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Ed Yeates ReportingIf you want a car to run faster and more efficiently, you computer analyze its mechanical parts. For Olympic trainers and coaches, you dissect the motors of your athletes. It's the relatively new science of high tech profiling.
Four years ago, Utah researchers were inside our own skating oval, measuring ice touted as the fastest in the world. But ice wasn't all they were measuring.
Skating, skiing, snowboarding, winter or summer games - doesn't matter. Depending on how muscles fire and relax, how hearts are beating and lungs are breathing, how each piece of the skeleton jumps, sags and leans - and more. This is the scientific game athletes must now play to win or lose by a tenth of a second or less in Olympic competition.
Kim Nelson, TOSH Trainer, U.S. Olympic Team: "We know what their '02 maxs are and we know what their responses are to a certain workout is. We know their heart rates. We know what their heart rate is in the morning, and that tells a lot how their motor is performing."
The Orthopedic Specialty Hospital, or TOSH as everybody knows it, polished high tech profiling four years ago during our own winter games. Analyzing these human motors only gets better with each Olympics.
Derek Parra, U.S. Olympic Athlete: "Biomedically there are certain angles you want to reach within your body composition. I have shorter legs than say someone like Joey Cheek or Chad Hedricks, so I'm going to skate a little bit deeper because I have to have a longer push to equal their push."
Derek Parra should know. He and other teammates have been dissected to monitor and measure every little detail of health and performance. They study how individual muscles metabolize, how joints and bones twist and re-arrange themselves, where one little subtle change in positioning during competition can make a fraction of a second difference in winning or losing the game.
Tom Cushman, Speed Skating Coach, U.S. Olympic Team: "I need to be a generalist, but I need my scientist to be really specific."
And specific it's becoming, almost down to the athlete's toe, all computerized and saved in each of their databanks. Combining these profiles with what is called Dartfish, coach Tom Cushman can watch his skaters with competitors, side by side, frame by frame, scrutinizing every subtle move.
Tom Cushman: "Then you can start to see where the difference is in timing, where the difference in pressure is, and why she's skating better at one point than another."
TOSH also has new training gear, like a giant treadmill where skaters, for the first time, can watch every little maneuver in a mirror, at full skating speeds.
TOSH researchers are already gearing up for the summer Olympics in China. They're developing a new wireless system where athletes and coaches can see immediate profiling in between events.
