Secrets of Sports Science

This is an era of chronic sleep deprivation, triggered largely by our addiction to the screens of our personal devices. But how do athletes deal with sleep deprivation? What's the relationship with sleep and athletic performance? Why should athletes carry their own pillows and switch off their phones at night? Do short naps have any benefits when it comes to performance? And why is it that our strength and power outputs are better in the evening? Is training for elite athletes structured according to the time of day? All those answers and more with Dr Pullinger, the Head of Sports Science at the Inspire Institute of Sports in Bellary, where India's finest athletes live and train.

South African strength & conditioning specialist Dr. Wayne Lombard was the Indian women's hockey team's scientific advisor from 2017 to 2021. He led the coaching staff that took over a struggling team and made them into world-class athletes in time for the Tokyo Olympics, where the unfancied Indian team then went on a wild, fairytale ride all the way to the bronze medal playoffs. In this episode, Dr. Lombard answers some critical questions: how do you assess a player's fitness? How do you build a neuromuscular profile for an athlete? Why is a simple jump called the Countermovement Jump such a great indicator of athletic ability and game readiness? What is the relationship between an athlete's perceived fatigue and what machines tell us about the state of his or her physical fatigue? How can that be bridged?

Dr Orchard was on the field that day in 2014 when Phillip Hughes got hit in the head by a cricket ball and died later from his injury. It marked the beginning of a long campaign by Dr Orchard and others to introduce concussion rules in cricket. In late 2019, Marnus Labuschagne became the first concussion substitute in the 142-year history of Test cricket. In this episode, Dr Orchard talks about the research, advocacy and negotiations that went into convincing the cricket world of the need for concussion rules. Why like-for-like replacements are so important in the game, and the increasing need to address the possible dangers of repeated head impacts in any sport.

There was a time when the best footballers in the world—from Maradona to Johann Cruyff or Zinadine Zidane—learned their skills playing street football. Now promising footballers go into academies by the time they are six. Is this formal coaching environment killing creativity in sports? Is prescriptive coaching—where it’s the coach’s way or the highway—an outdated model? What makes a good coach? How can players develop creativity? These are the questions at the root of Dr. Mark Williams’ decades-long research, which led to the book The Best: How Elite Athletes are Made. In this episode, Dr. Williams dives deep into what the data says about formal coaching vs informal play in the development of elite athletes.

You may know him as Neeraj Chopra's coach. But Dr Bartonietz or "Dr Javelin" is one of the world's leading experts on throws, and has been conducting research and analysis on it since 1975. Now, as Neeraj Chopra gets ready to throw competitively again a year after his Tokyo Gold--he will be participating in the Paavo Nurmi Games in Finland on June 14--Dr Bartonietz breaks down the technical complexities of the javelin throw and why Neeraj is ready to breach the 90m mark. From release momentum to the biomechanics of braking, from release angles to the role of the shoulder, learn why just being big and muscular doesn't mean you will throw longer distances.