Since the start of this year, and as a follow-on to the raft of physiological and biomechanical studies we did with Roehampton University in 2010/11, we have been engaged in a new study with Birmingham University who are using parkour to try to understand the mechanics of how large primates, such as orang-utans, actually move through the canopy of a rainforest. 

We are sending 20 athletes from the Team, one by one, to go through the tests which include looking at energy expenditure while travelling in this way amongst other things, to Moseley Climbing Centre in Birmingham which has been specially set up for this scientific research project. 

 Dr. Suzanna Thorpe from the University’s School of Biosciences explains more:

'What we're doing here is using the parkour athletes as an analogy for a large bodied ape moving around a complex environment.  We're getting them to move around an assault course that we've made, that they've never seen before, and we're going to record their energetic expenditure while they're doing it.  The reason we're doing the study is that orang-utans and the other great apes move around the canopy of tropical forests and the branches there are very flexible underneath their weight because the animal is so large.  Here we have lots of supports that we can make behave like branches in the forest, we can set up the assault course so that it's very complicated, as moving around a forest canopy would be, and we can confound how the supports behave.  So, we can have supports that appear to be stiff that we make compliant and supports that are quite compliant that we actually make to behave in a stiff way.  That mimics the challenge that a large bodied ape would face moving around the canopy, when they have to look ahead of them and judge how the supports available to them are going to behave without being able to test them.'

Dr Lewis Halsey of Roehampton University is monitoring the energy expenditure aspect of the tests:

'The primary thing we're interested in is the energy costs for our parkour athletes as they traverse the circuit as they use various bits of apparatus and we're going to measure that by measuring their oxygen consumption. So, we're going to put onto their backs, essentially, a portable oxygen analyzer, they will have a mask and the oxygen consumption of the person and the carbon dioxide output at the same time is measured by this mobile gas analyser which is strapped to their back. And that's all relayed to a computer. So in real time we can see the various costs of the various apparatus they're using. There's an added twist to this, which is at some points they may partly use an aerobic metabolic pathway and the analyzer can't pick that up because it's measuring oxygen consumption which is involved with aerobic pathways.'

Dr Thorpe goes on to explain the importance of the study:

'It's important for lots of different reasons. One from the perspective of understanding human evolution and the challenge that the common ancestor of all of the great apes would face and also our ancestors would face when they were partly arborial and partly moving bipedially on the ground and secondly from a conservation or an ecological perspective, if we understand a lot more about the challenges that orangutans face in the canopy and the solutions that they find to solve them and the energetic cost of doing so then we can better construct conservation strategies for them and they have of course been predicted to be extinct within ten years in the wild if we don't do something about it. So, finding the most effective way to structure a habitat or picking the most effective habitat for them for rehabilitance is a good way to help contribute towards their conservation.'

The research so far has proven to be highly revealing and useful to both the scientists and us as athletes, with some amazing results - all will be revealed in due course, and we look forward to continuing to assist with this sort of beneficial scientific project. The tests run on into March of this year.