Tales from the FRONTIER

Roy Shephard’s reflections on the early days of sport science

Just a couple of months before his passing in February 2023, Professor Emeritus Roy Shephard talked to Pursuit magazine about the differences between research w hen he first started out and now. Shephard was widely considered a luminary in the realm of exercise science. A medical doctor and physiologist from the UK, he was invited to Canada to spearhead the development of fitnessrelated research. He answered the call by establishing Canada’s first doctoral program in exercise sciences, mentoring and inspiring whole generations of exercise scientists in Canada and the world over [see p.54].

“I had really ridiculously small and ancient premises, altogether five rooms,” said Shephard of his lab space at the U of T School of Hygiene, the predecessor of what is today the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “One room was occupied by my secretary, one by myself, one by an assistant professor and then there were two very small rooms for equipment – one just about big enough to get a treadmill in and the other one about big enough for a bicycle ergometer.”

The space was built for Frederick Banting in the 1920s, and a lot of the power supply points were still direct current, so if one of the technicians plugged an apparatus into these sockets, it probably blew it up, Shephard recalled.

Space was so scarce that a lot of the research had to be done outside of the school, with researchers taking all their apparatus with them wherever they went.

“We did one stint at the CNE to get random samples of fitness of the Canadian population. I hadn’t realized what 12 hours a day down at an exhibition was like in the summer with all the noise and having to keep the apparatus working in the field,” said Shephard.

“We were measuring their fitness with a bicycle ergometer and their heart rate with a homemade telemeter, and we had to have a soldering iron with us to periodically solder the wires back in place – all while a queue of people waited to be tested.”

The equipment was completely different, he said, and there were no computers.

“The only thing we had was a Facet calculator, where you had to turn a handle to work out things like standard deviations and means. If you turned the handle too fast, it jammed and you had to wait a couple of days for the representative to come round and unjam it.”

The other big difference was how oxygen consumption was measured – a procedure that is largely automated today. But in those days, researchers had to collect expired gas in big bags and then take samples with glass syringes to analyze the oxygen and CO2 content. Then they had to empty the bags through a gas meter to find out how much volume had been expired.

“So, even to get one measurement of oxygen consumption for just one half-minute interval was a very slow process,” said Shephard.

Yet he still managed to publish around 1,600 refereed articles and write numerous books on physical activity and health.

“We worked very hard,” said Shephard. “I think if we’d had the equipment that’s available today, we probably would’ve done a lot more.”

Of the many impactful studies he conducted, Shephard was especially proud of two longitudinal studies. One looked at Inuit Igloolik, an Inuit hamlet in Nunavut, over a 20-year period to show the (negative) effects of acculturation to the southern lifestyle on Inuit health and fitness. The other one was a project conducted in conjunction with the University of Quebec à TroisRivières over seven years. It involved a couple of primary schools in Quebec where half the students were given an hour of additional physical education per day, while the other half of the students served as controls.

“A lot of people said we shouldn’t do it because it was going to spoil their academic performance, but we showed that, if anything, the children in the enhanced program did better in both English and mathematics,” said Shephard.

A lesson the Faculty took to heart, making it their mission to generate, advance and disseminate more knowledge of this kind. — JD