Question: How many people will be affected by your research and why do you think so?

Emma Ross answered on 24 Jun 2013:

There is a lot of information that we find out from studying people’s fitness that can also be used to help people who are ill. For example, understanding how we use energy during exercise, like breaking down carbohydrates for use as fuel, allows us to understand the best way that marathon runners can eat during exercise to get the fastest time. But the same information also gives us an understanding of the systems that can go wrong when someone has diabetes, because this effects a persons ability to absorb carbohydrates from the blood. Another example is by learning how we can train someone to make their nerves send better signals to their leg muscles to make them sprint faster, we also start to understand how we can train older people to control their muscles to stop them falling so often in old age. So understanding fitness, and how we can train the human body to become fitter, also allows us to understand some of the things that go wrong when the human body becomes ill, and so hopefully has a greater impact.