Undergraduate Sport and Exercise Students from the University of Birmingham describe their third year research projects on Poster Presentation Day.
Video Title: Sport and Exercise Sciences undergraduate research poster presentations
Duration: 8.18 mins
Speaker Names (if given):
S1 Jade Samford - Sport and Exercise Sciences Undergraduate
S2 Alex - Sport and Exercise Sciences Undergraduate
S3 Simon Franklin - Sport and Exercise Sciences Undergraduate
S4 Laura Bowen - Sport and Exercise Sciences Undergraduate
S5 Scott Powell - Sport and Exercise Sciences Undergraduate
S1 My name's Jade Samford and I do Sport and Exercise Sciences and for my third year dissertation project I've done a service evaluation of the Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals trust Phase 3 cardiovascular rehabilitation programme that's offered at City Hospital in Birmingham. Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of mortality in the United Kingdom and cardiac rehabilitation is put into place as a secondary prevention with the aims of restoring patients’ health from their disease condition and also ensuring that their quality of life is brought back to what it was previously.
So the aim of this study was to basically see if the cardiac rehabilitation programme they offer at City Hospital was effective and see whether there were any differences between sex, ethnicity and also the intervention of the patients. We had 94 patients in total all of them were referred to the outpatients for cardiac rehab at CH and they all underwent assessment before they started their exercise training sessions.
These assessments were anthropometric so we measure age, weight, height and body mass index. We also did some cardiovascular assessments which included resting heart rate, resting blood pressure, heart rate maximum during exercise and then heart rate recovery and blood pressure recovery at one minute and five minutes post exercise. Exercise capacity was determined by incremental shuttle walk test. Patients had to complete 24 exercise training sessions and then we did follow up measures. What we found was there was a significant increase in the number of shuttles which patients completed after cardiac rehab.
There was also significant increase in heart rate recover at one minute and five minutes post exercise. There was no difference in anthropometric measures at follow-up and there was also no difference in blood pressure at follow-up either. These findings are quite encouraging, we're showing that patients can walk further after cardiac rehabilitation and also that they have a greater reduction in heart rate after exercise, which is really good.
We can use these findings as well for best practice in development of cardiovascular rehabilitation at City Hospital Birmingham.
S2 My name's Alex and for my third year dissertation as part of my Sport and Exercise Sciences degree I looked at matching energy intake to energy expenditure during different intensity exercise bouts. So basically we got people to do a VO2 max test. So they run as hard as they can so we can work out their fitness levels. Then we get them to run at 60% or 90% of their VO2 max. Both energy bouts were expending the exact same amount of energy, 450 calories.
From there we asked them to consume food to the same amount of what they thought that they and give us an estimation of what they had expended. So we found that, actually, a lower intensity or moderate intensity [exercise bout] causes people to, first of all, think that they’ve expended less energy and consume less energy compared to higher intensities. This has implication on people trying to lose weight. So if people choose a moderate intensity exercise bout it might actually cause a greater weight loss compared to higher intensities.
S3 My name is Simon Franklin and I was looking at the effect of footwear on foot strike in middle- and long-distance. Basically we got runners into the lab and focused on kinematics associated between barefoot running and running in shoes. We used our motion capture system that we have in the kinesiology lab to focus on differences in technique and style associated between running in barefoot and running in shoes.
The results we found from this were that middle distance runners, as they are used to running more quickly and with more fore-foot strike which is associated with barefoot running, that there was very little difference between running barefoot and running in shoes. Whereas in longer distance runners they normally adopt a rear-foot strike and therefore running barefoot changes this and there are significant difference between the two conditions.
Therefore, this has implications on the recommendation for middle- distance and long-distance runners as there is little difference between barefoot and shod in middle distance runners, the benefits which they'll get from doing barefoot will be very limited. Whereas for long-distance runners, if they switch to running barefoot, this may alter their kinematics so they can be beneficial for their performance.
S4 My name's Laura Bowen and I'm currently in my third year studying Sport and Exercise Sciences. My project was looking at how maximal and dynamic strength predicts sprint, shuttle and jump performance in young elite footballers at Aston Villa Academy. It was based on a previous study which looked at maximal strength and sprint and jump variables in adult elite footballers.
We tested 12 players. They did the one rep and three rep max dead lifts. They did two ten-metre sprints, two ten-metre shuttles and three counter-movement jumps. We didn't find any relationship in the results for the one rep max or the three rep max predicted sprint, shuttle or jump. This could have been due to the fact that the players had never had any strength training before so they didn't know how to maximally produce force. It also could be due to that fact that they all had different maturity levels. So, it might have affecting their functional capacity.
What we did find was maximal and dynamic strength was strongly related to one another but the sprint and shuttle were only moderately related and the jump didn't predict either sprint or shuttle. This suggest that we picked the wrong test to test sprint and jump and that also sprint and jump can't be grouped together in young elite footballers.
In future what we are going to do is use this dissertation as a baseline and do a strength training intervention for a number of weeks and then test them again to then see if a relationship exists.
S5 My name's Scott Powell, I'm a third year Sport and Exercise pupil. I've recently finished my third year dissertation project which is looking coaches and athletes motivation in a grassroots football setting.
What we specifically wanted to look at was the antecedence of coaches’ specific styles. So whether they used controlling styles or autonomy-supportive styles. Autonomy supportive styles are where you are offering your athletes choice and provision and this is very adaptive. Whereas controlling behaviour is where you give your athletes rewards or you may be threatening them, which is obviously mal-adaptive to their athletes motivation.
So we used a questionnaire which measured a lot of variables for the motivational climate and we specifically found that a coach's basic psychological need was associated with their autonomy-supportive style. So therefore you can conclude that the club environment should, sort of, create an environment where these needs can be satisfied and therefore your coach is more likely to use more adaptive coaching styles, which is autonomy-supportive. I also investigated for the perceived pressures in the environment had any effect on the coach's style.
We found no significant results in this area but this may be because we looked at a grassroots sample. Future research may look in a more competitive area of sport, so academy performers where there was high pressure and see whether this affects the coaching styles of those coaches.
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