{"id":167,"date":"2016-09-09T06:00:21","date_gmt":"2016-09-09T05:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/research-marketing\/?p=167"},"modified":"2017-11-01T13:57:23","modified_gmt":"2017-11-01T13:57:23","slug":"trust-me-im-a-doctor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/knowledge-exchange-and-research-impact\/2016\/09\/09\/trust-me-im-a-doctor\/","title":{"rendered":"Flexing our research muscle for the BBC"},"content":{"rendered":"

We had the pleasure of welcoming Michael Mosley and crew to campus a few months\u00a0back to film the latest episode of \u2018Trust Me, I\u2019m a Doctor\u2019<\/em><\/a> which aired last night and asked whether or not stretching was important before\u00a0doing exercise.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Putting Michael through his paces in our Applied Biomechanics Suite<\/a> and around campus was Dr Polly McGuigan<\/a> whose research interests within the Department for Health<\/a> focus on muscle and tendon mechanics.<\/p>\n

And stretch<\/h2>\n

For a whole day, Polly had Michael squatting, jumping and flexing before exercise in an effort to see what effect (if any) stretching had on his flexibility, performance and power.<\/p>\n

Michael\u2019s results revealed to him by Polly over coffee in The Edge CAFE<\/a> showed that he was more flexible after the stretching routine due to reduced stiffness of his muscle-tendon units, but that this had a detrimental effect on performance: reducing his jump height and the amount of power produced by his muscles.<\/p>\n

Powerful activities like jumping require muscles to develop a lot of force and to transmit that force to the skeleton very quickly. Stretching reduces the stiffness of muscle which means they transit their force a little more slowly, reducing the power of their contraction.<\/p>\n

You'll find out more about Michael's results here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Polly<\/a>
Polly and Michael discuss results from his stretching tests outside The Edge<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Behind the scenes, what ends up as a 5 minute segment may have taken a whole day\u2019s filming and also involved extra organising too \u2013 you may have spotted some familiar faces stretching and running around the lake during the introduction!<\/p>\n

But when there\u2019s an opportunity to reach an audience of around three million on primetime TV it\u2019s an excellent opportunity to take and one that really helps to get\u00a0our research and expertise out to the masses.<\/p>\n

\"Lights,<\/a>
Lights, camera, action as Michael Mosley is put through his paces in our Applied Biomechanics Suite.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"IMG_1483\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Amplifying messages<\/h2>\n

So how does an opportunity like this come up? Back at the beginning of 2015, we\u2019d put Polly in touch with the\u00a0editor on NHS Choices<\/a> who was writing an article about pre-exercise stretching in light of new research casting doubt about its effectiveness.<\/p>\n

Last night\u2019s \u2018Trust Me\u2019<\/em> shows how one thing can lead to another, helping to amplify messages about research and expertise. As the BBC producer explained to me: \u2018When we were trying to find an expert to talk to us about muscles and stretching, the NHS Choices article with Polly\u2019s name were the first to come up.\u2019<\/p>\n

Watch last night's\u00a0episode again via iPlayer -\u00a0http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/iplayer\/episode\/b07v3pwk\/trust-me-im-a-doctor-series-5-episode-2 <\/a>(starts - 44m35s)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We had the pleasure of welcoming Michael Mosley and crew to campus a few months\u00a0back to film the latest episode of \u2018Trust Me, I\u2019m a Doctor\u2019 which aired last night and asked whether or not stretching was important before\u00a0doing exercise....<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":295,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[104],"tags":[24,61,62],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-promotion","tag-bbc","tag-trust-me","tag-tv"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/knowledge-exchange-and-research-impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/knowledge-exchange-and-research-impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/knowledge-exchange-and-research-impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/knowledge-exchange-and-research-impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/295"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/knowledge-exchange-and-research-impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/knowledge-exchange-and-research-impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/knowledge-exchange-and-research-impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/knowledge-exchange-and-research-impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/knowledge-exchange-and-research-impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}