Charlie you have talked extensively on relaxation being a key to elite sprinting. This is a common theme in many sprint coaching cues to relax when doing drill etc. Have you read about rate of relaxation in any overseas literature? I have scene people talk about studies relating the amount and size of mitochondria being related to “rate of relaxation.” Additionally there was a linear relationship in terms of rate of relaxation and development from national level athletes to international and elite status. This brings about the question of relaxation in multidirectional sports such as the skill personnel in football. What effect if any do you feel this has on the athletes abilities to cut/change direction with speed and re-accelerate etc? Would you characterize many who do not cut and juke well as larking in relaxation?
Relaxation has its biggest influence in the late part of the race (if we talk about the 100m), both from a biomechanic and energetic point of view. Anyway, quite difficult to gain relaxation (if not impossible) when you don’t have it from the start. I think that ability to make cuts or change of direction is not heavily correlated with relaxation, altough being relaxed is always very useful.
I have seen this too, and thought it was really interesting. I would have thought that muscle relaxation was controlled almost completely by neural mechanisms, but I guess not.
One idea I had was maybe that, endurance sports have a large relaxation component, so that the athletes use as little energy as possible. Top endurance athletes would be very good at relaxation from all of their background training. As well, these athletes would have the most mitochondria compared to others as a result of their training. So maybe it wasn’t the mitochondria necessarily involved in the relaxation, but the previous training that the athletes in the study were doing?
That is probably not right at all, it was just an idea.
If anyone could tell me the mechanism on how mitochondria speeds up relaxation, that would be great.
bump for charlie, pj kitkat