A New Pathway to Approximate Energy Expenditure and Recovery of an Athlete

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach using evolutionary computation to model and personalize an athlete's energy expenditure and recovery by generalizing a hydraulic metabolic model.

Contribution

It presents a generalized interpretation of the hydraulic model that enables parameter fitting for individual athletes without relying on difficult-to-measure physiological data.

Findings

Validated the generalized hydraulic model for individual athletes

Demonstrated the effectiveness of evolutionary algorithms in parameter fitting

Provided a new pathway for personalized athletic performance modeling

Abstract

This work proposes to use evolutionary computation as a pathway to allow a new perspective on the modeling of energy expenditure and recovery of an individual athlete during exercise. We revisit a theoretical concept called the "three component hydraulic model" which is designed to simulate metabolic systems during exercise and which is able to address recently highlighted shortcomings of currently applied performance models. This hydraulic model has not been entirely validated on individual athletes because it depends on physiological measures that cannot be acquired in the required precision or quantity. This paper introduces a generalized interpretation and formalization of the three component hydraulic model that removes its ties to concrete metabolic measures and allows to use evolutionary computation to fit its parameters to an athlete.