Here's a fairly common scene throughout the world. It's a coach working with young people on a sports field. And there are two things going on here. First, the youngsters are learning how to perform skills to play the sport. And second, as the youngsters are exposed to certain types of physical stressors, their bodies are gradually molded structurally and chemically to operate more proficiently at a high physical demand. In other words, the coach is part teacher and part biological engineer. Both coaching tasks require considerable knowledge. And the focus of this course is on how a coach fulfills the role of biological engineer to optimize the performance of an athlete's body in a very specific way. It provides you with the scientific knowledge you need to design a training plan to do this. Now I have my little friend here and it's easy to recognize this bony structure as the frame of a human. There are 206 bones, half of them are in the hands and feet and there's about 640 muscles attached to this frame allowing it to perform almost any variety of movement such as running, kicking, flipping, and hissing. And there are 60,000 miles or about 96,000 kilometers of blood vessels that are needed to feed oxygen and nutrients to the active tissues throughout this body. And there are 46 miles, or 74 kilometers of nerves, sending and receiving information about the activity this structure is doing and sends this activity to and from the brain. Now filling this frame are the organs that perform specific functions. In the cavity up here, that is the ribcage of the heart and lungs. And to the rear of the ribcage, back in here are the kidneys. And in the cavity right here, immediate below the sternum, lies the stomach and the liver. And below that are 20 feet of intestines. And the bladder and the reproductive organs are located in the pelvic cavity. Around 22 square feet or two square meters of skin holds this entire structure together. And the skin is packed full of nerves to keep the brain in touch with the outside world. Incidentally, the lungs that are located in this area here of the rib cage have 80 times more surface area than the skin. They're about the size of half a tennis court. This then is the structural starting point for a coach as a biological engineer. And the key feature about this biological structure is that it is molded and shaped as it grows and matures, and is also molded and shaped based on how it's used. And if the muscles are not used, let me put my little creature down. Go to sleep. If muscles are not used very much they can become a wee bit smaller. Nerves and blood vessels are trimmed away and the entire structure that we just looked at becomes slightly weaker. If the structure is used a lot bones become denser, muscles become bigger, more blood vessels and more nerves are built. And the result is the entire structure gets stronger. Now this molding feature of the human body is an evolutionary design feature that allows it to adjust to various environments, and scientists research this ability of the body to adjust the size of its components to meet its functional demands as plasticity. A coach exploits this plastic feature of the human body to mold it, both structurally and chemically to form the most effective phenom type for a sport. Now remember the athletes genes provide the instructions for their general structure. If phenom type is the outcome of the adjustments made to this general structure, in response to exposure to specific environmental conditions. Now, phenotype is what makes these identical twins look very different. They have the same genetics, however they've been exposed to very different environments. One trained as an endurance runner and the other trained as a body builder, and I bet you'll have no trouble telling which one is the endurance runner and which one is the body builder. The formation of the phenotype of each twin depends on three different things. It depends on their genotype, which in this case is the same. It depends on their environment, and it also depends on a genotype-environment interaction effect, both of which have been very different for the two twins. Neither twin would make a good basketball player, they're not tall enough. And this indicates the genetic constraint on how successful they can be in some sports. When purposely designing a sports specific phenotype a functional tradeoff also exists. If the twin who is currently a bodybuilder wants to be an endurance runner he would have to change his phenotype by doing a different type of training. An endurance runner needs minimal body mass to be successful. And the body building twin would have to reduce the size of all those big muscles. The critical issue when training an athlete is to know the best phenotype for a sport. This information provides the insights that you need into the engineering task that's required. It also forces you to think about the engineering constraints that influence how far you can take the body and adjust it in a way so that the athlete performs their optimal hormones. When we exploit the plastic nature of the athlete's body to mould it for a specific purpose, we refer to this as the training adaptation effect. Now, the term adaptation comes from biology where it's used to describe the evolution of a permanent change that permits an organism to gain a competitive survival advantage. For example, you see structural adaptation, such as the big ears of the desert fox, that has evolved to help the species of fox radiate heat in a very hot environment. There are the physiological adaptations such as the more efficient kidney function of the desert animal such as the kangaroo rat that helps them conserve water and their feet are also big to stop them from sinking into the sand. But also behavioral adaptations, such as the migration of birds and whales as they move to warmer climates to remove themselves from the cold winter. These are all forms of adaptations that have evolved over hundreds of years to ensure survival of these particular animals. Now when the word adaptation is used in the context of sport it really refers to a temporary adjustment made by the body so its functioning becomes more suited to operating in a very specific way such as when you're participating in sports. These adjustments have no real survival use in the traditional evolutionary sense of the word. The goal in sports is to prove superiority in an artificial competitive environment. The root adaptation, when describing phenotype adjustments to sports training, is well entrenched in training theory. And for this reason, I will continue to use the root adaptation when I'm really referring to the outcome of training specific body engineering that is fairly temporary. In this course, you will learn how to design the type of training that takes advantage of the plastic nature of the athlete's body. So you mould the right phenotype for the sport. We explore ways that their muscular system can be designed to generate force and power appropriate for effective performing of a sport skill. And we also examine the cost of plasticity when it is carried beyond the ability of the body to adjust itself to meet the imposed training stresses. The cost of overextending plasticity comes in the form of injuries and chronic fatigue. A coach can engineer the athletes body beyond it's genetic capacity, and as a result it can fail. The outcome of this course is for you to put an engineering plan together, and explain the science behind your approach. In this way, you will become an effective coach. Enjoy your learning experience. It is my pleasure to help you develop your bioengineering knowledge and successfully apply it through the design of an athlete's training plan, so let's get started.
