was just basically sinking. Nobody could do anything. And 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 get it back. 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, fortunately that's in there. Those pathways are -- they don't disappear easily at all. They get rusty. And you got to shake off the rust off with some workouts. But you quickly say, Oh, you know, OK, 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 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. Seiler, thank you so much. Thank you. I've enjoyed this.