How to Build the Perfect Athlete - Helen Glover, Hugh Dennis, Steve Haake and Emma Ross

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Is the hit Netflix show Emily in Paris just harmless escapist TV or is Emily ruining Paris? I'm Asma Khalid and I host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. The president of France has described the show as super positive for his country, soft power through cinema. But is TV tourism good for a city? For more, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:38BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. You're about to listen to The Infinite Monkey Cage. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays. Wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, the full series is available right now. First on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Ince, and this is the Infinite Monkey Gymnasium. Today we guarantee that in just ten days, you two can have a body like Robin Ince. Yes! It'll take a lot longer to have one like Brian's, but with mine, you can probably do it in five days, actually, with the correct amount of cakes. We have trained together, though. This is true.

1:12When we went on tour, we trained, and Brian thought that I would die, because Brian does lots of training, and I don't. This is why, because it would make the profit, for me, bigger had he died. I didn't realise how much he'd insured my life for, and I should have really checked on that. But, yeah, so what happened was we went up onto the moors, so it was a very kind of Heathcliff thing, and we had, like, these ropes and stuff, had to do all this kind of exercise. And afterwards, he did kind of go, how come you haven't died? And it would have been wonderful if you died, and then you'd have become star stuff.

1:47Anyway, so I explained to him, I said, well, the thing is that I actually do work out all the time, right? I do a thing which I call the BBBC, which is the Bibliomaniac Bodybuilding Book Camp. What I do is everywhere I go, I have a rucksack on my back, I walk everywhere, and I go, oh, look, there's a second-hand bookshop. And I go from having an empty rucksack to one that is absolutely filled with encyclopedias, and thus I am buff. and actually do a Brian Cox bodybuilding thing, right? And it is all based around this thing going, tired of having sand kicked in your face? With the Brian Cox bodybuilding.

2:26So you'll find that when you do get sand kicked in your face, you immediately go, of course, that's really fascinating because in many ways that does explain entropy. Today we are discussing how to build the perfect athlete. How has technology enhanced performance? How can we hack our biology? and how can we do all this whilst remaining a good sport? And our PE instructors for today are a physiologist, a sports engineer, Olympic gold and silver medalist, and the winner of the mighty throwdown, which I presume is some kind of wrestling event. It's pottery, isn't it? It's pottery. Pottery. Well, that was a mistaken book in there, wasn't it?

3:09And they are... My name's Steve Hake. I'm from Sheffield Hallam University. I'm a professor of sports engineering. And my most excruciating athletic experience was probably going down San Marit's bobsled track in a four-man bobsled. I'd been in a bar the night before, and the guy had said, do you want to come down on the track in the morning? We need a break, man. So I said, yes, it was a tourist sled. So I turned up early, we went down, and it was terrible. It was terrifying. four g's rivets kind of sticking in your legs in your nethers and i got to the bottom i thought well i won't have to do that again uh and he said right we've got three more and it took me it took me a week to recover it was horrible i'm dr emma ross i'm an exercise physiologist i was the head of physiology for the uk sports institute and now i work specifically with female athletes and my most excruciating athletic experience was when I did an Ironman.

4:08So for those uninitiated, an Ironman is a triathlon. Women can do it too, despite the name. It's 3.8 kilometres of swimming followed by 180 kilometres of cycling followed by a marathon. Back to back to back. Is there a month in between? And it took me about 12 and a half hours. I mean, a lot of it was enjoyable, weirdly, but it becomes excruciating by the end. I'd done a really good job of fueling myself quite well. I was a sports scientist, so I was quite proud of the fact that I had a really good fueling plan. But the trouble is, when you've been fueling yourself with carbohydrates for 12 hours, your stomach just becomes really unhappy, and digesting food is not a priority, and so your stomach just says, I don't want anything in here.

4:53So the last half of the marathon was many, many pit stops at the Port-a-Loo, which was quite excruciating. But once you reach the finish line, it's all worth it it is type 2 fun I'm Helen Glover I'm an Olympic rower and my most excruciating sporting experience was probably the pressure of being in Olympic year and lining up on the start line of the parents race at my kids school the pressure was real did you win? I knew someone was going to ask that it's an inevitable question here's the thing we had to run backwards holding the hands of our child that would be very easy for you, you do rowing you were thinking you were thinking holding your child's hand and one of my twins dropped their ice lolly as we were doing it I have all the excuses prepared didn't speak to her for a week so yeah so I'm Hugh Dennis, I think probably best known as the winner of Channel 4's Pottery Throwdown

5:59my most excruciating kind of athletic thing i do a lot of long distance cycling so i've done a thing called the atapta tour a couple of times which is an open stage of the tour of france which takes place kind of a week before the tour goes through it's always in the mountains so it was 200 kilometers in the pyrenees and you have 12 hours to do it and you get followed by a a thing called the broom. So if you're not going fast enough, you get taken off the course because you're holding people up. But in the ninth hour, I thought, you're doing incredibly well. I set my sights on this guy. It had taken me nine hours to catch up with this cyclist.

6:38Got closer and closer and closer to him and I overtook him. And as I overtook him, I realised he'd got one leg. And this is our panel.

6:52I love that there was an ice lolly that was dropped because, of course, you are also from a famous Mousel ice cream family, aren't you, Helen? Yeah, there's so many links. You don't immediately imagine a large amount of delicious ice cream leads to Olympic excellence. So have you found a way of balancing the two? You know, honestly, every day of my life, for my whole childhood, I ate bowls fulls of ice cream. Yeah, my dad was an ice cream maker in Cornwall and that's how he grew up. Yeah, lots of ice cream. There's the secret. So if you take away one thing from listening to this show, eat more dessert.

7:27Now, Hugh, I'll start with you. Do you think there's such a thing as a perfect athlete? Well, I'm certain it's not me. I don't know. I'm sort of interested in the views of the rest of the panel here because I would have thought that, you know, you can be perfect, say, for rowing or perfect for running, perfect for football, but, you know, it doesn't transfer. It's not a kind of transferable thing. So I suspect no. That was a more serious answer than you were hoping for. No, no, no. We wanted this. Can we ask everyone, actually, this is an interesting thing. As briefly as possible, summarise what you think makes the nearest you can have to a perfect athlete.

8:07Do you know what, though, to Hugh's point, you walk into an Olympic village and you look around and every single body type is represented. Because every single sport requires something so different. And they're selling the ice cream. I'm sure there's an archer or a shooter. But yeah, honestly, there's something for everyone. And it's actually really refreshing because there really is something for everyone. So the perfect athlete, I actually think, would come down less to the physicality and more to the mindset. If you're going to say, what is perfection? I think the mindset has to be really highly up there.

8:40Emma, what do you think? When we look at athletes from a sports science perspective, we always drill down into what are the important determinants of success for this event and they will all differ so for some athletes we want them to have a really big engine if they're an aerobic athlete for some people we want them to have a lot of speed and strength and power if they're a sprinter so it really does depend what they're training for but I also agree with Helen I think even as a physiologist who kind of is wedded to the fact that we can build this amazing biological specimen all the research we have shows that there are so many other factors and things like mindset and psychology but even how supported we are growing up.

9:18There's even some really cool data about if you went to a village primary school, you're 10 times more likely to be an elite athlete. So I think when you look at the individual, you have to make sure the whole ecosystem around them is being well designed to help them develop into an amazing athlete. What is the village school link? So it's in comparison to cities where I think there's just so much more competition. So I think your talent might get nurtured better if you're in a smaller pond, if you like. Well, that would be swimming. Or rowing. Or rowing. Or rowing. I mean, from a technological point of view, as you said, it's the whole ecosystem.

9:56So you've got the athlete and then you've got the kit. So if it's a cyclist, it's the cyclist and the bike. If it's bobsled, it's the bobsled and the athlete. And so we try and optimise the whole system. And so it's putting all that together. And as you said, Emmett, to pick up what you said, you talked about mindset. you also said we can build or help construct an athlete in a sense through training and so on in a particular sport how much is what you might call genetic and how much is then the training and the commitment and a lifelong commitment practice and so on i think we'd love to be able to do like a genetic test for an athlete and geneticists in sport have been looking for genes which really predict performance and they've really struggled to find it but what we do know if you take a group of non-elite athletes and a group of elite athletes about 60 percent of the variance between the two is down to genetics but genetics to do with all sorts of things so yes someone's aerobic capacity their fitness their strength their muscle composition but also their propensity to be injured you know staying injury free is one of the best predictors of being a successful athlete and even their personality so those things can be genetic and those things all feed into what makes a champion so we can build and we can train but you have to be starting with the right genetic material so certainly if you're talking about you said olympic gold for example so that there you have to have everything i suppose because you're the best of the best but then you also have to have that factor of opportunity and for me i was 21 when i started rowing and i i've got science to thank for the fact that i am a row at full stop like i started rowing through a talent id program i was measured physically measured my fitness was measured and i was told at the age of 21 four years before london you could be a good rower and it's like i had the makeup and the genetics and stuff that i still have today but if that sliding doors moment hadn't happened i would not be an olympian right now so there has to be opportunity there has to be access you know that's what i always try to say when i go into primary schools there's nothing to stop it being you you olympians are not people who are different or exceptional just because they are born that way there is so much around it around the edges and around the opportunity that i think it's really important to instill in the self-belief of young people as well and the idea that there's always there will be a sport for you because you said it's almost everyone is yeah we've got really good at identifying talent in this country like helen was identified because we knew that tall people with long limbs would be really good at certain sports like rowing but you were already involved in many sports what were you doing up to the age of 21 so that's the thing it kind of looks like the starting point was 21 but actually you know my whole life had been sport i was running hockey swimming everything i could so i actually had this massive multi-sport base and i was given this opportunity to channel it into one thing that i was physically really well suited for so it kind It worked out really well in my favour.

12:57And as a physiologist, I would say that's the perfect mix because some of you will have heard of the 10 ,000-hour rule, this idea that if we do deliberate practice for 10 years or 10 ,000 hours, we're going to be really, really good at sport. But actually, that research was based in music. And with sport, we know now that it's much better to do a variety of things when you're growing up, when you're going through puberty, when you're developing, so that you swim and you do games play and you learn how to be chaotic and move your body in a really chaotic way. and then you build a big engine by doing running and then you might do some sprinting and you build up this really amazing resilient body which knows how to move in loads of different ways and then you refine it.

13:33And even better if someone says, oh my goodness, your body is perfectly designed for export. And we are quite good at that in this country, identifying talent, but having that really broad base of exposure. Is there an age at which you have to give up your dream of being... No, no. ..an elite sportsman? no I work specifically now with female athletes and the menopause is obviously a predictable time of life for females to go through and I thought gosh I don't think we're going to have to encounter that but I have worked with many athletes who have had to contend with going through the menopause and being a world champion or and yes they tend to be archers or horse riders or target shooters but yeah at any time of life you are you're capable of getting out there there's still hope you but I think so much of it like we were talking earlier about how much of it is mindset as well so there was this this huge science base to say me starting rowing where I was I was measured and all this but actually I was slightly too short for the cutoff I was by far the smallest person that was tested and measured that day and a really important factor was the coach who was the person who selected me was stood at the side of the room watching the physical testing and years later after London, he was asked by the press, why did you choose her if she didn't even make the height criteria?

14:49And it was a bit offensive what he said. He said, she was a mongrel. We were looking for this... He said, we were looking for a pedigree. We thought we knew what we wanted, this perfect pedigree. And watching, I knew she was the dog that if backed into a corner, she would fight her way out. So that's essentially that nod towards, yes, you've got this physical attribute, but really, who's got the fight? I didn't realise that, Because I noticed at the end of every race you did, you're always given a little treat. So, Steve, I was thinking that, you know, how much do you look at, you know, biology and think, hang on a minute, if evolution had gone this way?

15:27What for me? Yeah, well, not necessarily for you, though there's no reason not to. But, you know, that sense of looking at the technology you're creating and feeling this kind of, you know, almost Darwinian thing of going, But if I imagine how this creature might have evolved to be faster or be able to jump higher, does that come into the way you kind of think? Well, we're often just trying to work out, if we have a piece of technology, is it actually going to work? So let's say tennis, for instance. We can create the perfect tennis racket, and we've done lots of work with lots of manufacturers.

16:00But when you actually give it to the player, the player goes, oh, I hate this. Oh, this is horrible. It feels terrible. So that translation from the bit of tech into what the player actually is going to do with it, whether the oars feel terrible for some reason, there's no grip in the water or something like that. From a technological point of view, we can work out the science and the physics of it, absolutely, but then you hand it over and there's this translation into the actual use of it, which you can get quite physically wrong. One example, a very simple one, was the colour of tennis courts.

16:32If you paint a tennis court green, an acrylic court green, people go, oh, I love this tennis court. If you paint the exact same tennis court red, people go, oh, this is really hard. I hate this tennis court. It's much harder than the last one we had. And it's just the colour. So it's this kind of psychological perception of what's going on. Is the hit Netflix show Emily in Paris just harmless escapist TV? Or is Emily ruining Paris? I'm Asma Khalid, and I host the Global Story podcast from the BBC. The president of France has described the show as super positive for his country, soft power through cinema.

17:11But is TV tourism good for a city? For more, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

17:23This is sport specific, of course, but in a sport like running, for example, a lot of technology goes into running shoes. yeah is there any way of saying what percentage does the technology give an athlete so i mean obviously formula one obviously is quite a lot but in terms of a couple of sports running tennis yeah the rowing i suppose with the technology the boat you know after working in sports technology sports engineering for about 10 years i did kind of go i wonder if this actually works am i wasting my time so we thought well okay if it works it's going to be in the data so we went back to the data we start looking at the data starting with um the the first olympic games in athens in 1896 and we collected all the data we could top 25s every year for whatever it was 120 years when we did that bit of data to see what is it that has the most impact on sporting performance and so the first thing that you see is you see that performance grew rapidly and then leveled Every sport is levelling off in performance, and we're almost at equilibrium for every sport that we looked at.

18:29So the first thing that makes performance grow is actually finding the right athletes. So back in 1896, it actually really was whoever turned up. So people just turned up and said, oh, I'll do that, I'll do that, and didn't even know what the rules were. So they had tug of war and things like this. So people would turn up, they'd get a medal, and that was the performance of the day. as time went on more and more good athletes were found and then as globalization occurred particularly after the second world war sadly the second world war killed a lot of our good athletes and so performance absolutely dropped after the second world war but then it took off again and then it's now leveled off so we've now got so the population has grown since then so that's the first thing so you've got a bigger population you've got a better way of finding the athletes so you've got a bigger athlete population to choose from and that kind of allows you to get the the best athletes so once you've done that you then go right what else can we do so there might be something like the Fosbury flop if anyone remembers that so uh so a high jump at the Fosbury flop you can see that as a little blip there in in that particular data so that's a technique it's a technique yeah yeah so people would kind of run at it and go over but kind of facing it and kind of do a scissor jump.

19:48And then Fosby flop is where you turn backwards and go over headfirst with your bum kind of just scraping the top of the bar. Most people don't go over at all, by the way. Or under, yeah. I've never managed. And then you get other things where you go, OK, what about swimming, for instance? First of all, swimsuits went from being quite big and being made out of wool and then silk. I can imagine swimming suits. a full body woolen swimming suit they got very very heavy in fact women first were asked to swim in dresses and dresses and blouses with weights in the dresses to keep the dresses down so you couldn't see the bloomers underneath so performance was not particularly good so then as time went on swimsuits got smaller and smaller and smaller and then anyone remembers the speedos the tiny speedos and then suddenly swimsuits got longer again because they realised that it reduced the drag through the water.

20:45And then they turned them into something very stiff and plastic-like. When it came to about 2009, at the Rome World Championships, 43 records were broken wearing these new swimsuits. And everyone was wearing them. Whoever was sponsored by one company was taking the logo off and sticking the logo of the best suit on. And everyone was trying to wear the best suit. So the ruling body just went, oh, no, we can't have this. We can't have this anymore. We're going to have to ban these suits. And from a technology point of view, that's when you can find out actually how much difference they made. Because overnight, they were banned.

21:19And you can tell exactly how much difference it made. So to answer your question, for swimsuits, at 50 metre, it was about 3%. A 3 % improvement in performance. Wearing the suit or not wearing the suit. Which is huge. Which is huge, you know, when you're thinking about... So it's seconds and seconds and seconds. Is that worrying, though? I mean, given that we're talking about athleticism. So the rules are about the human with the technology of the time of the day. And actually what FINA, the ruling body, should perhaps have done had just let it go its natural course. Because we were kind of at equilibrium, and they allowed the swimsuits to appear, and maybe they shouldn't have done that in the first place, but once they were out there and being used, suddenly performance went up.

22:01But what would have happened is everything would have reached an equilibrium again. Everyone had been wearing the suits, and then everyone had reached a different level but a bit higher up. What strikes me, though, as she used it as a sports person, clearly they're expensive things. How do you see that interaction between technology and just the athlete achieving the best that they can? Yeah, I really like this topic, actually, because for me, I'm quite, like, purist around the sport, and I think, for me, actually limiting technology universally, it doesn't limit the sport itself. um like in rowing everything needs to be commercially available for everyone so you can't go into a lair and develop a boat that no one's ever seen before to a spec that doesn't exist in any other country when you line up you know you're basically in the same boat with the same oars as everyone beside you that sits really well with me i like that but then i can also understand that you know if you're a cyclist and your bike is a gram lighter than the person beside you that's part of your sport as well so i think it really is sport by sport it depends on the sport because for some sports the tech is like you say it's really hand in hand with the athlete and for others actually it's slightly more standalone as the athletes i think it's really important that each sport has a bit of a handle on what tech is developing in their sport that it is available for everybody and people aren't priced out of the market and really crucially the youngsters don't feel the pressure or the need because otherwise yeah you can buy yourself a few seconds but if you're if you're 13 years old you don't need to be doing that you need to be enjoying it enjoying a variety of sports and not necessarily having those incremental gains worried about at that early age i think though i was going to say about that in the olympics last year the tragedy of someone deciding not to wear underpants i'm sure someone would have seen this it's so it really this guy does this incredible jump but unfortunately he obviously had gone commando and that meant that as he went over, his penis just dropped a little bit and knocked the bar off.

24:03And that is one of the... I don't know if you'll make the edit, but it is... It really was, because it was both comedic and tragic. Has anyone remembered it? Oh, yeah. It was shown on slow-mo in many times. Well, it's actually on a similar theme, surprisingly. So when we talk about technology giving percentage points improvement, one of the big projects I did ahead of the Tokyo Games was working with a research group at the University of Portsmouth around sports bras because what we now know about the biomechanics of breast tissue is that if we don't support the breast tissue well enough the breast movement can change our whole biomechanics and energetics so we decrease our stride length use more energy we fatigue more quickly and basically if you were someone lining up on the start line of a marathon and a clone of you was next to you and you were exactly the same in every way, training, preparation, fitness, one of you had a really good fitting sports bra on that minimised breast tissue movement and one didn't, the person with a good sports bra would finish a mile ahead.

25:08So we don't need engineers, Steve, we just need good sports bras. Well, having said that, for that particular research, talk about Jo Skur down at Portsmouth, I worked with her on the physics of the sports bras because she was doing lots of sports science, but she didn't really have the physical models. So she said, oh, can we develop these physical models? So I wrote some papers on this. But one of the things was I could see all the data, but obviously I couldn't see any of the videos. So there's lots of videos being taken of women in various guises from wearing bras to no bras. And so I'd have to look at the data and shut my eyes and imagine what was going on.

25:48And my daughter, I remember my daughter coming into the bathroom, and I've got my hands out and I'm kind of doing this side-to-side motion with my fingers, with my eyes shut, and she says, Dad, stop it, I know what you're doing. That is such a sad story, the story of the clone as well. The fact that they've managed to spend all the money on creating the exact copy, but ran out of money to buy a second sports bra, it's just very bad planning. So we've talked about the technology, but there's a technology I suppose you could call nutrition, the training regime itself, technology. How much difference is there now across different countries, for example, in terms of the technology that you apply to get your athletes into peak physical fitness?

26:40I mean I think the western world of the top sporting nations are probably all fairly equal but they do a really good job of finely tuning things like nutrition and things like um altitude training is a bit of a hack I guess for for accelerating adaptation to training so you either go to altitude 2 000 meters let's say and the oxygen availability up there is less and so your body has to work harder if our body isn't getting enough oxygen it's really hardwired to adapt to this stressor so it just starts to make more red blood cells which can carry more oxygen to the muscles so that adaptation can be kind of enhanced by going to altitude and then the next step was oh well what if we didn't need to go to altitude what if we just brought altitude to sea level and we made altitude laboratories where we can manipulate the oxygen brilliant now we don't even have to go up to altitude so now we have athletes who are sleeping in an ox a low oxygen tent who might be training in a low oxygen laboratory just to try and amplify the effect isn't that a bit disappointing for the athletes who are hoping they were going to go kill them and jar and now they're still in basalden i don't know if you've done it helen i've never done altitude and i actually i really wish i i really wish i had done it um at some point in my career because i i think all the research is really strong in it and there's so much you know benefit from it but no i've never done it you did uh so it's a mountain stage that yeah sort of so So did you get to a height where you started to feel the effects of altitude?

28:09No. Weirdly, I didn't know. How high does it get? Do you know, a couple of thousand metres? I don't know what the highest cold was, but you're never at the top of the mountain. You don't cycle actually to the peak and then down the other side. You always go for the cold. When does it start to... I mean, how high do you have to go to start seeing benefits? You probably have to go 1 ,500 metres, and the coals are probably 1 ,200 on some of the peaks of the... Yeah, when I drove across Peru with Ben Fogel for a series called The World's Most Dangerous Roads, and they were quite dangerous, they were sort of, you know, cliffs and stuff and no barriers and stuff, and I turned to Ben at one point and said, do you think they should be called The World's Most Dangerous Roads?

28:49He went, no, I don't really. I think they should be called Roads Passable With Care. That's the difference between me and Ben Fogel. Up in the Andes, every hotel lobby has got an oxygen tank. So you can just go in and kind of throw a mask on your face and feel better for a bit. Because you've done a few of those kind of shows and you've done one with David Baddiel recently. Yeah, that wasn't really an endurance event. Well, it didn't seem to be endurance for you, but for David Baddiel it did. You know, we cycled across France, epic journey, along a canal. So the maximum height we got to was about, I don't know, maybe 25 metres.

29:34And he was on an electric bike. Yeah, I think the fact the trailer they've been using on television is mainly you massaging his cut off and you go, oh, this electric bike's so heavy. I also think, going back to the actual technology thing, we used to get criticised, didn't we, as a nation, GB used to get criticised for really only being good at the sitting-down sports. And you kind of go, well, that's sort of fair in a way, I think, you know, rowing, etc. We're really, really good at sitting-down sports. Because they're the only sports in which humans would actually win any competition with animals.

30:13However fast you can run, whatever shoes you're wearing, you're not going to beat a cheetah. You're not going to beat a shark swimming. But you put a shark on a bicycle... And you have spent a lot of money on this research as well. If you go to Plymouth and go to Dennis' Zoo, you'll see why it's about to be closed down. In terms of training, we spoke about the fact that there's a big advantage to having begun sports early. But you in particular famously had a break. You had twins, didn't you? So how did you find that process? Did you lose a great deal of fitness? Is it kind of banked up somehow?

30:51Do you know what? I was really... There's lots of things I banded around about the amazing ability of, you know, post-childbirth mums and what happens, the physiology and blood volume and all these things. And when I had the kids, I never considered that I would get back into a boat, never considered that I'd go to another Olympics. After Rio, I hadn't rowed for four years. And when I got back on the rowing machine, it's because we were in lockdown, and I just had the twins, and they were newborns. and every time I got onto the rowing machine, they would only sleep to the sound of the fan of the rowing machine.

31:25It was really comforting to them. So basically their nap time, the way to get them to sleep and keep them asleep was to get on the rowing machine. And slowly but surely my numbers came down and I was really surprised how after four years out of the sport, how quickly my numbers came down. I mean, I was really surprised that I could still do this. Yes, I had a big bank of fitness, and that must have stuck with me. But I had four years out as well. What was the gap between giving birth to twins and actually going back to the Olympics then? So what would that have been? Just over a year would have been twins to Tokyo.

32:02And then I think I raced the European Championships. They must have been about nine months old, maybe 10 months old then. When you say you took a break, I bet you didn't. I bet you didn't. You didn't row, but how many miles a week were you running? I did a marathon and a half-iron. No, the year after me, I did a half-iron man and a marathon and all these things to keep fit. But then, as soon as I had Logan in 2018 and the twins in 2020, as soon as I had kids, I was trying to keep fit. So I wasn't, again, I wasn't a standing star, I wasn't going from zero, but definitely not putting in the hours I was on the programme.