Walking, all athletics, is the relationship between biomechanics and physiology, between contact with the ground so that it returns momentum and the cardiorespiratory capacity of the owner of the feet, which is resolved in economy of movement, increasing speed and reduce spending, and María Pérez, master of efficiency and maximum oxygen consumption, would like to demonstrate it these days, hitting the ground hard with both feet always well supported and light, flexible, but she cannot.
The double world champion has to settle for walking on water without hip extension with a floatation belt, and swimming in the high-altitude pool at CAR in Sierra Nevada, because she is recovering from an injury, a stress fracture of the sacrum. , the bones at the base of the spine to which they join with the pelvis, the walking hinge. “This is sport,” says her coach, Jacinto Garzón. “She has been unemployed for a month and it has been very hard mentally, because if she does not exercise, the athlete's body stops secreting dopamine or serotonin, the substances that lift the mood.”
When she returns to training, and it will not be too late, after Christmas and the multiple sports galas in which she is recognized throughout Spain as the best athlete of 2023, María Pérez, with all her heart and strength, will hit the streets again at full speed. speed, at 14 per hour, for example, with his head in the clouds of Paris 2024, where one, or two, Olympic medals await him (mixed relay and 20 kilometers), dark glasses on his nose and on the insteps of his sneakers two atomic chips of minimum weight (11 grams each) that she herself contributed to designing and that the wise men of the Spanish athletics federation and the Movistar engineers have come up with. They are the so-called IMUs that no one in the world seems to be able to do without anymore, inertial sensors that measure movement, linear acceleration and angular velocity and orientation, in three dimensions.
“The sensor sends raw data that, through an algorithm and the use of artificial intelligence, our program transforms into key data in the gait, the flight time, the time in which the walker's two feet are simultaneously in the air.” explains Antonio Martín, Telefónica engineer.
The walking regulations require that the leading leg be straight, the knee at an angle of 180 degrees, at the moment of stepping, and that the rear leg still maintains “visible” contact (with the naked eye, at real speed, not through a monitor with slow motion image repetition) with the pavement.
Physics, however, dictates that it is impossible to march at more than 10 kilometers per hour without, in a certain way, running, without lifting both feet off the ground at the same time. The so-called flight time in each step at 10 per hour is, according to published studies, about 10 milliseconds, and increases as the speed increases, reaching 49 milliseconds at 15 per hour, four minutes per kilometer, the cruising speed in the men's 20 kilometer test, and at 60 milliseconds, the limit of human perception, in the case of women at 14 per hour.
The only way to increase speed and stay within the regulations is to improve technique. And that is why the prodigious IMU chips arrive, and that is why María Pérez, an athlete who suffered technical problems in 2022, has worked, collaborating in establishing the algorithm. Afterwards, she will enjoy her help in training.
“The key to the system is that the walker can be informed live of his flight time so that, by training, he can improve his technique,” explains Juan Carlos Álvarez, responsible for technological development of the federation (the so-called Athletics Innovation Hub) and coach. of jumps. “Thanks to the algorithm and the use of the cloud for computing, a watch with the IOS operating system or glasses on the market with a data box transform the electrical impulses that come from the sensor into digestible information. The athlete can receive it in the form of a vibration on the wrist when he exceeds the flight limit set by the coach, or through traffic light colors or numbers that appear on his glasses.
If the future is shaping up to be cyborg athletes, half human, half electronic device, the recent past was that of athletes and their instruments of action patched with sensors that measured their biomechanical data, speed, strength, power, and their physiological data, heart rate, lactate, and stored them in their computers so that the coach could analyze them later. The present that guides the cybernetic athlete is that of an athlete and his implements patched and permanently connected to the outside, transmitting immediate information.
Permanent connection
Walkers' shoes will not be the only element in which inertial sensors are implanted. “We have already done studies on the flight of the discus when throwing, we have placed them at the base of a pole to study their behavior when they hit the box and we have worked with Asier Martínez to study how to improve their hurdles and power. improve, decrease, their flight time over them and the distance that separates the foot from their surface,” explains Álvarez. “The cloud and the possibility of making all data immediate have changed everything.”
In what was perhaps his last public act as president of the Higher Sports Council (CSD), hours before surprisingly resigning, Víctor Francos presided over the presentation of the system last week at the CAR in Madrid. While the marcher and trombone player, with big lungs and magnificent lips, Diego García was exhibited on the treadmill, Francos defined himself as a poacher of efforts and motivations on the grounds that the CSD building shares with the CAR and recalled that The money needed for the research came from the 75 million European funds allocated to sport. “We provide the money, the athletes, the talent,” Francos summarized. “We always want to be among the first in technology and sports. We have to make a difference in the Paris Games, but, whatever medals we get, we are already proud of our athletes.”
Training by heartbeats, by watts, by millimoles…
It is the evolution of training in endurance sports, which require continuous efforts of 30 minutes or more. Not long ago, in the 90s, and it seems like centuries, heart rate monitors arrived, and Chuso García Bragado remembers the day his coach told him that since he was a tourist in New York, he should buy a Polar, a gadget that was not available in Spain. And the historic walker, upon seeing what it was, wondered who would be interested in that, knowing how fast his heart was going when he trained, that it would be a failure. And it was the beginning of a boom.
There began to be talk of aerobic and anaerobic thresholds, delimited by the speed of the heart, but their avant-garde air was soon replaced by watts. First in cycling, then everywhere. The SRM cranks arrived and cyclists began to delimit areas of power and metabolism (use of fats or glycerides as muscle fuel) between thresholds and to refine which ones they should train on. We no longer talk about aerobic or anaerobic, but rather about maximum threshold, submaximal threshold, power threshold…
There is little time left for watts to live, however, say some eminent experts who advocate training in zone two, the one in which fats give way to carbohydrates, delimited by the measurement of lactates generated when burning fuel. . Until now, millimoles were measured by pricking the athlete's ear or finger and sticking the drop of blood on a contrast strip. Now the patches arrive to know the lactate instantly and the race, and athletes and cyclists are already training for millimoles, so many minutes, so many kilometers to three, 2.5 to 5…
Trainers never stop publishing and reading scientific articles that validate or invalidate the wearables that come onto the market, in the great bazaar of performance, which is not limited to atomic sneakers. Power, cadence, speed, position with GPS coordinates, temperature, altitude, accumulated slope both positive and negative, watts, kilos, relative power, pulse, internal temperature, skin temperature, glucose… can now be measured in competition. More knowledge, perhaps, than what can be used.
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