Tuesday 4 August 2009

Injury Update

It is now 12 weeks post surgery and training is coming good. The chest and shoulder are getting stronger every day. I am up to 60 minutes on the grinder – pain free! and I can just about do 5 push-ups now. I am more confident that ever that I will be ready to ‘rock-and-roll’ come the end of year Louis Vuitton Series... (thanks everyone for all the support, emails, etc.)

When I’m not at physio or in the gym, I am consulting for the Sports Technology Institute (STI) at Loughborough University (http://www.sports-technology.com/). The STI is the World leading Sports Technology research centre where much of the R & D for major sports brands such as Nike, Adidas, Reebok, New Balance, Callaway golf, etc is performed. In fact we also performed some exciting research on grinding at the STI last year (the novel research is currently in press) and we hope will influence the design of future big-boat grinding pedestals and winch systems. The World Cup soccer ball was also designed at the STI, as well as the new synthetic NBA basketball, not to mention the most successful golf club of all time, the Calloway big-Berther.
I attended an interesting presentation recently by Dr Richard Liang from the High Performance Materials Institute in the USA (http://www.hpmi.net/) on the use of Carbon Nanotube Buckypaper composite, which is taking the place of carbon fibre and is one tenth the weight yet 500 times stronger than steel. It is being used in the aerospace and military industries, and is sure to find its way into the likes of the America’s Cup and Formula 1 very soon.

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