Associate Professor Carl Paton has focused on high performance sports research for many years and has published a number of articles with postgraduate students.

Enhancing performance for elite athletes through research is a focus for an EIT Health and Sports Science lecturer.

Associate Professor Carl Paton has focused on high performance sports research for many years and has published a number of articles with postgraduate students. His main area of expertise is high performance cycling and researching ways to achieve better results.

Recently Carl has been working with Charlie Pugh, a PhD student at University of Waikato. Their research continues a theme that Carl has been studying for several years – blood flow restriction as a training methodology.

“We were carrying on that research, but with the national track cycling team. There’s a lot of research that shows that it’s beneficial, but we actually want to create a practical method and investigate why it is beneficial.”

“We did some studies looking at what happens if you restrict blood flow in a training session, and looked at changes in aerobic performance and recovery. We investigated both what happens in a single training session and over multiple sessions.”

The findings were published in the prestigious European Journal of Sport Science.

Another student that Carl has been working with is PhD student Roné Thompson from the University of Waikato, who is a senior physiotherapist for NZ Cycling and High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ).

“She is looking at the training responses using isometric training for recovery from injury, but also improving sprint performance in track cyclists.” The results of this research was recently publish in the Journal of Sport Science.

“It’s very difficult to monitor track cyclists in a velodrome environment, because they’re moving so fast, and you can’t really simulate it, so we’ve been trying to find ways of measuring it while they’re actually on the track  in the velodrome.”

“We’ve been trialling and experimenting with some initial measurement units (IMU’s) that you can wear to look at the movement of the body and the legs and the pedalling actions.”

“We trialled one set of sensors, but it was not accurate enough for what we wanted to do. We now have to sit down and look through the data to see how useful it will be in applications for training.”

Another project that Carl has started working on, is about shifting the position of the cleats on bike shoes for triathletes. This work, which he has done research on in the past, is in collaboration with two researchers from universities in Australia.