Tim Noakes, foremost Sports Scientist in South Africa has something to share with us…

This follows a request by Ashley, a blogger on our web site, regarding the resting senior Springboks.

Ashley basically wanted to know two things, namely:

1. Was the rest period long enough to rejuvenate the senior Springboks?

2. Did the rest period come at the right time or in time to be meaningfull to the senior Springboks?

This is what Tim Noakes had to say….

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“Dear Rudi

Here are my answers: 

1. Is the rest period for senior Springboks long enough to make World Cup results favourable?

Too little too late I fear.  The rest is definitely better than nothing but the level of fatigue after the past 4 seasons and the Super 15 cannot be corrected in 2 weeks.

2. Was the rest period done IN TIME to allow for these weary bodies to perform at their peak?

The end of year tours in 2008/9/10, because they did not allow senior players 8 weeks rest each year (and the chance to develop a cadre of junior players to international standard) and the 2011 Super 15 competition have done the damage.

The senior players’ bodies will tell them whether they are up to it. Each player in his heart will know whether he really has it in him for 2 more Tri-Nations games and 7 more big games in the World Cup.  And each will play those games according to what his body tells him.

We may wish it otherwise.  But when the body is tired, the mind cannot drive it to the level that is possible when the body is fresh and properly rested.

Poor decision making has stacked the cards against the Boks.  It will take some of the most heroic performances in the history of South African rugby for this team of proven, extraordinary players, to retain the William Webb Ellis Trophy.

Warm regards,

Tim Noakes”

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Who is Tim Noakes

Timothy David Noakes (born 1949) is a South African professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Cape Town. He has run more than 70 marathons and ultramarathons, and is the author of the running book Lore of Running.

Background

Noakes was born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1949 and moved to South Africa at the age of five. As a young boy his main sporting interest was cricket. Noakes attended Monterey Preparatory School in Constantia, Cape Town, then Diocesan College. He has earned an MBChB (1974), MD (1981), and DSc (Med) (2002) from the University of Cape Town.

As researcher and educator

In 1980 Noakes was tasked to start a sports science course at the University of Cape Town. From these humble beginnings Noakes went on to head the Medical Research Council funded Bioenergetics of Exercise Research Unit, which was later changed to the MRC/UCT Research Unit for Exercise Science and Sports Medicine.

In the early 1990s Noakes co-founded the Sports Science Institute of South Africa, with former South African rugby player Morne du Plessis. In these new facilities his research unit’s physiological research has thrived since 1996, producing over 370 scientific articles (and counting) during this time period.

Although Noakes is well known in academic circles for the high caliber of his scientific insight and work. He is perhaps best known for being the first to publish a scientific paper on the condition now known as Exercise Associated Hyponatremia (EAH). He first recognized this condition in a female runner during the 1984 Comrades Marathon, and published his findings in 1985 in the scientific and peer-reviewed journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. Noakes continues to contribute to our understanding of this condition, and in 2005 hosted the 1st International Exercise-Associated Hyponatremia Consensus Development Conference in Cape Town in May 2005. In November 2007 the 2nd Consensus Development Conference adjourned in Auckland, New Zealand.

Noakes is also known for renewing and elaborating the idea first proposed by the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine winner Archibald Hill that a central governor regulates exercise to protect body homeostasis.

In 2005 he undertook a series of pioneering experiments in the Arctic and Antarctic on South African (British-born) swimmer Lewis Gordon Pugh to understand the full range of human capability in extreme cold. He discovered that Pugh had the ability to raise his core body temperature before entering the water in anticipation of the cold and coined the phrase anticipatory thermo-genesis to describe it. In 2007 he was the expedition doctor for Pugh’s one kilometre swim at the Geographic North Pole.

Today Noakes lectures to second- and third-year physiology students at the University of Cape Town. His lectures emphasise the importance of objective science and he urges students not to take all the facts presented to them at face value. His lectures, in nearly all fields, will contain some mention of the Central Governor Model and the history thereof.

Awards

Noakes is also well known for challenging common and old paradigms in the discipline of Exercise Physiology. In 1996 he was honored by the American College of Sports Medicine when he was asked to present the J.B. Wolfe Memorial Lecture, the college’s keynote address at its annual meeting. In his presentation Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. (Out of Africa always something new) Noakes challenged the popular held dogma of the VO₂max plateau theory. This work lead eventually to the construction of a complex central governor model of exercise in which the brain is the primary organ that dictates how fast, how long, and how hard humans can exercise. Much of Noakes’ work over the past 10 years has provided further support for this model. In 2002 he was awarded a Doctorate in Science (DSc), the highest degree the University of Cape Town can award, for his seminal contributions over the years.