CHARLOTTE -- Team USA has dominated much of the Olympics this year, but one critical part of the USA swim team is thousands of miles from Rio.
Dr. Jason Batley, a physician with Iredell Health System, helped prepare this year's Olympic swimmers, Ryan Lochte, Camille Adams, Anthony Ervin, Jimmy Feigen, and has worked with previous gold medalist, Tyler Clary. He receives updates directly from Rio from Coach David Marsh.
"My job is to look at how they are impacted by the training, monitor their diet on a daily basis, then look at how they recover from hard training, and give Coach the feedback, so he can adjust each athletes training individually within the larger program," said Batley.
The swimmers spend hours training every day in the pool and the weight room. "Some weeks are very intense. They'll have a two hour pool session and a weight room session, eat lunch, take a nap, and come back to the pool in the evening, and then they'll be weeks following that are intended to recover from that," said Dr. Batley.
The swimmers can burn 6,000 to 8,000 calories a day in a training session. "That's where developing meal plans that are a balance between the right proteins, the right carbohydrates come into play. They could eat food all day long, any food they want. The challenge is to pick foods that will provide them energy and give them the calories they need,” said Dr. Batley.
Sleep is also crucial and is monitored closely. "Each athlete has a sleep monitor in their mattress and at the end of the night's sleep, they would forward me a screen shot of how well they slept, and it breaks down how much restful sleep they had and how much poor sleep they had, and from that we get an idea of how much human growth hormone they produced, and thus, how much they recovered," said Dr. Batley.
As the swimmers bring home the gold for Team USA, Dr. Batley says he feels honored to be part of helping the swimmers strive to be the best, saying, "they're an inspiring group. It is hard to be working with them on a daily basis and in that environment and not you, yourself, suddenly feel inspired to be better at what you do."