The Tokyo Olympics is a battlefield for top sporting nations to compete and an important stage for them to demonstrate the results of sports science. Taiwan is no exception. The National Sports Training Center invites domestic sports science and domestic sports medicine experts to organize a sports science team. Research Chair professor of the Department of Athletic Performance Prof. Shiang Tzyy Yuang serves as General Coordinator to integrate the resources of the major sports research teams to support training of athletes to prevent injuries to improve performance.
Professor Shiang Tzyy Yuang receives his PhD in the University of Pennsylvania in Mechanical Engineering (majoring in Biomechanics). His research interests are mainly dedicated to various aspects of Sports biomechanics, Biomedical engineering and Sports equipment design. He has been a research scientist and faculty member in the National Sports Training Center in Taiwan. He presently serves as the chairman of the Graduate Institute of Sports Equipment Technology and is the president of the Taiwanese Society of Biomechanics in Sports. Shiang was the first person in the field of sports science to win the MOST’s Outstanding Research Award.
According to Professor Shiang, the Sports Science Team is the hero behind the athletes. Project Teams were set up for highly ranked athletes, providing them support of sport science and medical trainer.
Athletic training encompasses the prevention, examination, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of emergent, acute or chronic injuries and medical conditions. Professor Shiang said: ‘When performing sports work, you must first plan and then implement it simultaneously. With objective scientific data, you can identify the training needs of athletes in each categories performance and adjust according to the need and performance of athletes.
For example, shooting and archery require stability and high skills. The sports science team integrates the fields of sports psychology and biomechanics to provide complete psychological training for team players to improve their stress resistance and focus. They assisted in the development of a pre-match psychological plan and a focus plan for the competition. For the stability of aiming, special technical diagnosis of shooting and archery from the perspective of biomechanics were given through quantitative analysis and real-time feedback.
Weightlifting is one of the promising categories for Taiwan. A real-time feedback system of weightlifting was developed by Prof. Shinag years ago that was vital in the preparation for the Rio 2016 Olympic. In recent years, image analysis technology and artificial intelligence were used to develop a smart barbell trajectory tracking system in the daily training of weightlifters.
