Training

Competitive sporting activities have played an important role in human evolution and cultural development. From the ancient Olympic Games in Greece to the modern version taking place this year in London, athletes have consistently striven to compete with, and ultimately, defeat competitors for fame, glory and self-satisfaction. Today, professional sport is a multi-billion pound industry, and consequently the stakes for sports men and women are incredibly high.

Accordingly, identifying the factors that influence high-level performance has become a subject of significant scientific interest. Commonly referred to as sports science this field is highly inter-disciplinary, drawing on cutting-edge research from diverse scientific areas, such as genetics, physiology, nutrition and psychology.

At the genetic level, the body's responsiveness to training is influenced by the regulation of genes that affect oxygen uptake and the capacity for skeletal muscle adaptation. Sports psychology, by contrast, investigates stress-related factors and achievement motivated behaviour in athletes independently of genetic effects. Finally, neuroscientists have recently started to investigate movement dynamics in sports and the brain's role in controlling muscle performance.

Of course, being a successful athlete requires the correct combination of genetic, psychological and neural factors. However, the interactions between these different components are likely to be highly complex and therefore extremely challenging to study - this is one of the most significant challenges currently faced by sports scientists.

With this in mind, the sixth annual EMBL-EBI Science and Society Symposium will bring together three scientists working on the genetics, the neuroscience and the psychology behind sporting success. The speakers will offer an insight into each of these areas before discussing the overall contribution of science to a deeper understanding of sporting success.

Speakers:

• Paul Flicek (chair), The European Bioinformatics Institute
• Alun Williams, Manchester Metropolitan University
• Robert Gray, University of Birmingham
• David Fletcher, Loughborough University

Biographies are available following the speakers' links below.

Abstracts and biographies

Being a physiological and genetic outlier will help win gold in London

The debate about the extent of the genetic contribution to differences between people in terms of their physical performance has raged for decades at least, and in some respects dates back to Ancient Greece. Scientific study has been applied to this issue, and the available evidence suggests that probably over 50& of the factors that influence sporting ability are in fact inherited. The inherited biological factors include physiological characteristics such as muscle structure and performance, the structure and function of the cardiovascular system, hormonal regulation of those systems during times of stress (training), and so on. Putting those kinds of elements together, most people are then probably ready to accept that the ability to sprint 100 m in under 10 s, or run a marathon in under 2 hours 5 minutes, is at least partly inherited. The genetic contribution to success in a more obviously skill-based sport, such as tennis, is probably more contentious. However, I would argue that there remains a genetic contribution to most sports, even those with a relatively high degree of emphasis on skill. Nevertheless, few would seriously suggest that sporting success at the elite level, in any highly competitive event, does not also require huge amounts of hard work in the form of training and practice, plus a great will to win.

Interactions between the Thoughts, Perceptions and Movements of the Elite Athlete

Elite performance in sport requires optimal processing in multiple neural systems including perception (e.g., detecting visual information about the movement of ball), cognition (e.g., anticipating what an opponent will do next) and motor control (e.g., producing precisely timed and highly consistent movements). This presentation will examine examples of how these different systems interact during sports performance, resulting in both positive and negative outcomes. I will first consider the phenomenon of action-specific perception: a performer's intentions can cause the perceived size of a moving object to increase and its perceived speed to decrease. Paradoxically, these misperceptions seem to help performance by improving action selection. I will next explore how performance pressure can cause shifts in an athlete's focus of attention which interfere with skill execution - leading to the well known phenomenon of "choking under pressure".

Going for Gold: The Psychology of Olympic Performance

Why is it that some sport performers are able to withstand - or even thrive on - the pressure of Olympic competition and attain peak performances, whereas other succumb to these demands and under-perform? It is the study of resilience that aims to address this question. In this presentation, Dr David Fletcher previews findings from his research, due to be published in June 2012, that investigates the relationship between psychological resilience and optimal sport performance. He will discuss how numerous psychological factors (relating to a positive personality, motivation, confidence, focus, and perceived social support) protect the world's best athletes from the potential negative effect of stressors by influencing their challenge appraisal and metacognitions. These processes promote facilitative responses that precede optimal sport performance. The presentation will conclude by highlighting what people can learn from Olympic athletes about managing pressure and performing at their best.