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Short heels make elite sprinters super speedy
Date:10/29/2009

When 100 m sprinters launches themselves from the starting blocks, the race can be won or lost in the first few strides. Acceleration through the first few strides is the key to winning gold. So when Stephen Piazza was approached by an American football star, who sprints in his position of wide receiver, to find out how he could improve his technique and training regime, Piazza decided to focus on the athlete's ankles to try to discover what gives elite sprinters the edge over ordinary mortals and publishes his findings on 30 October 2009 in The Journal of Experimental Biology at http://jeb.biologists.org.

The effectiveness of an accelerating sprinter's push off depends on the amount of leverage that the calf muscles have when pulling on the back of the heel to pull it up as it pushes the toes down, and off, the ground. Piazza figured that the athlete's foot would have a large distance from the ankle to the back of the heel to produce a long 'heel lever' for the calf muscle to pull on when pushing the toes down. In this case, the calf muscle would have to contract and pull the heel up over a long distance, so Piazza measured how far the athlete's tendon moved (translated) while pulling the athlete's heel up to see how it compared with that of non-sprinters. Piazza says 'I thought it would be one of the largest (tendon translations]) we had ever measured'. But when he and his student, Sabrina Lee, measured the distance, they were surprised to find that it was much shorter than average. Was the football star the exception or the rule?

Piazza decided to compare the Achilles' tendon translation of elite athletes with that of non-sprinters. Working with sprinters and long jumpers from Lock Haven University, and local non-sprinters, Piazza and Lee used ultrasound imaging to measure the tendon's translation as the subjects pointed their toes. Amazingly, the distance was 25% shorter in the elite athletes
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Contact: Emma Kelly
emma@biologists.com
44-122-342-5525
The Company of Biologists
Source:Eurekalert

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