Behind every great elite athlete, there’s a team of researchers taking the guess work out of all their training and preparation.

“Everything that we do is sport science, physiology, biomechanics, sport psychology, and all the knowledge we have is based on research,” said Ambrose Serrano, an assistant sport physiologist at the U.S. Olympic training center in Lake Placid, NY, and keynote speaker at Thursday’s seventh annual Kinesiology Research Day.

Ambrose Serrano.

“The research is the foundation,” said Serrano, whose focus is on such sliding sports as luge, bobsled and skeleton, and who works directly with athletes like Olympic gold medalist Steven Holcomb. “Research is key for sport performance. If we don’t have that, it’s all nothing but guess-work.”

All that research has paid off at the podium, said Serrano, who holds a bachelor’s degree in exercise science from Truman State University and a master’s degree in kinesiology and sport sciences from East Tennessee State University. The US men’s bobsled team, led by Holcomb, won gold at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, bronze at this year’s world championships and gold last year. The women’s team took bronze in Vancouver, silver at this year’s world championships, and bronze at last year’s.

“Research is very important to achieving our goals,” said Serrano, who served as the sport science lab supervisor at ETSU and was in charge of sport performance testing and monitoring of Division I athletes and teams. “It’s all about optimizing training. You can not have optimal results unless you know how you got there.”

Working directly with the athletes is one of the most gratifying aspects of his job, said Serrano, who spends a great deal of time with them during spring and summer months when tracks are closed.

“During the off-season, you could almost consider us their primary coach,” he said. “I’d say about 75 per cent of their time then is spent with us. Closer to the season when they’re on the track, that drops to about 50 per cent.”

His current work involves characterizing the traits that define an elite bobsled athlete, and in the next year, he’ll be studying how the technique used in the initial push affects acceleration and velocity as the sled heads in to the first curve.

Kinesiology Research Day is an open house-style event that fosters research culture and showcases research from the last year in kinesiology, at the undergraduate, graduate, staff and faculty levels. Researchers set up posters in the atrium of the human kinetics building. There will be a student research panel held during a first-year class in the morning, followed by a speed poster session during which graduate students will entice a second year class to come and see their posters.

Serrano’s free and open lecture will begin at 11:30 a.m. in room 140, followed by poster viewing in the atrium. Poster awards will be announced at 2 p.m.