What if science could help athletes run faster, train smarter, and recover more effectively? At Stanford, researchers and athletes are teaming up to turn that question into reality. Through collaborations between Stanford Athletics and the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, scientists are applying cutting-edge research to real-world sports performance, uncovering insights that benefit research and athletic training alike.

“Athletes and scientists are constantly seeking to improve and push boundaries, whether on the field or in the lab,” said Scott Delp, chair of the Leadership Council of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, a network of six universities and institutes. “By joining forces, we are discovering new insights in both the world of sports and science.”

Tyler Friedrich, the Marie and Alex Shipman Associate Athletics Director of Applied Performance, is helping oversee a number of the projects. “We’ve found that science can really move the needle when it comes to understanding the intricacies and mechanics of the human body and getting an athlete to perform at their peak,” he said. “There’s a natural symmetry there, and we realized that we could mutually benefit from collaborating.” 

These collaborations span various sports and scientific disciplines. For example, researchers and athletes are working together to create computer simulations of volleyball players to better understand the mechanics of human movement and injury. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Mike Fredericson and Dr. Emily Kraus worked together on a study that showed that a nutritional intervention can decrease bone stress injuries. And studies from Reed Gurchiek on hamstrings injuries and training – work that Friedrich was also involved with – enhanced our understanding of how muscles adapt to training. 

Clocking baseball sprints 

In addition to injury prevention, researchers are studying how to optimize athletic movement. One such project involves tracking sprint performance in baseball. 

Postdoctoral scholar Samuel Montalvo is collaborating with Stanford’s baseball team and Gunnar Cederberg, the assistant Olympic sports performance coach. Cederberg runs a program that collects players’ performance data, such as hamstring strength, jump height, and lifting velocity. He also conducts sprint profiling, which measures strengths and deficiencies of athletes’ sprint times.

“Baseball is a sprinting sport,” Montalvo said. “Players must make short sprints from base to base. It’s one of their main tasks and important to their performance and game outcomes.” 

Cederberg measures players’ sprints at various “splits,” or distance intervals. For example, he’ll measure an athlete’s speed at 0–10 yards and compare it to their speed at higher intervals, such as 10-20 yards, producing a ratio that describes how well an athlete accelerates. He explained that if an athlete is fast from the starting point of a sprint, they demonstrate high levels of force – or are “force dominant.” If they are slower from the start, but can reach high speeds, they tend to be “velocity dominant.” 

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Andrew Brodhead

“My job is to take that data, interpret it, then create exercise prescriptions that will help athletes improve performance,” Cederberg said.

The project’s current sprint data was gathered once a week from nearly 40 Stanford baseball players during the 2022 and 2023 seasons. Initially, the data was strictly informative. But coaching staff wanted to know whether modified training that led to faster sprint times were associated with better game outcomes, so they turned to Montalvo for deeper analysis.

“If athletes improved sprint times by at least 1%, then we wanted to know if that was associated with either winning or losing games. And after crunching numbers it appears that, yes, it was,” Montalvo said. 

The project is ongoing, and Cederberg said the baseball team’s collaborations with the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance will continue to inform athletic training and, hopefully, improve game outcomes. “We’re providing the applied side, and they’re doing the data interpretation and breakdown while providing really valuable insights that we might not have the time or the resources to gather,” he said. 

Rowers and recovery

While speed and injury prevention are crucial aspects of performance, so is recovery. Understanding how athletes bounce back from intense training is another area of focus for Stanford researchers.

Morgan Smith, a postdoctoral scholar working with Professor Todd Coleman’s lab, is investigating how teams progress through a season toward peak performance. 

“What would happen if we paired physiological measurements with biometric data, to create a really colorful story about how athletes recover from preseason all the way through postseason, including through their peak performance?” she asked.

Working with scientists in the Coleman and Snyder labs, Smith is creating profiles of members of Stanford’s women’s rowing team that detail their paths through peak performance. 

Last quarter at Arrillaga Hall, where the rowing team practices, Smith and the other researchers gathered data before and immediately after training sessions. They collected blood and saliva samples from the rowers to measure physiological data like lactate levels and creatine kinase enzyme activity. They also conducted biological micro-sampling, including of cytokines, the small proteins crucial in controlling the growth and activity of other immune system cells. 

The human body conducts much of its recovery during sleep, so the researchers gave the rowers smart watches to wear at night. The devices measure body temperature and analyze heartbeat dynamics, focusing on the timing between heartbeats (inter-beat intervals) to assess autonomic nervous system activity. The watches also measure the balance between parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) and sympathetic (fight-or-flight) nervous system activity across sleep cycles, which reflects the body’s recovery processes.

Smith said the data collected in the Autumn quarter will serve as baseline measurements that they’ll compare to data gathered in the winter and spring. “As we do our next collection, we’ll be able to analyze complete profiles from rowers’ biometric data that tell us how these athletes recover over a particular time period,” Smith said. 

“By working with Stanford Athletics, the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance aligns its mission to integrate cutting-edge science with real-world applications,” she added, “fostering a deeper understanding of recovery processes that can elevate both research and athletic excellence.”

Delp noted the generous donor support that helps make these collaborations possible. “We are extremely fortunate to have Clara Wu Tsai and the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation as visionary partners who have helped us envision and launch this unique partnership”