The Infinite Monkey Cage - How to Build the Perfect Athlete - Helen Glover, Hugh Dennis, Steve Haake and Emma Ross

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are limbering up for a high-performance episode all about what it takes to build the perfect athlete. Joining them on the track are physiologist Dr Emma Ross, sports engineer Professor Steve Haake, Olympic rowing legend Helen Glover, and comedian Hugh Dennis - who’s getting into gear and reliving his cycling adventures in the Pyrenees. From muscle power and mental grit to high-tech training tools, the team dives into the science of champions. Can we engineer the ultimate competitor? And how do you get back to peak performance after becoming a parent? Helen Glover shares her inspiring story, while Hugh Dennis wonders if he’s still got what it takes to get to the top.Producer: Olivia Jani Series Producer: Melanie Brown Executive Producer: Alexandra FeachemBBC Studios Audio Production

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. T minus 10, nine, eight, seven. They're in this new spacecraft, unlike any spacecraft we had ever flown before. 13 minutes presents the Space Shuttle. Go for a minute to start. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. wherever you get your BBC podcasts. You're about to listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays

wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, the full series is available right now. First on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Ince and this is the Infinite Monkey Gymnasium. Today we guarantee that in just 10 days you two can have a body like Robin Ince. Yes! It'll take a lot longer to have one like Brian's but with mine you could probably do it in five days actually with the correct amount of cakes.

We have trained together though. This is true when we went on tour we trained and Brian thought that I would die because Brian does lots of training and I don't so this is why because you know it would make the profit for me bigger had he died I didn't realize how much he'd insured my life for and I should have really checked on that but yeah so what what happened was we went up onto the moors so it was a very kind of Heathcliff thing and we we had these ropes and stuff, had to do all this kind of exercise. And afterwards he did kind of go, how come you haven't died? And it would have been wonderful if you died, and then you'd have become star stuff.

Anyway, so I explained to him, I said, well the thing is that I actually do work out all the time, right? I do a thing which I call the BBBC, which is the Bibliomaniac Bodybuilding Book Camp. What I do is, everywhere I go, I have a rucksack on my back, I walk everywhere and I go, oh, look, there's a secondhand bookshop. And I go from having an empty rucksack to one that is absolutely filled with encyclopedias and thus I am buff. And I actually do a Brian Cox bodybuilding thing right and it is all based around this thing going

tired of having sand kicked in your face with the Brian Cox bodybuilding. You'll find that when you do get sand kicked in your face you immediately go of course that's really fascinating because in many ways that does explain entropy. Today we are discussing how to build the perfect athlete. How has technology enhanced performance? How can we hack our biology? And how can we do all this whilst remaining a good sport? And our PE instructors for today are a physiologist, a sports engineer, Olympic gold and silver medalist and the winner of

the Mighty Throwdown, which I presume is some kind of wrestling event. Pottery. Pottery? Pottery. Well that was a mistaken booking then, wasn't it? And they are. My name's Steve Haake, I'm from Sheffield Hallam University, I'm a professor of sports engineering and my most excruciating athletic experience was probably going down St Moritz bobsled track in a four-man bobsled.

I'd been in a bar the night before and the guy had said, do you want to come down on the track in the morning, we need a break man. So I said yes, it was a tourist sled. So I turned up early, we went down and it was a tourist sled so I turned up early we went down and it was terrible it was terrifying four G's rivets kind of sticking in your legs in your nethers and I got to the bottom I thought well I won't have to do that again and he said right we've got three more and it took me took me a week to recover it was horrible I'm dr. Emma Ross I'm an exercise physiologist. I was the head of

physiology for the UK Sports Institute and now I work specifically with female athletes and my most excruciating athletic experience was when I did an Ironman. So for those uninitiated, an Ironman is a triathlon, women can do it too despite the name. It's 3.8 kilometers of swimming followed by 180 kilometers of cycling followed by a marathon. Back to back to back. Is there a month in between? And it took me about 12 and a half hours. I mean a lot of it was enjoyable, weirdly, but it becomes excruciating by the end. I'd done a really good job of fueling myself quite well.

I was a sports scientist, I was quite proud of the fact that I had a really good fueling plan. But the trouble is when you've been fueling yourself with carbohydrates for 12 hours, your stomach just becomes really unhappy. And digesting food is not a priority. And so your stomach just says, I don't want anything in here.

So the last half of the marathon was many, many pit stops at the Portaleu, which was quite excruciating. But once you reach the finish line, it's all worth it. It is. Tight two-fold is what we call it. I'm Helen Glover. I'm an Olympic rower. And my most excruciating sporting experience was probably the pressure of being in Olympic year and lining up on

the start line of the parents race at my kids school. The pressure was real. Did you win? I knew someone was going to ask that. Here's the thing, we had to run backwards holding the hands of our child. This would be very easy for you, you'd be rowing. You were saying, you were saying, you had this... holding your child's hand, and one of my twins dropped their ice lolly as we were doing it. I have all the excuses prepared, didn't speak to her for a week. So yeah. So I'm Hugh Dennis, I think probably best known as the winner of Channel 4's Pottery Throwdown. My most excruciating kind of athletic thing, I do a lot of long-distance cycling,

so I've done a thing called the Atapta Tour a couple of times, which is an open stage of the Tour de France which takes place kind of a week before the tour goes through. It's always in the mountains, so it was 200 kilometers in the Pyrenees, and you have 12 hours to do it, and you get followed by a thing called the broom. So if you're not going fast enough, you get taken off the course because you're holding people up. But in the ninth hour, I thought, you're doing incredibly well. I set my sights on this guy. It had taking me nine hours to catch up with this cyclist

Got closer and closer and closer to him and I overtook him and as I overtook him. I realized he'd got one leg I love that there was nice lolly that was dropped because of course you are also from a famous Mausel ice cream family, aren't you Helen? Yeah, there's so many links. You don't immediately imagine a large amount of delicious ice cream leads to Olympic excellence. So have you found a way of balancing the two? You know what, honestly, every day of my life, for my whole childhood, I ate bowls fulls of ice cream.

Yeah, my dad was an ice cream maker in Cornwall and that's how he grew up. ate bowls full of ice cream. Yeah, my dad was an ice cream maker in Cornwall, and that's how he grew up. Yeah, lots of ice cream. That's the secret. So if you take away one thing from listening to this show, eat more dessert. Now, Hugh, I'll start with you. Do you think there's such a thing as a perfect athlete?

Well, I'm certain it's not me. I don't know. I'm sort of interested in the views of the rest of the panel here, because I would have thought that you can be perfect, say, for rowing or perfect for running, perfect for football. But it doesn't transfer. It's not a kind of transferable thing.

So I suspect no. That was a more serious answer than you were hoping for we ask everyone actually this is an interesting thing as briefly as possible summarize what you think makes the nearest you can have to a point right you walk into an Olympic Village and you look around and every single body type is represented. Because every single sport requires something so different. I'm there selling the ice cream. I'm sure there's an archer or a shooter.

But yeah, honestly, there's something for everyone. And it's actually really refreshing because there really is something for everyone. So the perfect athlete, I actually think, would come down less to the physicality and more to the mindset. If you're going to say what is perfection, I think the mindset has to be really highly up there. Emma, what do you think? When we look at athletes from a sports science perspective, we always drill down into what are the important determinants of success for this event, and they will all differ. So for some athletes, we want them to have a really big engine if they're an aerobic

athlete. For some people, we want them to have a lot of speed and strength and power if they're a sprinter. So it really does depend what they're training for. But I also agree with Helen. I think even as a physiologist who kind of is wedded to the fact that we can build this amazing biological specimen, all the research we have shows that there are so many other factors and things like mindset and psychology but even how supported we are growing up. There's even some really cool data about if you went to a village primary school you're ten times more likely to be an elite athlete. So I think when you look at the individual you have to make sure the whole ecosystem around them is being well designed to help them develop into an amazing athlete.

What is the village school link? So it's in comparison to cities where I think there's just so much more competition. So I think your talent might get nurtured better if you're in a smaller pond if you like. Well that would be swimming. Or rowing. I mean from a technological point of view, as you said, it's the whole ecosystem. So you've got the athlete and then you've got the kids. So if it's a cyclist, it's the cyclist and the bike.

If it's bobsled, it's the bobsled and the athlete. And so we try and optimize the whole system. So it's putting all that together. And as you said, Emmet, to pick up what you said, you talked about mindset. You also said we can build or help construct an athlete in a sense through training and so on. In a particular sport, how much is what you might call genetic and how much is then the training and the commitment

and a lifelong commitment practice and so on? I think we'd love to be able to do like a genetic test for an athlete and geneticists in sport have been looking for genes which really predict performance and they've really struggled to find it. But what we do know, if you take a group of non-elite athletes and a group of elite athletes, about 60% of the variance between the two is down to genetics. But genetics to do with all sorts of things. So yes, someone's aerobic capacity, their fitness, their strength, their muscle composition, but also their propensity to

be injured. You know, staying injury-free is one of the best predictors of being a successful athlete and even their personality. So those things can be genetic and those things all feed into what makes a champion. So we can build and we can train, but you have to be starting with the right genetic material. So certainly if you're talking about, you said Olympic gold for example, so that there you have to have everything I suppose because you're the best of the best. But then you also have to have that factor of opportunity and for me I was 21 when I started rowing and I've got science to thank for the fact that I am a rower full stop. Like I started rowing

through a talent ID program. I was measured, physically measured. My fitness was measured. And I was told at the age of 21, four years before London, you could be a good rower. And it's like, I had the makeup and the genetics and stuff that I still have today. But if that sliding doors moment hadn't happened,

I would not be an Olympian right now. So there has to be opportunity. There has to be access, you know. That's what I always try to say when I go into primary schools. There's nothing to stop it being you. Olympians are not people who are different or exceptional just because they are born that way. There is so much around it, around the edges and around the opportunity that I think it's really important to instil in the self-belief

of young people as well. And the idea that there will be a sport for you, because you said it's almost everyone is represented. Yeah, and we've got really good at identifying talent in this country. Like, Helen was identified because we knew that tall people with long limbs would be really good at certain sports like rowing.

But you were already involved in many sports. What were you doing up to the age of 21? So that's the thing, it kind of looks like the starting point was 21 but actually you know my whole life had been sport. I was running, hockey, swimming, everything I could so I actually had this massive multi-sport base and I was given this opportunity to channel it into one thing that I was physically really well suited for so it kind of it worked out really well in my favor. And as a physiologist I would say that's the perfect mix because some of you will have heard of the 10,000 hour rule, this idea that if we do deliberate practice for 10 years or 10,000 hours we're going

to be really really good at sport, but actually that research was based in music and with sport we know now that it's much better to do a variety of things when you're growing up, when you're going through puberty, when you're developing, so that you swim and you do games play and you learn how to be chaotic and move your body in a really chaotic way. And then you build a big engine by doing running and then you might do some sprinting. And you build up this really amazing, resilient body which knows how to move in loads of different ways. And then you refine it. And even better if someone says, oh my goodness,

your body is perfectly designed for export. And we are quite good at that in this country, identifying talent, but having that really broad base of exposure. Is there an age at which you have to give up your dream of being an elite sportsman? No. Not at all?

I work specifically now with female athletes, and the menopause is obviously a predictable time of life for females to go through and I thought, gosh, I don't think we're going to have to encounter that. But I have worked with many athletes who have had to contend with going through the menopause and being a world champion or, and yes, they tend to be archers or horse riders or target shooters but yeah, at any time of life you're capable of getting out there. There's still hope. But I think so much of it, like we were talking earlier about how much of it is mindset as

well. So there was this huge science base to say me starting rowing where I was measured and all this, but actually I was slightly too short for the cutoff. I was by far the smallest person that was tested and measured that day. And a really important factor was the coach, who was the person who selected me, was stood at the side of the room watching the physical testing. And years later, after London, he was asked by the press, why did you choose her if she didn't even make the height criteria? And it was a bit

offensive what he said. He said, she was a mongrel. We were looking for this. We were looking for this. He said, we were looking for a pedigree. We thought we knew what we wanted, this perfect pedigree. And watching, I knew she was the dog that if backed into a corner, she would fight her way out. So that's essentially that nod towards, yes, you've got this physical attribute, but really, who's got the fight?

Yeah. I didn't realize that, because I noticed at the end of every race you did, you're always given a little treat. LAUGHTER So, Steve, I was thinking that, you know, how much do you look at, you know, biology and think, hang on a minute, if evolution had gone this way... What, for me?..when you're...

Yeah, well, not necessarily for you, though there's no reason not to. But, you know, that sense of looking at the technology you're creating and feeling this almost Darwinian thing of going, but if I imagine how this creature might have evolved to be faster or be able to jump higher, does that come into the way you think? Well, we're often just trying to work out, if we have a piece of technology,

is it actually going to work? So for instance, let's say tennis, for instance, we can create the perfect tennis racket and we've done lots of work with lots of manufacturers. But when you actually give it to the player, the player goes, oh, I hate this. Oh, this is horrible. It feels terrible. So that translation from the bit of tech into what the player actually is going to do with it, whether the oars feel terrible for some reason, there's no grip or in the water or something like that. From a technological point of view we can work out the science and the physics of it absolutely but then you hand it over and there's this translation into the actual use of it

which you can get quite physically you know wrong. One example a very simple one was the colour of tennis courts. If you paint a tennis court green an acrylic court green people go I love this tennis court. If you paint a tennis court green, an acrylic court green, people go, oh, I love this tennis court. If you paint the exact same tennis court red, people go, oh, this is really hard. I hate this tennis court. It's much harder than the last one we had. And it's just the color.

So it's this kind of psychological perception of what's going on. It was the dawn of a new era of spaceflight. Our space program has reached another important milestone. We're going to fly this new rocket, never been flown before, and we've got people on it. You know that there are a lot of things that can go wrong. From the BBC World Service, 13 Minutes tells the story of the Space Shuttle. I think we've got something that's really going to mean something to the country and the world. Search for 13 Minutes presents the Space Shuttle. I think we've got something that's really going to mean something to the country and the world. Search for 13 minutes presents the Space Shuttle wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This is sport specific, of course, but in a sport like running, for example, a lot of technology goes into running shoes.

Yeah. Is there any way of saying, what percentage does the technology give an athlete? So I mean, obviously, Formula One obviously is quite a lot. But in terms of a couple of sports, running, tennis, rowing, I suppose, with the technology, the boat. After working in sports technology and sports engineering for about 10 years, I did kind of go, I wonder if this actually works? Am I wasting my time?

So we thought, well, okay, if it works, it's going to be in the data. So we went back to the data, we started looking at the data, starting with the first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, and we collected all the data we could, top 25s, every year for whatever it was, 120 years, when we did that bit of data, to see what is it that has the most impact on sporting performance. And so the first thing that you see is you see that performance grew rapidly and then

leveled off. Every sport is leveling off in performance and we're almost at equilibrium for every sport that we looked at. So the first thing that makes performance grow is actually finding the right athletes. So back in 1896, it actually really was whoever turned up. So people just turned up and said, oh, I'll do that, I'll do that, and didn't even know what the rules were for the, you know, tug of war and things like this. So people would turn up, they'd get a medal, and that was the performance of the day.

As time went on, more and more good athletes were found, and then as globalization occurred, particularly after the Second World War, sadly the Second World War killed a lot of our good athletes, and so performance absolutely dropped after the Second World War, but then it took off again, and then it's now leveled off. So we've now got, so the population has grown since then,

so that's the first thing. So you've got a bigger population, you've got a better way of finding the athletes, so you've got a bigger athlete population to choose from, and that kind of allows you to get the best athletes. So once you've done that, you then go, right, what else can we do? So there might be something like the Fosbury Flop,

if anyone remembers that. So a high jump at the Fosbury flop, you can see that as a little blip there in that particular data. So that's a technique. It's a technique, yeah. So people would kind of run at it and go over kind of facing it

and kind of do a scissor jump. And then Fosbury flop is where you turn backwards and go over head first with your bum kind of just scraping the top of the bar. Most people don't go over at all, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, or under, yeah. I've never managed. Yeah, and then you get other things where you go,

okay, what about swimming, for instance? First of all, swimsuits went from being quite big and being made out of wool and then silk. That's a wool, I can imagine a wool in swimming suits. A full body wool in swimming suits. They got very, very heavy. In fact, women first were asked to swim in dresses and dresses and blouses with weights in the dresses

to keep the dresses down so you couldn't see the bloomers underneath. So performance was not particularly good. So then as time went on, swimsuits got smaller and smaller and smaller and then, anyone remembers the Speedos, the tiny Speedos, and then suddenly swimsuits got longer again because they realized that it reduced the drag through the water. And then they turned them into something very stiff and plastic-like when it came to about 2009. At the Rome World Championships, 43 records were broken wearing

these new swimsuits. And everyone was wearing them. Whoever was sponsored by one company was taking the logo off and sticking the logo of the best suit on, and everyone was trying to wear the best suit. So the ruling body just went, oh no, we can't have this. We can't have this anymore. We're going to have to ban these suits. And from a technology point of view, that's when you can find out

actually how much difference they made, because overnight they were banned and you can tell exactly how much difference it made. So to answer your question for swimsuits, 50 meter, it was about 3%, a 3% improvement in performance, wearing the suit or not wearing the suit. Which is huge. Which is huge, you know, when you're thinking about it. So it's seconds and seconds and seconds. Is that worrying, though? I mean, given that we're talking about athleticism.

So the rules are about the human with the technology of the time of the day. And actually what FINA, the ruling body, should perhaps have done, had just let it go its natural course. Because we were kind of at equilibrium. And they allowed the swimsuits to appear. And maybe they shouldn't have done that in the first place.

But once they were out there and being used, suddenly performance went up. But what would have happened is everything would have reached an equilibrium again. Everyone had been wearing the suits. And everyone had reached a different level, but a bit higher up. What strikes me, though, as she was a sports person,

clearly, they're expensive things. How do you see that interaction between technology and just the athlete achieving the best that they can do? Yeah, I really like this topic actually because for me I'm quite like purist around the sport and I think for me actually limiting technology universally doesn't limit the sport itself. Like in rowing, everything needs to be commercially available for everyone so you can't go into a lair and develop a boat that no one's ever seen before to a spec that doesn't exist in any other country. When you line up, you know you're

basically in the same boat with the same walls as everyone beside you. That sits really well with me, I like that. But then I can also understand that, you know, if you're a cyclist and your bike is a gram lighter than the person beside you, that's part of your sport as well. So I think it's really a sport by sport, it depends on the sport, because for some sports, the tech is, like you say, it's really hand in hand with the athlete. And for others, actually, it's slightly more standalone as the athletes I think it's really important that each sport has a bit of a handle on what tech is developing in their sport that it is available for everybody and people aren't pressured out of the market and really crucially the youngsters don't feel the pressure or the need because otherwise yeah you

can buy yourself a few seconds but if you're if you're 13 years old you don't need to be doing that you need to to be enjoying it, enjoying a variety of sports and not necessarily having those incremental gains worried about at that early age. I think that's about that in the Olympics last year, the tragedy of someone deciding not to wear underpants. I'm sure someone would have seen this. It's really this guy does this incredible jump,

but unfortunately he obviously had gone commando, and that meant that as he went over, his penis just dropped a little bit, and knocked the bar off. And that is one of the, I don't know if you'll make the edit, but it really was, because it was both comedic and tragic. Does anyone remember this? Oh yeah, it was shown both comedic and tragic. Does anyone remember it? No, I see.

Oh, yeah. It was shown on Slow Mo. Yeah. Yeah. Emma, you're going to comment. Well, it's actually on a similar theme, surprisingly. So when we talk about technology giving percentage points at improvement, one of the big projects

I did ahead of the Tokyo Games was working with a research group at the University of Portsmouth around sports bras. Because what we now know about the biomechanics of breast tissue is that if we don't support the breast tissue well enough, the breast movement can change our whole biomechanics and energetics. So we decrease our stride length, use more energy, we fatigue more quickly. And basically if you were someone lining up on the start line of a marathon and a clone of you was next to you and you were exactly the same in every way, training, preparation,

fitness, one of you had a really good fitting sports bra on that minimised breast tissue movement and one didn't, the person with the good sports bra would finish a mile ahead. So we don't need engineers, Steve, we just need good sports bras. Having said that, for that particular research, talk about Jo Skir down at Portsmouth. I worked with her on the physics of the sports bras, because she was doing lots of sports science, but she didn't really have the physical models.

So she said, can we develop these physical models? So I wrote some papers on this. But one of the things was, I could see all the data, but obviously I couldn't see any of the videos. So there's lots of videos being taken of women in various guys from wearing bras to no bras and and so I'd have to look at the data and and shut my eyes and imagine what was going on my my daughter I remember my daughter coming into the bedroom,

and I put my hands out and I'm kind of doing this kind of side to side motion with my fingers, with my eyes shut, and she says, Dad, stop it, I know what you're doing. That is such a sad story though, the story of the clone as well. The fact that they've managed to spend all the money on creating the exact copy, but ran out of money to buy a second sports bra.

It's just very bad planning. It's very sad, yeah. So we've talked about the technology, but there's a technology, I suppose you could call nutrition, the training regime itself technology. How much difference is there now across different countries, for example, in terms of the technology that you apply to get your athletes into peak physical fitness? I mean, I think the Western world

of the top sporting nations are probably all fairly equal, but they do a really good job of finely tuning things like nutrition. And things like altitude training is a bit of a hack I guess for for accelerating adaptation to training. So you either go to altitude 2,000 meters let's say and the oxygen availability up there is less and so your body has to work harder. If our body isn't getting enough oxygen it's really hardwired to adapt to this stressor so it just starts to make more red blood

cells which can carry more oxygen to the muscles. So that adaptation can be kind of enhanced by going to altitude and then the next step was oh well what if we didn't need to go to altitude what if we just brought altitude to sea level and we made altitude laboratories where we can manipulate the oxygen. Brilliant now we don't even have to go up to altitude. So now we have athletes who are sleeping in a low oxygen tent who might be training in a low oxygen laboratory just to try and amplify the effect. Isn't that a bit disappointing for the athletes who are hoping they were going to go up Kilimanjaro and now they're still in Pasildon? I don't know if you've done it Helen.

I've never done altitude and I actually I really wish I had I really wish I had done it at some point in my career because I think all the research is really strong in it and there's so much you know benefit from it but no I've never done it. So it's a mountain stage that you have sort of so did you get to a height where you started to feel the effects of altitude? No. What was it? I didn't know but I... How high does it get? You know, a couple of thousand metres. I don't know what the highest col was, but you're never at the top of the mountain. You don't cycle actually to the peak and then down the other side. You always go for the col.

How high do you have to go to start seeing benefits? You probably have to go 1500 metres and the cols are probably 1200 on some of the peaks of yeah when I drove across Peru with Ben Fogel for a series called the world's most dangerous roads and they were quite dangerous they were sort of you know cliffs and stuff and no barriers and stuff and I turned to Ben at one point said do you think it should be called the world's most dangerous roads he went no I don't really I think it should be called roads passable with care that's the difference between me and Ben Foddle up in the Andes every hotel lobby has got an oxygen tank so you can just go in and kind of throw the mask on your face and feel better for a bit because you've

done a few you know of those kind shows, and you've done one with David Baddiel recently. Yeah, that wasn't really endurance. Well, it didn't seem to be endurance for you, but for David Baddiel it did. You know, we cycled across France, epic journey, along a canal to the maximum height we got to. It was about, I don't know, maybe 25 meters and he was on an electric bike. Yeah I think the fact the trailer they've been using on television is mainly you massaging his

car after he goes, oh this electric bike's so heavy. Yeah I also think going back to the actual technology thing, we used to get criticized didn't we as a nation, GB used to get criticized, thing. We used to get criticized didn't we as a nation, GB used to get criticized for really only being good at the sitting down sports and you kind of go well that's sort of fair in a way I think you know rowing is that we're really really good at sitting down sports because they're the only sports in which humans would actually win any competition with animals. However fast you can run, whatever shoes you're wearing, you're not going to be a cheetah. You're not going to be a shark swimming.

But you put a shark on a bicycle. And you're spending a lot of money on this research as well. If you go to a flimmer from going to Hugh Dennis' zoo, you'll see why it's about to be closed down. Yeah. In terms of training, we spoke about the fact that there's a big advantage to having begun sports early. But you in particular famously had a break. You had twins, didn't you?

So how did you find that process? Did you lose a great deal of fitness? Is it kind of banked up somehow? Do you know what? I was really, there's lots of things I banded around about the amazing ability of, you know, post childbirth mums and what happens, the physiology and blood volume and all these things and when I had the kids I never considered that I would get back into a

boat, never considered that I'd go to another Olympics after Rio. I hadn't rode for four years and when I got back on the row machine, it's because we were in lockdown, and I had just had the twins, and they were newborns, and every time I got onto the row machine, they would only sleep to the sound of the fan of the row machine. It was really comforting to them,

so basically then that time, the way to get them to sleep and keep them asleep was to get on the row machine, and slowly but surely my numbers came down and I was really surprised how after four years out of the sport how quickly my numbers came down I mean I was I was really surprised that I could still do this Yes, I had a big bank of fitness and that must have must have stuck with me, but I had four years out as well What was the gap between giving birth to twins and actually going back to the Olympics then? So what would that have been? Just over a year would have been from twins to Tokyo,

and then I think I raced the European Championships, they must have been about nine months old, maybe ten months old then. When you say you took a break, I bet you didn't. I mean you didn't row but how many miles a week were you running? I did a marathon and a half iron man. The year after we I did a half iron man and a marathon and all these things to like keep fit but then as soon as I had so I had Logan in 2018 and twins in 2020 and soon as I had kids I was trying to keep fit so I wasn't again it wasn't a

standing style wasn't going from zero but definitely not putting in the hours I was on the program and did I read it somewhere that there are some enhancements in certain parts of your ability or measurable enhancements? Yeah I got a personal best on the rowing machine after having kids. The most measurable thing we can do in our sport is a two kilometer test on a rowing machine. And I got the best time I ever got. So compared to when I won the Olympics in London and Rio

in my 20s, three kids later in fourth. And I mean, Emma, you must have an insight into what happens to the human body. But I was really surprised because I when I first started out I thought I probably won't get on the plane Tokyo I probably won't make it onto the Olympic team but at least I'll have given it a go and shown my daughter that it's worth the try and I was really surprised that I was getting these results. Was it the urgency of trying to keep the twins asleep? It was a big part, yeah.

There was one silver in Paris. So Emma, what do we... I mean, first of all, we have so little information about returning to medal-winning performance in women after having kids, because for so long, athletes had their athletic career and they retired and had babies. And it's not something you can do experiments on people. You can't just say

well I'm gonna make you all pregnant and you're not pregnant and I'm gonna compare you coming back to win Olympic medals. So we really have to learn from athletes like Helen about what works and what doesn't and it is very individual and she's clearly a unique superstar from all different perspectives. I think one of the things we always say because we work with lots of women across all different levels of performance is that it's not a badge of honor how quickly you get back. Helen will have planned all of her training and her return with loads of support and that won't be the same for the next

woman and if you're still in your pajamas at nine months and you're not winning a medal that's also okay, hashtag asking for a friend. But we are learning more and more and I think what would be really brilliant in this country is if we were sharing information more widely across sports because what you tend to find is that one sport will really invest in its, you know, in understanding its athletes and their performance and then they won't tell the next sport. And we've got someone like Laura Kenny in cycling who's done the same thing and and actually what we need to do is pull all of this really valuable information from women who are returning and doing remarkable things after childbirth and see if we can learn any lessons but I will say that it has to be a really measured return because childbirth is really significant. Is there a crossover from this study of elite athletes into just general health in the population? Well I was going to say I think when we look at things like Formula One and how much of those features end up actually in road cars eventually, it's an important responsibility of elite sport to use its

learning to inform public health? There's a lot of research on parkrun, so I've done quite a bit with parkrun, and there was an obstetrician a few years ago who wanted to investigate running in pregnancy. In fact, he was a parkrunner and someone said, I'm pregnant, am I allowed to run? And he went, I don't know, there's no research, because the ethics make it very, very difficult. And he went, oh, I bet there's a load of park runners who are pregnant already. And I'm not forcing them to run.

They're just doing their own thing. So did this amazing bit of research, got something like 2,000 participants, which is really big for a study of that kind, and found out what was happening. And some women were running right the way up to the end of pregnancy and then coming back quite early as well. But certainly what he found was that actually delivery

was fine, if not better, for those who were doing physical activity right up to the end of pregnancy. Yeah, we've been really conservative in this country about pregnant women. And we used to say, stop doing anything. And now we know that absolutely, if you've been doing something before,

you can continue doing that, and that's a really healthy part of pregnancy. In terms of the future, so you mentioned actually, Steve, you said that there's been a plateauing of performance. So if we talk about world records, for example, let's say 100 meters, can we see the limit to our, I was gonna say, I'm not gonna say design, but our physiology, are we see the the limit to our I was gonna say I'm not gonna say design but our physiology

Yeah, are we reaching that limit where you just so could there be a time when world records are really not gonna get broken too much Anymore well, we're kind of hitting that now. I mean we again we've looked at the data not the physiology I'll leave that to the physiologist, but in terms of looking at the data You're looking at some sports where really the records are not going to be broken for quite some time. We're looking at, you know, where do we get to the 99.999% of the infinite limit, you know, we put a curve through it. And it's years away for some events, you know, certainly some of the swimming events. I think, you know, if we were to last, if the modern Olympic Games was to last as long as the ancient Olympic Games, then it will finish in something like 2030 or something like that.

So we think about in the next Olympics, the next few Olympics, what's it going to be like? Will we have reached a limit? Well, by the year 3000, I'm pretty certain we will have reached the limit of performance. And Helen, you will yet again in the year three, still be an Olympic rower. Let me give it one more go. I mean, what is it, Hibaka? I mean, I know it's an impossible question,

but let's say 100 metres. Yeah. Where is it? If I were to say to guess, where is it? Is it 9.8, 9.7? I think we looked at the, you know, you can go based on previous performance, future performance, the limit will be, and we got down to something like 9.1 or 9.2 or something like this, if you follow the data and you kind of do a dotted

line off into the future. It's quite a world record at the moment, though. Is it 9.5 Usain Bolt? I think to start to really break records, we're just going to have to break rules. And not through drugs perhaps, I mean that is a way that people do break records. But Eliud Kipchoge broke the two-hour marathon a few years ago, and it was a huge project, years in the making, that was to basically make a man run under two hours. It had never been done before, and he ran one hour 59.40, so they succeeded.

But it required him to run, I mean, they chose the right surface, they chose the right time of day and the right climate with these shoes which had a huge energy return. They had pacers which were in a formation which made him the most streamlined. He was an amazing physiological specimen. There were so many components and actually his record

didn't stand as a world record because it wasn't within regulations. And so I wonder whether either the rules will have to change because I think the people at the top are now as close to being perfect specimens as we're going to get. Yeah, I mean, I agree with that absolutely. I mean, certainly with that two hour record, having a load of runners in front of him, shielding him from the aerodynamics was a key feature of why he got under two hours. I just want to finish by asking you because we've heard about the level of detail and the training and the effort it takes to be an elite athlete. In your experience do you feel you're at an absolute peak and there's really nothing else you could do to improve?

Do you get to that point where you think this is? Maximum performance. I love this question because I think it's a really important one. So I have experienced that once in my life after London we got the gold and I Didn't feel I deserved it. I didn't feel I've been in the sport long enough I didn't have any ownership over the title Olympic champion. I was going to go on for another four years to prove it to myself that that I belonged, that title belonged to me. And I can say for four years, I absolutely lived that lifestyle where every morning I woke up

and I thought at that start line in Rio, I have to know I could have done nothing more and I honestly say that I sat on that start line in Rio feeling as close to the most perfect athlete as I could physically create and I'm really proud I'm so privileged that I had a four-year period in my life where I could dedicate myself to being the best I could be but I would say that that was flipped on its head when I had three kids, I was breastfeeding all night, I was like getting no recovery and I was still competing and performing. So I think yes, there's this absolute perfection

and there's this quest, I'm really lucky that I had this moment in time where I could do that. But I don't think you necessarily have to, I think there are other ways of doing it. We asked the audience a question and today we asked them if you could add any sport or game to the school curriculum what would it be? Hugh? This is from Tressa and it says it would have to be rowing so Brian could be the cox. I think what it says hopscotch string theory I think you might mean hopscotch

quantum mechanics because you can have your legs simultaneously inside and out Your joke hasn't already been read out but it has been marked I'm afraid you just found it lacking I think it's quantum an illustrating cat. So thanks to our panel, Professor Steve Haake, Dr. Emma Ross, Helen Glover, and Hugh Dennis. Now, next week, we're going to be discussing science. Goodbye.

Is that it? Yep, it is. Why? Well, it's because we don't know what the next broadcast is going to be. Ah, but we do know because as you know the Infinite Monkey Cage was born in November 2009, thus making it Scorpio and so I've looked up our astrological prediction and it says next week we're going to be asking astrologists is it nature or nurture that makes them so bad at predicting the possible futures we'll get letters for that yeah we should get letters goodbye

turn that nice again. Hello, Russell Kane here. I used to love British history, be proud of it. Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians, obviously, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor. That has become much more challenging, for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius.

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