#ICYMI - Ask a Sports Engineer, with David James

In case you missed this episode on the Playing with Science channel… Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice answer your questions and investigate the collision of sports, technology, and engineering alongside David James, sports engineer and Director of Photo Credit: The Center for Sports Engineering Research at Sheffield Hallam University. jonwick04 (https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonwick/4388363999/) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:10Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chuck Nice.

• 0:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, he is, and this is Playing with Science. Today, we only have the one guest. He's not a rock star, a film star, or even a sporting legend, but he is British. So not only will he be splendid, he will most likely live in a castle and have an army of butlers, just like everyone else does in Britain.

• 0:27Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely, and I've heard that about you guys.

• 0:29Gary O'Reilly?

  It's true.

• 0:30Chuck Nice?

  Yes. Professor David James is, however, a sports engineer with enough published work to open his own library. He's also conducted research for sportswear giant, as Gary would put it, Adidas.

• 0:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you.

• 0:43Chuck Nice?

  And worked with the world governing body of soccer, aka, I say this for you once again, football.

• 0:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you.

• 0:50Chuck Nice?

  Better known as FIFA.

• 0:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 0:52Chuck Nice?

  Along with many others.

• 0:53Gary O'Reilly?

  And last year, he spoke at What Makes a World Champion seminar. So if that's what you are aiming for, then stick around. We will do our best to get the answer out of him by hook or by crook.

• 1:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Also, we'll be answering questions of your own selection and making. So stick around if you pose some questions. We'll get the good professor to answer those as well. Best to introduce him properly.

• 1:17Chuck Nice?

  We should indeed, especially since he's one of your countrymen.

• 1:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 1:20Chuck Nice?

  And he's actually coming to us from his home in Sheffield.

• 1:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Fabulous. So Director of the Centre for Sport Engineering Research at Sheffield Hallam University. And a man who has got involved in so many different things, it could take a series of shows to cover them all. So let's get straight into things. And so, David James, welcome to Playing with Science. So as we can all start on a firm footing, can you explain what it is you actually do?

• 1:48Speaker 02

  So I'm an engineer by training. So I started off life as a mechanical engineer. But what I do is I try and, I suppose, use technology, engineering techniques to improve sports equipment. I have a great team. We're an academic group, so we're in the Sheffield University, I've got about twenty staff and about twenty PhD students. And we look at how we can use technology in sport. We use it to make athletes perform better. So we do loads of work with our Olympic teams, looking at all sorts of aspects of technology in sport. And you know, the equipment that people wear, but also how we measure them,

• 2:29Speaker 02

  data, you know, intelligence around training, all sorts of different things. But it's all around technology. And we also look at how we can prevent injuries and actually make sport more accessible for people. So it's not just the elite, but actually how you can use design and innovation to encourage, you know, physical activity and participation in sport, which is a massive, massive issue, you know, for, for the health and happiness of our, our populations as well.

• 2:55Gary O'Reilly?

  I told you it was a series, didn't I?

• 2:57Chuck Nice?

  You've got your engineering tentacles in every single area of sport where, where, no matter where it is.

• 3:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Okay. So do you design, create and create original?

• 3:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Features or, or are you one of those groups that kind of,

• 3:15Gary O'Reilly?

  someone like Adidas or any other body comes, you say, this isn't working as well as it should, help?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, a bit of both, a bit of both, actually. So we do a lot of, sometimes we work before the design moment happens. So we'll be, so take what we do with Adidas. So we're trying to understand how different players in, in, say in soccer, move differently on different surfaces, whether they're playing on synthetic turf or natural turf or, or the new hybrid turf. And, and actually that, what that does is that, that provides information for the design team to come up with products to best match the shoe with the movement on the surface. So sometimes we do the very sort of fundamental research to give the ideas for, for the design work.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Figuring out, yeah, so how does this person move? What do they like? What are the conditions like? Equally, we also get involved sometimes when the product's been made and we test it to see, well, does it really work? Does it make any difference? You know, does it increase injury risk? Does it, does it do these different things? So often we're about the ideas, the inspiration for the designs and the testing. And sometimes we do the design work ourselves as well, but actually companies are quite good at that. So as a university, we're more of a knowledge partner.

• 4:34Chuck Nice?

  So I read that you guys worked with Amy Williams. She's a British skeleton, right? She's a gold medalist skeleton, British skeleton in Vancouver. Yeah, Winter Olympics. And in Winter Olympics and she was like a hundred and forty-three kilometers per hour is what she hit as a top speed. What did you guys do with her? Because I couldn't find exact, I knew that I, I found that you were, that you had worked with her, but I couldn't find, what exactly did you do?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  This is, um, this is, this is an interesting story this actually. So, um, it's kind of amazing the, what Team GB, so Team Great Britain, um, how they've done very well in the Olympics in, in recent years, bearing in mind, um, in, in the Olympic Games in Atlanta, the Summer Olympics, we got just one gold medal. Um, you know, we were like bottom of the medal table and obviously in, uh, in Rio, you know, we, we were second in the medal table, did incredibly well. Uh, and that, that's a huge transformation. So the whole high performance system has, has changed. And technology's been a key part of that, that story. Um, in the, in the skeleton bob, this one was actually a bit controversial because, um,

• 5:51Speaker 02

  there are certain rules around what you can and can't do. And, um, we, we kind of, you know, we, we, we push things right up to the limit of what the rules say you can do in terms of the design.

• 6:01Chuck Nice?

  I read that other teams, of, of course, USA, because you know, when the USA loses, they're just like, something's terribly, terribly wrong. How is it that we, we can't lose? Anyway, um, so not just Team USA, but a couple of other teams were saying that there was a controversy surrounding her skin suit. And that her skin suit gave her an unfair advantage. How so?

• 6:25Speaker 02

  So the rules on the skin suit weren't particularly clear. They're a little bit ambiguous and we're open to debate about what you could and can do. But essentially, we had, it's kind of hard to describe, but from the helmet, we had part of her skin suits, kind of, there's a bit of structure to her shoulders.

• 6:44Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  So it kind of gave this nice profile from her head to her shoulders.

• 6:49Chuck Nice?

  Brilliant.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Which, which provided a fantastic, well, you know, a small aerodynamic advantage.

• 6:53Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  And it wasn't overly clear if that was allowed or not in the rules. And some other teams didn't like it.

• 7:02Chuck Nice?

  Uh, well.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Losing teams never like it.

• 7:04Chuck Nice?

  Let me just say this, David. If Team USA bitched about that, that is the most un-American thing you could do. Cause there is nothing more American than taking ambiguous rules and using them to your advantage.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  That's what we do. That's, that's, that's, you know, I, I believe in, you know, fair sport, good competition. But actually, the modern world of sport, you know, pushing things to the limit within the rules is what, is what you do.

• 7:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  You're there to win. You're not there to, you know, okay, look, I, I have quite strong feelings on this, but, but sport isn't a level playing field. Athletes get up in the morning to be better than their opponent. They want to train harder, get the right advice. It's all about getting an advantage. And the modern sports person really has to, you know, think of the whole picture and push things to, to the limit whilst not stepping over that limit.

• 7:59Gary O'Reilly?

  What's your favorite project? What's the favorite project for you that you've been involved in and found successful?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Okay, that's, that's good, actually. I really like that. So one of my favorite projects was working on goal line technology.

• 8:12Chuck Nice?

  Oh gosh, yep.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  With FIFA. That's been a great, a great fun thing to do. So, yeah, I've worked with FIFA, helping them to.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Basically decide whether goal line technology should be used in soccer. So this is a system which tracks where the ball is in soccer match. And it basically tells the referee if it's a goal or not. So that's been a great project, actually. And it's been really good to see a very sophisticated technology be introduced into the sport and actually change the culture of the sport because soccer has always been quite resistant to technology. And I think it's it's really changed now, actually. And that's been a great, great journey to be part of.

• 8:54Chuck Nice?

  So speaking of measurements and, you know, this goal line technology, uh, let's kind of knead that dough and push it out to all other sports. Because if you think about the one thing that is common in all the sports is there's a human being who's making a judgment call about a ball. Uh, did that ball go over the plate? Is it a strike or a ball? Did that ball actually cross the line? Is it a goal? Did that football break the plane? Is it a touchdown? So, uh, when you, when you look at that, uh, if you were to make that measurement so that there was no need of a referee,

• 9:36Chuck Nice?

  do you think that's a good thing for sports or a bad thing for sports?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Well, it's difficult, really. I think in for some, for some sports at the top, top levels, the, the, um, frankly, if you just look at the finance of it, you know, getting a decision wrong can cost hundreds of millions of pounds.

• 9:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  And it's, it's really, it's, you know, it's fundamentally unfair, I think, to have a decision that's, that's wrong be implemented because it can totally change people's futures. Uh, you know, whole cities can be affected by that if your team goes up or goes down. That's got massive implications. So some decisions are so important, they just have to be right. And you can see that, you know, in World Cups as well. It's maybe the money's not so important, but it's, it's, it's a massive, massive thing. You have to get it right. So I think for that, I think technology has a very good role to play. However, the concern is that technology comes at a price and a cost. And actually, at the lower levels of the sport, they might not be ever be able to afford this.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  And so what that can do is it can actually pull the sport apart a little bit. You have different rules for the elite to sort of everyone else.

• 10:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  That's the challenge because, you know, the idea is that someone who plays football or baseball, they're playing the same sport as their their idols, the pros.

• 10:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  So there should be one sport, not not different, different forms and sport for different structures of the game. So that's that's the real challenge. But, you know, technology is getting cheaper. Um, you know, camera technologies, mobile technologies, computer technologies, it's all getting cheaper. And as the systems get more developed and you get more companies in the game, prices will come down. So hopefully we'll, you know, become more open to everyone else.

• 11:17Chuck Nice?

  Maybe the two of you can explain something to me because you just said like whole cities, their fate can be determined.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:23Chuck Nice?

  Okay, now, we're not used to this here in America, okay? And I just found this out this weekend. Um, that when a soccer team or football team, like, okay, let's say Manchester United or, you know, Crystal Palace, whoever, when they win or lose, they can go up or down in standings that can get them put in or kicked out of a league.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 11:50Chuck Nice?

  So, oh, my God, this is insane. Who knew this? I'm telling you. So in football, in football, it's completely socialistic, okay? You can lose every single game and you are still in the NFL.

• 12:04Gary O'Reilly?

  It's called the Cleveland Browns.

• 12:05Chuck Nice?

  That's correct. So but so how's it working? How's how does this work?

• 12:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, man, it's it's frightening. It's like, Professor, if you don't mind.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:14Gary O'Reilly?

  You start August, you end in May. It may, if you finish in the bottom three of the Premier League.

• 12:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Your history, you get relegated to the division below.

• 12:23Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God.

• 12:24Gary O'Reilly?

  This is what the professor means when he says whole cities.

• 12:27Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God.

• 12:29Gary O'Reilly?

  And, you know, if you lose one game, well, okay, you don't, you don't like it, but you get on to the next one. But if you've been so bad and you finish in that bottom three, you're out of here. Now, you can imagine that in a World Cup. It's not just a city or a club. Right. It's a whole country. Oh. Can you imagine if it got robbed of a World Cup in the final? Oops. So the way, the, once you drop that pebble in the pond, the ripples can be enormous. Wow. Such ramifications. Wow.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  And so I think, I think it's interesting, the, you know, this, I mentioned about cities. So it's interesting in the UK, a really good sort of soccer team can really put your city on the international map. So, you know, when I travel around the world, I say, I'm from Sheffield. People say, well, where's Sheffield? And I say, oh, it's next to Manchester. And a lot of people know about Manchester because they know about Manchester United and Manchester City. Pretty much anywhere I go in the world, you know, really, you know, throughout Africa and all over, people, oh yeah, I know Manchester, Manchester, Manchester. And so it really affects the, the, the standing or, or how people view your city. So it has, it has very deep, profound effects, these, these decisions.

• 13:45Gary O'Reilly?

  And Sheffield.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  And being in the Premier League puts you in that top line.

• 13:48Gary O'Reilly?

  So you have two big soccer teams, Sheffield United, Sheffield Wednesday. Don't ask me about the Wednesday. Sheffield Wednesday? Yes. Is that anything like Taco Tuesday? We'll talk. Then you have the Sheffield Steelers, which is a hockey team. Then you have the Don Valley Stadium, which is track and field. Not sure about basketball, but I'm thinking there is one, but that's, so it's, it's known as the.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Sheffield Sharks.

• 14:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Steph, thank you. Sheffield Sharks. So you've got, you've got a lot of sporting excellence in this area as well as the good professor. And he's, he doesn't have an army of butlers. He has a team, an army of PhDs. Yes, an army of PhDs and PhD students. I mean, he's just seen my butler and raised me an army of PhD graduates. Right, we are going to take a break. When we come back, more with, I'm going to call him a sports engineer, but it doesn't seem fair. It doesn't cover anywhere near the work that he does, but Professor David James will be with us when we get back.

• 14:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back to Playing with Science. This is a fabulous conversation. Chuck and I are enjoying immensely with sports engineer David James, professor from Sheffield Hallam University in delightful Britain, or we call it England, really. You sound a little homesick, my friend. I know, I'm getting teary. So I said earlier on in the show that you spoke at a seminar about what makes a world champion. So Professor, you're up. What makes a world champion? Is there a secret?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  I think good athletes make world champions. I think, you know, sometimes we get a little bit obsessed by the things that are going on behind the scenes, you know, the science, engineering, the technology, maybe we can make a champion, but actually it's the individual. And if you think about all athletes, great athletes, world beating athletes, they're extreme outliers. They're not normal. They literally have bodies which are on the edge of normality. They really are outliers. So you have a brilliant kind of body to begin with, and mind and ability. So the athlete's at the core of it. But that isn't nearly

• 16:04Speaker 02

  enough, you know, and we know that basically great athletes are made mainly sort of by three key components: talent, so that's the key thing, you know, what you're born with, the sort of the environment which that talent is then nurtured in, and that comes from, you know, lots of things like, you know, did your mum and dad drive you to basketball kind of classes or whatever it is, or the team meets on a Wednesday evening, or did they get up early in the morning at 5am to take you to swimming? You know, those kind of environmental things are massively important. So champions are a product of that system,

• 16:44Speaker 02

  often by their parents and what the parents have given them when they were younger. And then people like me get involved later on, when you've got someone who's already very good, we can then work with them a little bit to get them that tiny bit more. So what I do as an engineer, I'm never going to turn someone who's not good at sport into someone who's a world champion. They have to be very good already. We can make very small changes at the end, small savings in time, a little bit, you know, enhance their skills in some way through maybe virtual reality or different types of techniques, improve strategy. We can do those kind of things, but you have to be very good to

• 17:29Speaker 02

  begin with. And I think the third thing, so I've mentioned two things, talent, opportunity, well, so the environment, or maybe you might consider the opportunity. And then the third thing would be the drive from the individual. So the, you know, that personal resilience to keep going when it's tough, and that personal drive. And I think when you're thinking about sort of maybe a national level, how do you come up with a great Olympic team? In a way, we can identify talent quite well. It's not precise science, but we can, we're pretty good at picking out people who are going to be good. We can provide the right

• 18:10Speaker 02

  environment, but it's very hard to identify people who have got those really strong motivations, that willpower to do it. That's the kind of the guesswork. And some people have it and some people don't. And the best athletes have got all three. They've got that talent, they've had the opportunities, and they've got that drive as well. So I think it's those three things that make a world champion.

• 18:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Yeah. People like LeBron James who just tick that box and have that X factor. I mean, there is one of your published works, The Physics of Winning, because I'm just, you're trying to remember your own works now, aren't you? You've done that many. I'm just thinking, you've been, you've had your whole team of PhD students and graduates, and you've sat them down to come up with an equation. So you've kind of got your own equation for winning in physics. But is it quite that simple? Or how did you approach something with that kind of title?

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, so this is

• 19:16Speaker 02

  This is the difference. So some sports are quite simple in a way.

• 19:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  So we call them, I call them linear sports, like in a way like running a hundred metres or jumping the pole vault or a high jump or riding a bike around a track. But basically those sports are measured by a single outcome, which is a time or a distance or a height, you know, and actually you can break that sport down into a number of key elements, like, okay, I need to have so much power delivered at this time and I know I can deliver that amount of power out of my body and that will achieve this speed on the bike if I optimize the bike. And you can basically make a very good prediction

• 20:01Speaker 02

  of what will happen. And so that's why the physics come in, because it's about the energy that the human body has and then understanding how we use that energy to get what we need to get done. You know, we can tweak things like the aerodynamics on the bike or the body position on the bike and things like that to do it. So I'd say it's very deterministic, like in a way I can predict what's going to happen within a sort of a fraction of a second. And then when the athlete goes to do it, they'll do that. Take a sport like soccer, you know, baseball, American football, we can't do that. We can't make predictions because you might have a plan, yeah, I'm going to do this, then what's the opponent doing? And then what are the, what are the interactions with the team?

• 20:44Speaker 02

  So we can use physics and mathematics to describe what will happen in sport in these very linear, simple sports, which are often measured in time or height or distance. When it comes to sort of sports, which are games, which have multiple players, all bets are off. It's, it's too complicated system to try to model.

• 21:03Gary O'Reilly?

  So thank you for explaining that. You've done work with wearable tech, not just the sort of telemetrics tracking sort of thing, but, and then you've gone on to discuss how it can prevent injury and you're analyzing impact. Can you expand on that a little bit more on exactly what areas you were working in?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we did a project recently with FIFA.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  The governing body for soccer.

• 21:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Football. And they, so we see this loads now where players are wearing devices, tracking devices.

• 21:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Often they use like a GPS satellite type tracking technology, but there are many other technologies as well.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  They have other sensors in them as well, like we call them inertial sensors. So they've got accelerometers, rate gyros, magnometers, these kind of different devices to to measure what you're doing. The trouble with these devices, you have to wear them and there's actually a potential risk of injury when you're wearing them. So often these devices are worn at the top of the back.

• 22:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  And, you know, dare I say it, they're they're there to get good satellite coverage. So the satellite can see it very easily. It's not a bad place to put it because you don't see many collisions, but putting something on your spine, a hard object on your spine in a in a potentially, you know, violent environment like.

• 22:34Chuck Nice?

  Well, what could go wrong? Come on, sir. What could seriously go wrong? You've got a big hard thing on your back, right? Right? Come on, what could go wrong?

• 22:43Speaker 02

  So, you know, I think there are, so we did this big study for soccer and we tried to understand what the injuries could be as players are wearing these devices. And we surveyed lots of medics and players who are wearing them. And we sort of identified these sort of injury scenarios. And basically what we did was we, by kind of recreating that, those impact events that we see in sport, we're able to improve the design of these, these devices. And actually, it's a sort of a basically an impact test that they all have to pass now to be, to be deemed to be safe or safe enough. I said before, like, we can't ever make something hundred percent safe, but we can reduce its risk of injury. I think it's really interesting and the the NBA are doing exactly the same thing.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  I think it's even worse in basketball because you've got players potentially, you know, landing on a hard court.

• 23:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  They've got this hard device on their back. Okay, at the best, it might cause just a little laceration or a bruise. But at its worst, it could be, could be worse.

• 23:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  So it's been looked at quite a lot.

• 23:46Chuck Nice?

  Unless you're a delicate flower like me, in which case it would be absolutely devastating.

• 23:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh gosh, time to take another break after you've said that. Right, don't go away professor, because you are going to be back when we get back and we will have cosmic queries here on Playing with Science and our sports engineering show. So don't go away.

• 24:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back to Playing with Science and our sports engineering show with the wonderful Professor David James. And as promised, it's time for a cosmic query and your question.

• 24:21Chuck Nice?

  So Jay Bailey, who is a Patreon patron, which means that we're going to start with his, Jay's, because Jay could be a male or a female. We'll start with Jay's question, because if you support us on Patreon, that's what happens. We give you a priority. My roller derby coach once commented that if humans were made to skate, our ankles would be on the front of our foot.

• 24:44Chuck Nice?

  I'm still a little puzzled about that. But what other changes to the human design could you imagine that would make human bodies more efficient for quad skates? What changes would you make for a roller skate? And it is Janelle. So Janelle is probably a girl. It's from Chicago. What a wonderfully weird question, Professor.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  I think it's actually, there's some really interesting stuff in that question.

• 25:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Sort of, I think the first thing is that the idea of having sort of a, basically like an articulated joint on the front of the skate, like an ankle, is of course something which is done in speed skating. So in the 1980s, we had the clap skate. So this is a device which is, it's speed skating, it's very big in the Netherlands in the Winter Olympics. And the clap skate is a classic bit of fantastic sports engineering, where actually by putting that extra joint in, so it's basically what happens is that at the toe, the shoe can lift off the hard skate which remains on the surface. And it just subtly changes the biomechanics of

• 25:55Speaker 02

  the motion. And what that can do is it can actually improve the efficiency of the athlete. And the people who wear clap skates can go quite a bit faster, using less energy.

• 26:04Gary O'Reilly?

  So that allow more power to be delivered through the skate?

• 26:08Speaker 02

  But of course, you know, if you think about the animal kingdom, plenty of animals have quite interesting locomotion. If you think about birds or ostriches have kind of almost like a reverse knee.

• 26:18Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  And they can run very fast as well. So yeah, it's quite interesting to think about different ways of being.

• 26:25Chuck Nice?

  That's a great question, Janelle. Way to go.

• 26:28Gary O'Reilly?

  And we've got a great answer. And yeah, those skates sound just perfect for me in the winter.

• 26:32Chuck Nice?

  This is Noar21 from Instagram who says, what is the comparison of head injuries in football versus rugby? And I'll include soccer into that. So your football, such as the severity of chances of having a head injury. Also, do the use of pads and a helmet in American football contribute to higher chances of injuries solely because of the hard material? So a lot of, a lot of stuff packed into one question. You can unpack it any way that you want. But, you know, do you have any information on the comparison of head injuries for American football, your football, soccer, and perhaps rugby?

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think this is probably the biggest topic facing sport at the moment in my world, this whole topic of concussion. You know, it's particularly relevant, well, across the whole, all sports, all three of those sports, soccer, rugby, and American football. I think the, if I was to rank them, it seems, you know, in the data, American football seems to be the worst, rugby would be second, and soccer would be in third place. So most of my work has been around soccer and rugby from the UK. We don't get much work in American football, but obviously that, you know, we follow what's happening there. I think it's interesting, I do quite a bit of work with rugby, and rugby have

• 27:55Speaker 02

  been very cautious about, I suppose, allowing athletes, players to wear head protection or shoulder protection because they worry that it will change the playing behavior of players. So players will be more aggressive when they go into tackles rather than actually trying to protect themselves. However, that is changing and actually World Rugby, who are the governing body of rugby, they're introducing potentially like some head protection now is kind of coming in, they're going to legislate for that and the shoulder pads as well. It's a controversial issue though because they are worried that if players wear this protection, they'll become more aggressive and that might lead to injuries.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  So it will change the playing behaviour and I think that's what, when we look at American football, that's what we see. We see actually because of the equipment they're wearing, it allows this potentially quite dangerous behaviour to take place on the field. So that's a really kind of delicate, delicate balance at the moment. So World Rugby are introducing this idea of some head protection and shoulder protection and lots of researchers are going to be studying how that actually changes behaviour in the game. But you know, there's quite a lot of regulations around it already. If you take it and compare it to soccer, okay, so in soccer, this is also a topic actually, particularly around this concept of heading a ball.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  So when you've got a football coming across and players head it, there's a lot of talk now about, you know, can this lead to dementia in older life or mental health issues? I think that's very, not very well understood at all actually. And I know in America, I think you've banned young players from heading footballs in training academies, I think that's true. And we've been thinking about that, what's the science for that? Is it valid? Is it not? I'm, you know, it's difficult because when you head a football, it's not a concussive injury, you know, or it's what you call a subconcussive injury. But the idea is just these repetitive, low level impacts that over time may cause, you

• 30:09Speaker 02

  know, an injury. But that's very, very hard to measure or understand and track. So the science there is not very well understood at all. Rugby in a better place, but I think certainly American football is where it's really happening.

• 30:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and those are some interesting, interesting things that you point out. One, we see in American football that there is indeed a

• 30:30Chuck Nice?

  A different playing culture because of the helmets and the pads. And so one of the things that has been instituted this year in American football is the NFL, leading with your head or leading with your helmet when you are tackling, especially the quarterback, is now a penalty. You know, also, when you, when a player is what they call vulnerable. So if a player is up in the air or a player is exposed on the field and you spear that player with your helmet, that's also now a penalty. And all of that is aimed at what you said, changing the behavior, the behavioral culture of the players. And it's difficult.

• 31:15Chuck Nice?

  It's hard to do.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  And I think this is the thing that we know, you know, I do a lot of work in impact protection and trying to make sports equipment safer. And all we can ever do is reduce the risk because actually you could have a very, very safe equipment, but if you play in the wrong way, you can injure someone, yourself or another player by being very aggressive or behaving in a certain way. So as an engineer, I can't make sports safe. You know, I can reduce its risk, but if, if, if an athlete wants to go and do something, you know, a bit crazy, they're going to get hurt.

• 31:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  And this is where the sort of the legal side of it gets a bit complicated because, you know, they can get a bit, well, you know, you get sued. Oh, you said if you're wearing this, you're not going to get an injury. Well, you know, if you behave in a certain way, you're going to get injured. It doesn't matter what you're wearing.

• 32:07Chuck Nice?

  Wow. And also, I do have an answer for it, and that is bubble wrap. Bubble wrap. Look into it, David.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. Seriously, I mean, there's some really exciting, just, just very good, just in terms of stuff that's happening. I mean, there's some brilliant science happening here. We're doing a lot of work in what we call, it's a really cool material called auxetic foams. So conventional material, this is really, this is amazing science. Conventional material, when you, when you stretch that material. Okay, the material gets thinner.

• 32:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Thinner, right.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  So as you stretch it out, it gets thinner. Yeah, this is typically what happens.

• 32:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  And that's a conventional material. It's to do this thing we call a Poisson's ratio. It's a material characteristic. But anyway, an auxetic foam is a kind of a, it's a new, new idea. Um, and we can make them in foams. And what happens is when you pull that, that foam, this padding material, it doesn't get thinner. It gets fatter. So it actually grows.

• 33:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  It does the opposite of what you think. And what this means is when you have an impact event, normally what happens is the material flows away from the impact location. But this material, it flows towards the impact. Patient, it's, it's really, really an amazing thing. So called a smart material. We call it smart material and it's, um, well, we're, we're, we're exploring that and how we can use it in helmet protection. Um, we've been looking at it for baseball and cycling helmets and all sorts of different.

• 33:36Gary O'Reilly?

  That is fascinating, fascinating stuff, man. Thank you for that. That's great. All right. Shaun Larson here. Question from Facebook. What effect does the shape and curvature of a snowboard have on its efficiency or path of travel down a hill?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Well, again, it's a, it's a really good question. Um, it's a bit, it's a bit complicated actually. Um, so what, what happens is the main thing that slows a, a snowboard down is the, is the friction between the snow and, uh, and the board. And actually that, that friction is independent of the contact area. So, but this is what science says. So it doesn't matter how big it is or how small it is, you'll always get the same frictional force. Cause as the, as the, as the, as the contact area gets smaller, the pressure gets bigger. So you get more resistive force. As the, as the contact area bigger, the pressure gets less, you get less resistive force. And the two kind of balance, always balance each other out. And so actually, the thing that determines how fast your snowboard goes is the friction

• 34:36Speaker 02

  between the snow and the board. And the only real way you're going to make that to go lower is by having a low friction, like waxing the board, or using other silicons or sprays on the board to improve the, or reduce the friction. That's something we've also looked at, kind of having almost like injectors, of putting like, almost like, kind of lubricants

• 34:57Chuck Nice?

  on the bottom. Like a snail.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  To make it faster.

• 35:00Chuck Nice?

  Like a snail. You turn the board into a snail. You have the lubricant come out of the board.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Almost like have kind of, like, I've forgotten what it was now, what was going on a bit, to try and reduce that coefficient of friction. But it's not really to do with the shape, it's to do with the friction between the two surfaces.

• 35:15Chuck Nice?

  Cool, man. Wow, that was cool. Now, since you said that, let me ask you just a follow-up question, just for out of curiosity's sake. What is, what's your favorite sport with respect to Newtonian physics?

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Hmm. That's a good question. Okay, I love the pole vaults, actually. So I think the pole vault is pretty amazing. It's an amazing thing that people do. To do that, this kind of incredible gymnastic maneuver at six meters in the air is just totally extraordinary. But there's an incredible bit of physics behind it, right? So bear with me, I'll try and take this really quickly. Basically, what you have is, the pole vault's all about translating kinetic energy, running into potential energy, which is about height. So you might call it gravitational energy, which is how high you can go. So you're going, you're turning movement into height. And of course, at the top of the jump, you have no speed. You've

• 36:13Speaker 02

  reached a zero velocity, and you've just turned all your energy into height. So you can do a calculation, right, which goes, well, what is a theoretical maximum speed I could run at? Okay, so you take Usain Bolt, okay, how fast can he run at? So he can run at like 10 meters a second when he's sprinting, you know, 10 seconds, 100 meter sprint. Running at full speed, you can calculate how much energy That athlete would have, right? If they do the perfect jump, they can use, turn all that kinetic energy into gravitational energy. And what that does is it means you can calculate how high they could theoretically go with perfect technique. If you had the perfect athlete running at full speed, as fast as Usain Bolt could run. And what it turns out is that

• 36:57Speaker 02

  that height is like six meters forty, okay, which isn't that much higher than the current world record at six meters eighteen, I think it is.

• 37:08Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  And so what has happened is pole vaulters have reached a ceiling of physics. They, they can't go any higher because they just don't, there's no way of putting more energy into the system. So their kind of physics has put us at like a limit on how high they could jump. And really you have to do things like reduce gravity to go any higher.

• 37:26Chuck Nice?

  Or would it be that somebody like you and your team would come along and engineer a pole that would be able to transfer more of that energy?

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can do it. But even, even if you're transferring all of it, you've still got a limit.

• 37:39Chuck Nice?

  You've still got a limit. Wow.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  You have to put more energy into the system to go any higher.

• 37:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Would you, do you improve footwear? Do you improve the running surface? Would that affect?

• 37:49Chuck Nice?

  Wouldn't do any.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  That's what you can do. You come up against the hard rule of physics, which is you can't, you know, energy has to go somewhere. And in this case, you're turning all the kinetic energy into gravitational energy, and that determines a maximum height.

• 38:03Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Maximum height.

• 38:05Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so a follow up question.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  We're almost there.

• 38:07Gary O'Reilly?

  We're almost there. Um, right, this, this is definitely some, a name that's going to get mangled. Feddy Gabboldon from Instagram. You want to have another stab at that?

• 38:19Chuck Nice?

  Uh, forget about them. Forget about them.

• 38:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Everyone's a comic.

• 38:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Even you.

• 38:34Gary O'Reilly?

  So, so here professor.

• 38:37Gary O'Reilly?

  See, that's why Chuck and I are a great double act. I can't read. Uh, for how long will athletes keep breaking records until they get to a biological limit in which they can't improve anymore? Will that cause the introduction of sort of biomechanical sports or athletes?

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Good question, great question.

• 38:57Gary O'Reilly?

  We've got some great listeners.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  We've been looking at this as well, like a lot of how, you know, performances are changing over time. And in, in all sports, what we're seeing is, uh, every year, uh, performances, well, most sports that go up a little bit. Uh, but the rate of increase is slowing. And, and if the rate of increase is slowing, it, it indicates that at some point it will reach a limit when it won't get anymore. Um, in some sports, we've seen no improvements in performance since the 1980s. Um, take female athletics. Okay. A lot of those 1980s world records are not being broken. And in fact, current performances are significantly slower than those, those performances in, in, in the 1980s.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  And I think there's, you know, you can talk about, you know, issues around doping around that. I think that's a very valid discussion to have. Um, but, but yeah, sure. I think humans will reach, there will be limits. Um, that's to say, you know, we, we shouldn't reduce what we think is possible. Uh, if you take a case of middle distance running, okay, in, um, in, you know, uh, 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago. We were seeing no improvements in performance in say the 10,000 meters or marathons or anything like this. And then what happened was a new population started to compete. Uh, East African runners started competing and performances really started to, to go up.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  So actually, what I'm saying there is that sport, although we live in a globalized society, not every corner of the globe is able to compete in all sports. And actually, as more countries develop and are able to participate in sport, we might find that new populations enter those sports and performances will increase. So that's something to look forward to. So when we see, oh yeah, this is going to be the human limit, I'm a little bit, well, let's just be a bit cautious about that because you never know. And sure, you know, when those limits are reached, who knows what we'll want to do in sport? People like progress and yeah, maybe there will be some changes or maybe sport will change.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Or maybe we'll be more interested in these more complex sports, maybe like football and soccer and basketball, which aren't quite so deterministic.

• 41:11Chuck Nice?

  So do you ever foresee a time that when it comes to human performance improvement, that we would integrate the technology directly into the athlete? For instance, a chip that might perhaps increase your production of adrenaline or that actually stops you from producing malalactic acid after your year? Stuff like that, could you?

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, you're getting into the realms of, I suppose, what's called transhumanism. So as, you know, we start to develop, integrate the technology, change our bodies in different ways. Yeah, I can totally see that happening. It's kind of happening somewhat already, you know? If a hundred years ago, if you'd said that a child being born today is almost certainly going to live to a hundred, that would be considered to be completely crazy. And so in a hundred years' time, you know, things might be very different for humanity as well. And, you know, that sounds a bit science fiction, but you know what?

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Science fiction is becoming science fact in a lot of places and a lot of aspects of our lives. So, yeah, I think all these things are possible. I think the, you know, there are big, big ethical debates about whether we want it, what it means to be human and. And who would have access and who wouldn't, you know, these things can come at a cost. Certain nations, you know, they start building almost like these super athletes and it, you know, that starts getting a bit crazy. So I think there's big political, ethical debates to have around that.

• 42:52Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 42:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes. Well, that is our show. Professor David James, thank you so much.

• 42:57Chuck Nice?

  Such a pleasure to talk to you, man. You're fantastic.

• 42:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Chuck?

• 43:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 43:01Gary O'Reilly?

  You now realize that from maybe 1980 to now, so much has changed.

• 43:09Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 43:10Gary O'Reilly?

  There's so much more appliance of science, so much more technology in play that you don't quite realize is there. So, uh, yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's pretty cool when you find people like Professor developing.

• 43:22Chuck Nice?

  He's fantastic.

• 43:23Gary O'Reilly?

  And making things happen.

• 43:24Chuck Nice?

  And I didn't even get a chance to ask him about drag force.

• 43:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Good. Right. That's been Playing with Science. I've been Gary O'Reilly.

• 43:31Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chuck Nice.

• 43:33Gary O'Reilly?

  And there's no drag force here. No, uh, look forward to your company next time.