Engineering the Perfect Athlete

By Anastasia Toufexis

From the time he took up the long jump at age 11, Mike Powell showed great potential. But in his first 15 years of competition he had trouble making it to the far end of the sandpit. His jumps consistently measured in the 7.6-m- to-7.9-m range, more than a meter short of record-breaking territory. Then in 1988 he began improving rapidly. At the world championships in Tokyo last August, Powell came into his own. He bounded down the runway, hit the board and soared 8.95 m, eclipsing by 5 cm the "unbreakable" record set by America's Bob Beamon 24 years ago. A believer in nonstop improvement, Powell thinks he could set another record in Barcelona.

What accounts for his amazing metamorphosis from also-ran to world-beater? Powell, 28, gives credit to a five-year scientific training plan devised by his coach, Randy Huntington, who goes by the nickname "Mr. Gizmo" and leaves almost no technique untried in his exhaustive approach to training. Among the elements of Powell's regime:

-- To increase the explosive power of his legs, Powell runs on the track with an open drag parachute trailing behind him. For variety, he sometimes tows a sled.

-- In the garage at his home in Southern California, he builds strength by working out on pneumatic weight machines, which precisely control the velocity of his movements to prevent damage to his joints.

^ -- To avoid injury and reduce the recovery time between workouts, he performs dozens of water exercises in his pool. He also stimulates his muscles by applying electricity to them with a battery-operated microcurrent device.

Powell is caught up in the brave new whirl of sports science. Fast disappearing are the days when an elite athlete was simply the product of hard work, a gruff coach and a little luck. Today science has become an indispensable part of the formula for more and more world-class competitors, who find that the margin between gold and silver is often a centimeter or a hundredth of a second. Helping mold athletes today is a growing army of specialists -- from physiologists and psychologists to nutritionists and biomechanists. Result: athletes who are training not just harder but smarter. With some players already working seven hours a day, six days a week, "it is physically and socially irresponsible to increase the volume of training any more," says Gerd-Peter Bruggemann, a professor of biomechanics at the German University of Sports Sciences in Cologne. "Science must think of ways to make training more efficient."

One of the biggest changes brought about by sports science is the increased use of resistance training, which includes workouts with weights as well as sessions on machines employing everything from hydraulic cylinders to rubber bands. Such training has spread even to the more skill-oriented sports, including archery and target shooting. The reason is that scientists have learned that muscle strength produces not only power but also stamina. At the National Sculling Center on the Occoquan River in Woodbridge, Va., Igor Grinko, a former Soviet rowing coach who now trains the U.S. team, has had American Keir Pearson doing 400 pulls on the oars with 200-lb. weights attached. "When we slack off," says Pearson, "Igor screams at us that Russian women can lift more weight than we can." Says Jonathan Smith, 31, a two-time Olympic medalist who is pushing for a third prize this summer: "The volume and amount of weight we're lifting is two to three times more than I did before."

The goal in most cases is to increase strength without adding bulk. "We're trying to make runners and jumpers, not body builders," says Dave Ash, weight-training coach at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. One technique is to do many repetitions at low resistance, which takes longer to increase strength but vastly improves endurance. As part of her pre-Olympic regimen, Jamaican long jumper Diane Guthrie has been doing 250 leg curls every day wearing 10-lb. ankle weights. The 20-year-old Guthrie, who trained at George Mason, notes that when she slacked off onweight training, she hurt some of her leg muscles.

In resistance training, athletes focus on the muscle groups now recognized as vital to their sport. Grinko's rowers are spending one day a week concentrating exclusively on arms, another day on legs and a third on the back. Swimmers are working on building up their arms because about 80% of their propulsion through the water comes from the arms' movement. Cyclists now give more attention to their hamstrings, a group of muscles in the back of the thigh. "The hamstrings stabilize the knee and transfer mechanical energy between the joints," explains biomechanist Robert Gregor of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Even individual muscles contain different fibers that respond to specialized training. The two primary types are so-called fast-twitch fibers, which contract rapidly to produce large amounts of power, and slow-twitch fibers, which generate less force but don't tire as quickly.

People are born with different proportions of the two fiber types, and athletes tend to excel in events for which they have the best muscle endowment. Sprinters, such as track star Carl Lewis and swimmer Dana Torres, have muscles containing a large majority of fast-twitch fibers. So, surprisingly, do shot putters and weight lifters, who need not only strength but power too. "They have to move a heavy weight very quickly," explains U.S. Olympic Training Center physiologist Steve Fleck. "Weight lifters in the clean-and-jerk event can move as fast as a sprinter." Distance runners and swimmers, on the other hand, have mostly slow-twitch fibers.

Heredity has a lot to do with the muscles' makeup, but training can play a part as well. "You can't convert slow-twitch into fast-twitch fibers," says Fleck, but you can speed them up a bit. Middle-distance runners who want to improve their final kick can go through drills of bounding, jumping and sprinting to condition their muscle fibers to contract more quickly.

Since muscles can perform only if they have fuel, scientists have deeply probed the role of body chemistry in generating energy. They have developed various conditioning programs to enhance the two basic types of energy production. One is the well-known aerobic system, in which muscles rely on oxygen to release energy from carbohydrates, fat and some protein. Athletes in endurance events -- as well as fitness buffs who run or do aerobics -- draw primarily on this system, which functions for a long time. Breathing supplies oxygen indefinitely, but eventually the stores of carbohydrates run out.

The other system is anaerobic, in which muscles use reactions that do not depend on oxygen to produce energy from carbohydrates and other chemicals stored in the muscle. Sprinters -- as well as nonathletes dashing from the shower to grab a ringing phone -- rely to a large extent on this system, which provides lots of quick power but can operate for only a short time. The reasons: depletion of the necessary chemicals and buildup of a chemical by- product called lactic acid, which inhibits muscle contraction. Middle- distance athletes depend on a delicate balance of both aerobic and anaerobic systems.

To help determine how well energy production is going, scientists and trainers collect air exhaled by athletes during workouts and take blood samples to test for chemicals such as lactic acid. Speedy computer analysis enables the trainers to get information in time to make adjustments in subsequent workouts.

At the U.S. Swimming Federation's International Center for Aquatic Research in Colorado Springs, more than 10,000 swimmers have been tested on a swimming treadmill called a flume, in which their oxygen intake is measured and evaluated as they exercise. Sessions in the flume showed that Dara Torres, a specialist in the 100-m freestyle, needed to enhance her anaerobic system with more sprint repetitions. Such evaluations are also helping athletes settle on the right amount of training. Swimmers reach a peak after 12 weeks of intensive work and then need a tapering-off period.

Just as important is the raw material the body uses to produce the energy. Only a generation ago, when protein was the breakfast of champions, athletes were chowing down on steak and eggs. Now every morsel is evaluated. At the U.S. training center's cafeteria, each food item is labeled with its carbohydrate, protein and fat content. Large amounts of carbohydrates, as much as 60% to 70% of daily calories, are the mainstay of athletes' diets, because a storehouse of such foods helps maintain stamina. Nutritionists advise players to limit fat intake to 30% of calories, protein to about 15%.

While athletes require more protein than do most people to build new muscle and repair damaged tissue, they usually fulfill their needs by eating more food rather than increasing the proportion of protein. The typical American consumes 2,000 to 4,000 calories of food a day; a male basketball player or long-distance runner may take in 8,000. Many athletes also supplement their diet with capsules of amino acids, the building blocks of protein, though there is no convincing scientific evidence to support their use.

Since top athletes constantly go for broke and wind up straining or injuring themselves, physical therapy has become a vital part of training science. Kinesiologist Linda Huey of Santa Monica, Calif., devised a water exercise program to help keep long jumper Powell in shape after he had an emergency appendectomy just six weeks before the Olympic trials in 1988. "On land, he could not have trained," explains Huey.

Never getting out of condition is the best way to maintain an athletic career. Top athletes now train year-round instead of seasonally. "It's not advancing age that necessarily hurts performance," says American physiologist Steve Fleck, "it's deconditioning." Experts believe that swimmer Mark Spitz, 42, whose technique in the butterfly stroke is still regarded as ideal, failed in his comeback bid earlier this year in part because he had been out of condition for 17 years and did not do enough resistance training. Nonetheless, notes Fleck, "the trend is in the direction of the better performances coming from older athletes."

Athletes are complex machines going through complicated motions. Even a power event such as the discus throw involves an elaborate, spinning choreography. The richness of the variables has provided a fertile field for biomechanics experts, who use infrared lasers, force plates, high-speed video cameras and computers to isolate the motions and moments that make a difference. Scientists have analyzed every type of athletic movement, from a diver's twist to a runner's stride, from a weight lifter's lunge to a rower's stroke.

The success of American hurdler Edwin Moses shows how critical changes in technique can be. Before the 1976 Games, Moses, a physics major in college and a strong proponent of sports science, analyzed his stride and discovered that it was longer than most hurdlers'. That, he figured, could enable him to shave a step from the traditional 14 that most competitors took between vaults in the 400-m hurdles'. Moses won the gold and wrote a paper on the biomechanics of running 13-step hurdles. Four years ago, at the U.S. Olympic trials, backstroker David Berkoff set a new world record in the 100-m race by swimming more than two-thirds of the first 50 m underwater using the dolphin kick. Today nearly everyone employs the maneuver, which cuts drag, but only for 15 m, the maximum allowed by newly set rules.

In preparation for Barcelona, German hammer thrower Heinz Weis, with his trainer and a biomechanist, have been poring over video data on Yuri Sedykh, the Soviet thrower who set a world record in 1986 that still stands. One element of Sedykh's success, they believe, was his ability to generate maximum power by keeping both feet on the ground as long as possible during the three or four preparatory spins. Scientists at the U.S. aquatic center, working with swimming coaches, have suggested changes to American backstroker Janie Wagstaff and freestyler Matt Biondi in their underwater pulling patterns. Biondi was urged to keep his wrist cocked for one-half to a full second longer at the end of the stroke to maximize his propulsion.

At Pennsylvania State University, sports-science researcher John Shea has developed the "Leaper Beeper" for divers. The system uses sensors connected to a laptop computer to measure elements of an athlete's dive; during practice, a beeping noise code tells the diver in the air how high he has jumped and how far down he pushed the diving board. "We want to give the diver immediate and precise information about the dive so a change can be made for the next attempt," says Shea.

For fencers, German specialists have devised a steel-plated dummy that examines competitors' attack moves. The mannequin has a helmet-shaped head containing a high-speed camera mounted behind Plexiglas. Its torso is wired at strategic locations with tiny bulbs. When a hit is scored, a red, green or white light goes on. Tests with the dummy have shown that speed alone is not the crucial factor in a fencer's prowess. Athletes are more accurate when they take time and move deliberately in the moments preceding attack.

The most ambitious technique-enhancing device yet may be the robot that is helping prepare America's table-tennis team for Barcelona. Dubbed R-4 and costing $50,000, the robot can simulate the styles of the best Ping-Pong players in the world. A computer-driven motor that spins at 6,000 r.p.m. can shoot a ball at up to 60 m.p.h. "The robot eliminates the need to travel to China and Japan to practice against the best players in the world," says Olympic hopeful Sean O'Neill. "This is a training tool that allows you to practice against them every day."

Sports science undeniably contains some hype and hokum. Even its advocates are wary of excessive claims and complexity. Alois Mader, a professor at the German University of Sport Sciences in Cologne, points out that the highly successful Kenyan running program is as simple as can be. "It goes: run every day from youth on. And run so that you still enjoy it the next day. Everything else will follow automatically."

No one is sure just how much further science can help push performance. In most events, improvements will get smaller and smaller. "It's clear the curve of progression is flattening out," says biomechanist James Hay of the University of Iowa.

Yet some areas show immense possibilities for improvement. "By 2054 we'll see a mile in the 3:30s ((current record: 3:46))," predicts physiologist Jay Kearney, head of sports science for the U.S. Olympic Committee. In swimming, "we're not near the physiological limit," says John Troup, director of sports medicine and science for U.S. swimming. "A fish is 80% to 90% efficient in water, a world-class swimmer only 8% to 9%. It's not out of the realm of possibility that in six to 10 years we could get a drop of one or two seconds in the 100-m race. In distance events, we could take 15 seconds off." Some of that progress will be the result of athletes who were simply born with greater natural talent. But it will also be science that is pushing them to be faster, higher, stronger.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles and Rhea Schoenthal/Bonn