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Programs and projects

Device created through the AIS's involvement in the CRC for Microtechnology. Image: 1 2 The chief elements of the Performance Research Centre are:

Post-Graduate Scholarships Visiting Scholars Scheme Applied Sensors Unit Data Analytics Unit Sports Research Funding National Small Technologies Program Workshops, Seminars, Events

Post-Graduate Scholarships
The AIS provides placements for post-graduates including honours, masters, PhDs, and post-doctoral students on an as-needs basis. This scheme identifies specific areas requiring further research, thus providing a more focused assistance to AIS and national sports programs. It enables scholars to work with specific sports on a day-to-day basis, interacting closely with coaches in identifying and addressing issues of practical relevance. Since each of the scholars is enrolled through an Australian university and has both AIS and university supervisors, the scheme promotes the recruitment of external expertise to help solve sportrelated problems. In the past financial contributions to the scheme are negotiated between the AIS, a partner University and a National Sporting Organisation, however under new direction, the AIS will primarily award scholarships to students who have obtained an APA (Australian Post Graduate Award). Under Australian Government policy, the AIS can only offer scholarships to non-Australian citizens when there are no suitable Australian candidates, however an appropriate VISA will need to be aquired. The AIS Sport-based PhD Scheme (established in 2001) provided a model that is now being emulated in other countries. Students interested in applying for a research scholarship should periodically refer to the Positions vacant website.

Visiting Scholars Scheme

In 2007, the AIS Performance Research Centre commenced its Visiting Scholars Scheme with the sole purpose of supporting visits to the AIS by internationally recognised innovators who can contribute to the improvement of the AIS' delivery of innovative programs and science. The Scheme provides funds to allow AIS sport science and medicine researchers to bring specially targeted people to the AIS in Canberra for periods of about one month to assist with the planning or conduct of AIS research, or the interpretation of results. Generally, three Scholars each year are supported.

Applied Sensors Unit

The Applied Sensors Unit designs and develops advanced sport-specific software for coaches and scientists, typically utilising sensor and video technology. The Unit gives the AIS the capability of gaining competitive advantage through highly innovative use sensors in a variety of sporting applications. This capability enables our scientists to monitor athletes in the field, rather than being confined to laboratory settings.

Data Analytics Unit

The AIS Data Analytics Unit is dedicated to 'making sense' of data by analyzing and presenting the data in a way that will provide greater insights for Australian coaches and scientists. The Unit is comprised of three analysits each with a different set of expertise and responsibilities in the key areas of analytics.

Sports Research Funding

The AIS has long recognised the importance of research and the development of technologies to enhance coach and athlete performance. The AIS Sports Research Fund is an allocation of a specific, dedicated budget for research and development targeted at the needs of sports. With the limited funds available, A total of $240,000 is allocated as $20k grants to the following Category A sports: Athletics, Canoe (Sprint and Slalom), Cycling, Diving, Hockey, Paralympic Alpine Skiing, Rowing, Sailing, Swimming (inc. APC), Triathlon, Water Polo and Winter Sport. The Sports Research Consultant, Sports Performance Manager, Coach and Sports Coordinator in consultation with the performance enhancment teams for each sport will decide on the research projects that will likely deliver performance outcomes. The funding being made available to sports is veiwed by the AIS as an investment in the furture of athlete performance outcomes. As such, the AIS quality assures the research by assessing protocols and proposals through both the AIS Ethics Committee and an AIS Research Committee. This quality assurance check ensures that the research proposals are both scientifically valid and will also reap the outcomes envisaged by the sports research team.

National Small Technologies Program

Since 1997, the AIS has recognised a need for development of small, unobtrusive equipment to enable increased monitoring of athletes in field situations (as opposed to laboratory environments). There has been awareness that such equipment can enable more regular collection of data, providing a continuous and comprehensive picture of training adaptation rather than just occasional snapshots. Because of limitations

to in-house technological capacity, progress in this area has depended largely on the formation of collaborative links. In July 2001, the Australian Sports Commission became a partner in the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Microtechnology, and in the following years some very significant advances have occurred, particularly in regard to the development of prototypes for use in rowing and swimming. Strong technological and human resource platforms have been established to support future work (as evidenced at the 2004 CRC Annual Conference when there were no less than 23 presentations on sportrelated developments). Driven by the need to better service athletes and coaches, the Performance Research Centre has been at the foreground of developing technology which not only serves its purpose, but also has potential commercial scope as well.

Workshops, Seminars, Events

The Performance Research Centre organises a weekly series entitled, 'Smart Talk'. Originally created to disseminate research information, Smart Talk presentations provide a variety of opportunities for Commission staff to hear about various activities in Australia and around the world. In September 2007, the 100th Smart Talk was delivered by Professor Peter Fricker, Head of the AIS. Workshops have been conducted to expedite collaborative research. The most successful of these occurred on 2nd and 3rd November 2006 when the AIS and CSIRO came together for a two-day workshop. From this event, no fewer than 12 research projects were seeded. A follow up workshop entitled, 'Frontiers of Human Performance' was subsequently hosted by the AIS on 13th and 14th March 2008. This workshop will bring together scientists from the AIS, CSIRO, DSTO and NICTA to discuss where performance gains in human endeavour are likely to occur in the next 4-5 years.

Performance recovery at the Australian Institute of Sport

Head of AIS Performance Recovery Dr Shona Halson.

Share 02 Dec 2011 Performance Recovery at the Australian Institute of Sport by Dr Jodi Richardson Performance recovery at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) is provided on a day-to-day basis for noninjured athletes to enhance their ability to train daily and give them strategies they can use in competition. Performance recovery is an emerging speciality of high-performance sport, which now represents a significant aspect of an elite athletes training plan. In 2002, Recovery was a division of the AIS Physiology Department with a staff of one. Now Performance Recovery at the AIS has grown to become a discipline in its own right with six staff. Each Recovery Physiologist is responsible for servicing athletes from five to eight sports and engaging in their research areas within the Recovery discipline. Evidence-based recovery programs are designed to assist athletes with treatment from physiological stressors associated with training and performance including inflammation, soreness, energy-substrate depletion, oxidative stress, nervous system fatigue, muscle damage and high-core temperatures. The founding member of Performance Recovery and now its Head of Department, Dr. Shona Halson, began at the AIS in 2002. During her PhD she specialised in overtraining, particularly fatigue, investigating hormonal responses to overtraining and overreaching as well as carbohydrate metabolism, performance and mood changes. Her work at the AIS centres on recovery which is essential for athletes when high levels of fatigue are present. Dr. Halson explains why Australia is one of the leaders in Performance Recovery. As athletes train harder and harder and place more demands on their body and their mind, we need to help them to continue to train at a high level, to minimise excessive fatigue and injury; and to ensure that when they compete they have as low levels of fatigue as possible, Dr Halson said.

Many other countries view it as recovery from injury, the AIS does that as well in terms of our Physical Therapies Department, but we look at its application from day-to-day training and between events during competition, which is very different. The AIS Recovery Centre opened in 2006 and demand for these services continues to increase. Each programmed recovery session is supervised and tailored dependent on environmental conditions, type of athlete and how fatigued the athlete is. The key recovery strategies are: hydrotherapy, sleep optimisation and compression. These are also the areas in which most of the Recovery departments research is focussed. Dr. Halson emphasises the importance of research in this new area of high-performance sport to ensure that they can best understand how to apply these strategies using new and improved protocols. Part of the Recovery Centre research focuses on mechanisms underlying why hydrotherapy is an effective component of athlete recovery. The main techniques used in hydrotherapy are cold water immersion and contrast water therapy, which alternates hot and cold water immersion. Dr. Halson and her colleagues assess how hydrotherapy affects an athletes core, skin and muscle temperature, blood flow, hormonal responses and mood responses. Through their research they are also developing sports-specific hydrotherapy protocols. Dr. Halson considers the guidelines and education provided for athletes around sleep to be their best recovery strategy, yet, despite its importance, there is limited objective research on sleep and elite athletes. In collaboration with the University of South Australia Centre for Sleep Research, a number of sleep studies with AIS athletes are being conducted. Sleep guidelines are tailored to each athlete (based on their individual research data). The use of compression garments is another area of research in Performance Recovery. Partnering in research and development with 2XU (who supply garments for athletes), Dr. Halson reports that there can be positive physiological, perceptual and performance effects of compression for recovery. Dr Halson says though recovery practices have been used for centuries, it is only in the last five to six years that it has become more evidence-based. As our knowledge increases and uptake of recovery by coaches increases, there has been a natural progression for recovery as a discipline, Dr Halson said. The scientific backing, the development of facilities and implementing recovery as a more structured and formal as part of an athletes training program have all helped the rise of recovery. An evidence based approach for some of the recovery practices is a significant development in this discipline. Further to this, being able to assist athletes in getting good sleep is the next focus for the recovery at the AIS. It is understood that athletes who dont have good sleep are more prone to illness and potentially becoming overreached. Reduced or poor quality sleep can especially affect athletes from sports requiring high levels of cognition, such as team sports, where reaction time is important and athletes need to strategise and anticipate. The Performance Recovery Centre at the AIS is an essential component of an athletes training regime, but it is just as important for athletes to have access to these resources when they are competing. To that end, Dr. Halson and her colleagues plan to establish a recovery centre for Australian athletes competing at the London 2012 Olympic Games. The recovery centre will provide hydrotherapy, massage, active recovery and stretching areas, nutritional and psychological services to athletes.

The next Olympic cycle should see exciting developments in Performance Recovery with novel research into recovery and the brain being Dr. Halsons key area of interest. Important questions she is looking to answer include whether or not the brain can be manipulated to help athletes sleep, and which recovery strategies might change brain state that could improve sleep. The brain controls everything and we now have better technology to understand what is happening at a neural level, Dr Halson said. I am very interested to see the effects of recovery on brain state. Many athletes feel better when they have done recovery and I am interested to know if these changes can be observed in the brain. As Dr. Halson and her team are gaining an insight into sleep, recovery and brain functioning, development and implementation of these additional cutting-edge recommendations will serve to further enhance the physiological and psychological restoration of our athletes. The Australian Institute of Sport will be hosting the inaugural AIS Performance Recovery Symposium from 12 to 13 December, 2011. Speakers from the AIS and external experts will discuss recovery strategies around sleep, travel, hydrotherapy, nutrition, physiology, psychology, compression, monitoring, and athletes with a disability. View more information about the AIS Performance Recovery Symposium.