Objective: The present study aimed to investigate the gender differences for sleep complaints, patterns and disorders of elite athletes during preparation for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. Methods: The study included 146 athletes from the Brazilian Olympic Team (male: n=86; 59%; female: n=60; 41%). The assessment of the Olympic athletes’ sleep took place in 2015, during the preparation period for the Rio Olympic Games. The athletes underwent a single polysomnography (PSG) evaluation. Sleep specialists evaluated the athletes and asked about their sleep complaints during a clinical consultation. In this evaluation week, the athletes did not take part in any training or competitions. Results: The prevalence of sleep complaints was 53% of the athletes during the medical consultation, the most prevalent being insufficient sleep/waking up tired (32%), followed by snoring (21%) and insomnia (19.2%). In relation to the sleep pattern findings, the men had sig-nificantly higher sleep latency and wake after sleep onset than the women (p=0.004 and p=0.002, respectively). The sleep efficiency and sleep stages revealed that men had a lower percentage of sle-ep efficiency and slow wave sleep than the women (p=0.001 and p=0.05, respectively). Conclusion: Most athletes reported some sleep complaints, with men reporting more sleep complaints than women in the clinical evaluation. The PSG showed that 36% of all athletes had a sleep disorder with a greater reduction in sleep quality in men than in women.
Barcelona had the most celebrated youth system in the world – designed by Johan Cruyff, and bringing through the likes of Messi, Xavi and Iniesta. Now, after years of big spending, they’re in trouble
Until their U.S. Open Cup final at Atlanta a year ago, Minnesota United players knew not of chartered air travel, which is a way of life in the NFL, MLB, NBA and MLB.
A new MLS labor agreement reached last winter required teams charter eight one-way flights per season. Then the coronavirus pandemic came in late winter, shutting down play until the league’s MLS is Back Tournament had all teams sequestered in Orlando this summer.
Now that the MLS regular season has restarted in home markets, teams are stipulated where distance requires to fly by chartered aircraft to and from road games on the same day to reduce the chance of contracting the virus.
A few weeks ago, for various reasons I decided to start reading a neuroscience textbook (Fundamental Neuroscience). Though dense, it’s packed with interesting information that filled a lot of gaps in my knowledge about the brain.
One of those gaps was about how exactly the information travels through a neuron. Up to this point, all I knew was “something involving electric pulses”.
The reality, it turns out, is more interesting: neurons use ion channels to create and strengthen electric signals, and propagate information along their lengths.
So here is more or less how I understand this so far.
As a coach, you may have heard the term ‘neuromuscular training’ and dismissed it as being too complicated, too academic, or simply too time-consuming to add to your already-packed practice and gameday schedule. But at its core, neuromuscular training simply means getting back to basics with your athletes and working to improve their fundamental movement patterns in order to see more success as things get complicated on the field.
Here, Dr. Michele LaBotz, TrueSport Expert and sports medicine physician, explains exactly what neuromuscular training really means for sport, and how you can apply it to your coaching practice.
The Made to Play Coaching Girls Guide — created by Nike and We Coach, with additional support from Youth Sport Trust in Europe, the Middle East and Africa — equips all coaches with tools that can help make sport fun for girls.
By age 14, girls have dropped out of sport at twice the rate of boys. The open-source coaching guide shines a light on barriers that are specific to girls and offers insights on how to remove them or to help girls overcome them. It is prepared using research from the Women’s Sports Foundation and Nike’s Coaching Through a Gender Lens report. This research shows that when girls like their coaches, they are more likely to love playing and keep playing as they get older.
Dr. Stefan Duma is the director of the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Sciences at Virginia Tech. He discusses with Wes McElroy how he and Virginia Tech football and sports medicine collaborated to create the face shields for the players’ helmets.
Question: How did this project come about? Did you approach the football team or did it reach out to you?
Answer: This came out of sports medicine, and Mike Goforth (associate athletics director of sports medicine) reached out to me about two months ago in early July asking if we had any potential solutions of how we could make a face shield. That’s when we started working on the project.
… Noah Syken is responsible for leading the Strategy and Partnerships related to IBM’s global sponsorship portfolio and oversees IBM’s work with sports tournaments and organizations. He joined NewsChannel 7 at 4 on Friday to share more information about the work IBM is doing with sports including how new technologies are impacting the fan experience and examples of IBM’s partnerships with major sporting events.
… Through this post, he was contacted by two acoustics researchers from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. Honorata Hafke-Dys and Jędrzej Kociński aren’t doctors, but they both had young children who were prone to respiratory infections, and they complained that the only thing they needed to physically go to the GP for was to get the youngters’ chests listened to with a stethoscope. “All the other things can be done remotely,” Radomski says.
Together, the group developed StethoMe, a wireless stethoscope that Radomski hopes will one day become as ubiquitous as the home thermometer. The device, which connects to a smartphone via Bluetooth, uses a sophisticated array of microphones to isolate the sounds from within a patient’s chest from any external audio. “Up to 75 per cent of doctor’s visits are unnecessary,” he says. “And some of those patients go to the doctor healthy and come back sick. Home monitoring can provide tools that do not risk patients’ health.”
StethoMe has focussed its initial efforts on children, for whom respiratory diseases can often progress alarmingly quickly from a cough, to bronchitis, to pneumonia, which kills more than 800,000 under-fives every year. The device automatically detects when it’s been touched to the skin, and an accompanying app guides parents through the diagnostic process, directing them where to press the device on their child’s body to collect data.
A stretchable, wearable gas sensor for environmental sensing has been developed and tested by researchers at Penn State, Northeastern University and five universities in China.
The sensor combines a newly developed laser-induced graphene foam material with a unique form of molybdenum disulfide and reduced-graphene oxide nanocomposites. The researchers were interested in seeing how different morphologies, or shapes, of the gas-sensitive nanocomposites affect the sensitivity of the material to detecting nitrogen dioxide molecules at very low concentration. To change the morphology, they packed a container with very finely ground salt crystals.
A little league baseball tournament during the pandemic reveals the trade-offs at the heart of the industry — which could be facing approaching a breaking point.
Bill Moos made the arrangements. The flight and hotel were booked for what was supposed to be a celebratory weekend with his son.
The Nebraska athletic director had planned to watch Ben, the youngest of his five children, practice at Cal. A redshirt junior and outside linebacker, the younger Moos was growing into a more prominent role.
Then came the Aug. 11 decision from the Big Ten and Pac-12 to postpone fall sports amid the coronavirus pandemic. Bill Moos kept his reservations, arriving at his son’s studio apartment a few days later.
“I got to spend a weekend with him,” Moos said. “He needed his dad right then, and I wanted to be there for him.”
The practice of women’s sports has been clearly increasing in recent years, with a higher number of athletes, higher standard of play, and greater professionalism. The differences in sports performance between the best men and women ranges from 8% to 12% depending on the sports discipline, and appears to be clearly linked to hormonal profiles related to gender. However, it this gap has been seen to decrease with increasing professionalism in female athletes and growing knowledge about their physiology.1 The most important factor identified to date that could explain the differences in performance between the two genders is the concentration of circulating testosterone, which is 10 to 15 times higher in males.2
Most research in recent years has focused on the fragile profile of women, and their predisposition to pathologies associated with energy deficit and endocrine disorders. Although things are starting to change, to date less than 40% of papers have focused on female athletes, probably due to the complexity of understanding the effects of menstrual cycle on sports performance.1 This trend has resulted in a very limited and uniform vision of the woman athlete and her hormonal metabolic profile, and little knowledge of any differences between sports disciplines, or of metabolic endocrine phenotypes and their etiology.
Athletes require energy to develop multiple bodily functions beyond simply performing physical exercise. Functions such as maintaining cellular structure, reproduction, immunity, and thermoregulation have daily energy needs that are reflected as energy availability, and if not met, there can be repercussions for health and physical performance3. Meeting these energy needs to avoid energy deficits that decrease performance and endanger health has been a subject of increasing study. ?4These findings challenge the contemporary concept of the female athlete triad, which postulates that reproductive dysfunction in athletic women is typically a consequence of chronic energy deficiency resulting from eating disorders.5