Former Murray State basketball star Ja Morant continues to give back to the Racer Nation with the donation of a brand new recovery room for Racers to enjoy.
The NBA Rookie of the Year teamed up with Hyperice, a recovery and performance technology brand, to design the recovery room, which will be dubbed the “Murray State Recovery Zone.” The room will feature NBA-approved recovery technology for the benefit of Murray State Athletics.
Emma White, a 22-year old professional racing cyclist, was set to compete in her first Olympics this Summer in Tokyo. Then the coronavirus pandemic happened.
It’s been six months since the COVID-19 pandemic forced the International Olympic Committee to postpone the Tokyo 2020 Olympics until 2021, leaving thousands of athletes wondering what will happen next.
“It’s exhausting. You eat, sleep and breathe thinking about the Olympics. Every decision in your life on and off the bike is for this one goal. To push that back a year, it’s a big mental challenge.”
Daily Memphian reporter Danielle Lerner undergoes a VO2 max test, which measures the maximum amount of oxygen a person can intake during exercise, at the University of Memphis Human Performance Center on Tuesday, Oct. 6. [slideshow]
… As a parent, you might be panicking after all the time and energy you spent collaborating with your child’s therapist and/or guidance counselor pre-pandemic. Take a breath—there are ways for you to continue to build your child’s social skills during this time.
Caroline Maguire, M.Ed. suggests that family dinners and other kinds of family time can become opportunities for building and maintaining your child’s social skills. Given we have fewer extracurricular and social activities in place, now is the time to take advantage of the time.
While researching a book on endurance a few years ago, I interviewed a German scientist named Wolfgang Freund who had recently completed a study on the pain tolerance of ultra-endurance runners. Subjects in the study had to hold their hands in ice water for as long as possible. The non-athlete control group lasted an average of 96 seconds before giving up; every single one of the runners, in contrast, made it to the three-minute safety cut-off, at which point they rated the pain as a mere 6 out of 10 on average.
The results were consistent with previous research showing that athletes can tolerate more pain than non-athletes. But not all sports impose the same demands, Freund pointed out: “Maradona, at least, had the illusion that
Objective The objective of this scoping review is to investigate the possible links between the practice of video games and physical health. It seeks to answer the following question: What are the physical health consequences of playing video games in healthy video game player? and How is it currently investigated?.
Methods A scoping review was conducted to identify observational and experimental studies pertaining to our research question. Retrieved papers were screened using a two-phase method first involving a selection based on titles and abstracts. Then, potentially relevant studies were read and triaged. The final set of included studies was analysed, and data were subsequently extracted. Observational studies and experimental studies were assessed using the appropriate Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool and data were synthetised according to specific physical health and related health behaviours.
Results Twelve peer-reviewed articles were retained for further analyses. Results of this scoping review suggest preliminary evidence that time spent gaming is associated with some health outcomes indicators. Our results indicate preliminary evidence that increased gaming time is associated with higher body mass index and lower self-reported general health status. There is insufficient evidence to conclude on a possible association between gaming time and physical activity or sedentary behaviours, sleep or fatigue, musculoskeletal pain or dietary behaviours.
Conclusion The results of this sopping review suggest an association between increased video game playing time and a deterioration in some physical health indicators but available evidence is scarce, precluding from any strong conclusion.
In a previous blog we explored how different techniques measure body composition. Here we are going to look at how valid and reliable these measures actually are. It is worth noting that the main limitation of all body composition assessments is that they are based on assumptions. The only truly accurate way to assess body composition is cadaver analysis (i.e. dissection). In this article we will focus on the 3 most used methods to measure body composition: Dual X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), skinfolds and bio electrical impedance measurements (BIA). Air displacement measurements (Bodpod is only mentioned in the infographic).
National Institute on Aging, NIH Research Matters from
… There’s no single test for osteoarthritis. Doctors use a combination of medical history and lab or imaging tests to diagnose the condition. X-rays can reveal cartilage deterioration and bone damage. Osteoarthritis is usually only found after pain has developed and bone damage has already occurred. Earlier diagnosis could allow for early interventions to prevent cartilage deterioration and bone damage.
MRI imaging can peer into the fibers that make up cartilage and reveal details about its structure. A research team led by Dr. Shinjini Kundu of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh and Dr. Gustavo Rohde of the University of Virginia investigated whether artificial intelligence could be used to analyze MRI images for early signs of osteoarthritis and predict who will develop the disease. They used MRI scans from 86 people who had no initial symptoms or visual signs of disease. About half the participants developed osteoarthritis after three years.
The fact that COVID-19 is a small part of the current NBA conversation is a testament to the success of the NBA bubble.
Nearing the end of the season, there have been no outbreaks of COVID-19 among NBA players, no interruptions since the bubble began. COVID-19 has been handled so thoroughly by the NBA that its largest COVID-related stories have involved individual behaviors that didn’t lead to any actual outbreaks, but potentially put others at risk. For instance, Houston Rockets forward Danuel House’s removal from the bubble for breaking bubble rules.
How, in the midst of a pandemic that continues to affect millions, did the NBA manage to make it about basketball?
The NFL is experiencing a high injury rate this season. There are probably multiple reasons, including limited training and practice sessions due to Covid-19 and the lack of any preseason games to gradually get in game shape.
But there’s one injury factor that’s been a constant through the years: artificial turf. And the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) is committed to doing something about it.
After an easy decision atop the NHL draft, general manager Jeff Gorton doesn’t know what his New York Rangers or any team will do when free agency opens on Friday.
“I don’t think it’ll be like last year, that’s for sure,” Gorton said.
It won’t be like any year in the history of NHL free agency. For the first time since the salary cap was instituted in 2005, it will remain flat — at $81.5 million — from one season to the next because of revenues lost to the pandemic. That has left everyone in the dark about what the market will look like and how much players will make.
FIFPRO commissioned the research to help football stakeholders understand how the evolving situation of the pandemic applies to the week-long window, when each national team is scheduled to play twice. The research data was compiled through September 24.
Preparing for a marathon, one of the most critical steps is making an objective assessment of your training to determine what you are (and are not) likely to be capable of doing in the race. But unless you’ve run a fair number of marathons (and have done one or more benchmark workouts late in your training against which to assess your fitness), this can be more guesswork than science. Worse, it’s guesswork that can be easily influenced by optimism that can turn the latter part of the race into a depressing slog if that optimism proves unwarranted.
Scientists from France and Finland, however, have come up with a way to make such predictions from smart-watch data logged during your last six months of training. In a study in today’s issue of Nature Communications (a companion to the prestigious journal Nature), they were able to estimate thousands of runners’ race times to within, on average, about 2 percent of the times they actually ran. To put that in perspective, that’s about 3½ minutes, one way or the other, for 3:00 marathoners: not perfect, but very good.
Making Sense Of: Social Determinants of Fitness
Social Determinants of Health is a term, and an idea, that has been gaining traction since the pandemic forced so many people into increased social isolation. Because SDOH still does not have a consensus definition, it means different things to different people.
It’s interesting to see how widely applied the term is, but any insight is necessarily hazy and vauge. I’ve seen the term come up in articles about social media, about social justice, about the current pandemic, and about insurance. It’s all over the place, but for the most part it comes from a place that is data-aware and evidence-based.
In that hazy, vague, data-literate spirit I am going to stretch the concept to include Social Determinants of Fitness (SDOF). You can point to subjects like athlete buy-in but also to ideas like the link between sleep quality and loneliness. The psycho-social dimensions of health and sports are ripe for inquiring in both SDOH and SDOF, and because so much of athletic training involves learning, psycho-social aspects might be even more pronounced in sports, especially youth sports.
It will be a challenge for athlete management systems to capture and express SDOF cogently. But I think that doing so will bring depth and nuance to the insights those systems are capable of providing.
