• Question: In what way does your work help the world?

    Asked by 12impennington to Alan, Damian, Emma, Liam, Luca on 17 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Damian Bailey

      Damian Bailey answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      By understanding how the human brain works we can fight diseases like stroke, Alzheimer’s and help people age more gracefully, suffering from less depression and dementia (forgetfullness).

    • Photo: Liam Bagley

      Liam Bagley answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      I hope I’m encouraging people to move around a lot more and not be a couch potato! By having efficient muscles, we prevent fat building up and this fat interfering with our bodies and causing diseases and living longer.
      I am trying to develop exercise programmes which are really short but give us the maximum benefit of exercise in the least amount of time. This way people can go about their normal lives for longer!

    • Photo: Alan Richardson

      Alan Richardson answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      The most important question here!

      I try to help firefighters better understand what their bodies are going through and how we can reduce the consequences of the heat and fatigue.

      In terms of altitude, many people are trying to understand and predict how and why some people get ill when going to altitude and other don’t. This is a difficult question and one i’m not sure we will ever be sure of.

      I am also studying how we can use altitude or hypoxia (low oxygen) to aid fat breakdown and help people that are not able to exercise effectively to lose weight.

      Alan

    • Photo: Emma Ross

      Emma Ross answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      3. 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.

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