On the heels of announcing thoughtful updates to its Vivoactive 3 device, Garmin is bringing some of the same new wearable features to the Fenix line. The new Fenix 5S Plus, Fenix 5 Plus, and Fenix 5X Plus devices finally have Garmin Pay and music storage now, and they include advanced biometric and routing features that serious athletes will appreciate.
The Fenix family represents the upper echelon of Garmin smartwatches, but that doesn’t mean they’ve been the most wearable devices. Over the past couple of years, Garmin has worked hard to keep the integrity of the Fenix design while also slimming it down and making it easier to wear all day long. The Fenix 5 Plus family consists of the most streamlined Fenix devices yet—while some are bigger and bulkier than Vivo devices, they’re much lighter and less cumbersome than previous Fenix devices.
Apple announced some great new features for the Apple Watch with WatchOS 5: a Walkie Talkie app, Siri shortcuts and Podcast support. But as someone who uses her Apple Watch mostly for its fitness and workout features, those are the improvements I’m most looking forward to with the new update.
Here are the key fitness upgrades coming with WatchOS 5 this fall.
1. Avoid strenuous physical activity in the late evening. Regular physical activity is an important part of a healthy lifestyle, but your body doesn’t stop working when you do. Your body can remain in an elevated state long after you finish a workout. As a result, your night time recovery levels may be delayed and diminished.
Fitbit has officially launched the Fitbit Ace, the company’s first activity tracker designed for children, specifically kids ages 8 and older. The band was first announced in March.
“As childhood obesity rates continue to rise, it’s more important than ever to empower the entire family to embrace a healthy and more active lifestyle,” Fitbit CEO James Park said at the time. “It can be hard to start and stick to good habits, and we know from our community that network effects are key to getting and keeping people motivated. By bringing that experience to families, it can make healthier habits feel more achievable by making it fun and engaging.”
TrueUp lets you switch between compatible devices* and keeps your data in sync. Garmin Connect acts as a messenger between your devices, making sure you get the most up-to-date readings.
With this month’s update, you’ll be able to sync your VO2 max, recovery time, training status and training load data among devices along with your activities. After you receive the software update, you’ll be asked to enable the feature. Just turn it on and sync your device with Garmin Connect to complete the process.
Medium, Strava Engineering, Jason van der Merwe from
… At the end of 2017, the Growth Team began working on activity tagging. This feature allows athletes to send their activity to a friend who forgot to record. The receiving friend can accept the invitation and save that activity to their own profile. During this time period, our team was focused on increasing the number of invites sent by our athletes, and activity tagging is a very natural way to invite a friend to join Strava.
Activity tagging didn’t first launch in the state that athletes see it today. We arrived at the current version through a series of iterations that are still ongoing. The process that we took to build this feature is a perfect example of how we approach iterative product development on the Growth Team at Strava.
Biometric sensor technology company Valencell announced this week that it has raised $10.5 million in Series E, bringing the company’s total funding to $35 million. The new backing primarily comes as the result of a strategic investment by hearing instrument and specialty earphone company Sonion a/s, with additional participation from prior investors including TDF Ventures, GII LLC, and WSJ Joshua Fund.
According to a statement, the new funding will be used to further improve the technology behind Valencell’s biometric sensors while expanding sales growth.
Head injury is the leading cause of death and catastrophic injury among skiers and snowboarders and accounts for three to 15 percent of winter sports-related injuries. Helmet use is increasingly encouraged at ski resorts, however, there have been little data collected on the degree to which ski helmet use prevents traumatic brain injury (TBI) and other types of head injury (OTHI). A new study published in Wilderness & Environmental Medicine confirms that helmets are generally effective in protecting skiers and snowboarders from head injuries, but questions their effect in reducing traumatic brain injury, especially concussion.
Ski helmets are designed to protect the head from penetration and to deform upon impact to absorb impact energy and reduce head acceleration. “Sport helmet effectiveness in preventing TBI has been repeatedly questioned. This study assesses the effect of helmet use on the risk of TBI and OTHI in alpine sports,” explained Nicolas Bailly, PhD, of the Laboratoire de recherche en imagerie et orthopédie, Centre de recherche de l’HSCM, Montréal, Québec, Canada, who led the study.
The non-toxic material features globs of gallium and indium that sit within a silicon-based polymer substrate, the liquid metal acting as a fluid conductive medium that allows electricity to flow. According to the researchers, the structure resembles round liquid metal islands floating in a sea of polymer, supported by a liquid metal base to ensure full conductivity.
The material is produced using a combination of screen printing and microfluidic patterning, resulting in a pliable and resilient liquid-plastic hybrid that can take on a range of two-dimensional shapes. Described in new journal iScience, the MPC could facilitate advances in wearable electronics and durable biomedical implants.
“These are the first flexible electronics that are at once highly conductive and stretchable, fully biocompatible, and able to be fabricated conveniently across size scales with micro-feature precision,” said senior author Xingyu Jiang, a professor at China’s National Centre for Nanoscience and Technology. “We believe that they will have broad applications for both wearable electronics and implantable devices.”
Thank goodness for oxygen. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to run very far. The body consumes vast amounts of oxygen during sustained running—up to 15 times more than at rest. The body uses it to release energy from metabolic fuels, mainly glucose and fat, and power muscle activity.
But oxygen has a downside. A highly volatile molecule, it has a tendency to generate free radicals, a diverse array of chemicals that wreak havoc in the body. In the mind of the average person, free radicals are associated with oxidative stress, a type of damage to body tissues that over time may cause chronic disease and accelerated aging. Everyone who breathes is subject to oxidative stress. But because the body consumes so much more oxygen during running, it also produces many more free radicals, some of which contribute to muscle fatigue and to the muscle damage and inflammation that make it hard to run again the next day.
Onstage at the launch of Amazon’s Alexa Prize, a multimillion-dollar competition to build AI that can chat like a human, the winners of last year’s challenge delivered a friendly warning to 2018’s hopefuls: your bot will mess up, it will say something offensive, and it will be taken offline. Elizabeth Clark, a member of last year’s champion Sounding Board team from the University of Washington, was onstage with her fellow researchers to share what they’d learned from their experience. What stuck out, she said, were the bloopers.
“One thing that came up a lot around the holidays was that a lot of people wanted to talk to our bot about Santa,” said Clark. “Unfortunately, the content we had about Santa Claus looked like this: ‘You know what I realized the other day? Santa Claus is the most elaborate lie ever told.’”
The bot chose this line because it had been taught using jokes from Reddit, explained Clark, and while it might be diverting for adults, “as you can imagine, a lot of people who want to talk about Santa Claus … are children.” And telling someone’s curious three-year-old that Santa is a lie, right before Christmas? That’s a conversational faux pas, even if you are just a dumb AI.
This sort of misstep perfectly encapsulates the challenges of the Alexa Prize, a competition that will help shape the future of voice-based computing for years to come.
In this overview, we summarize the findings of the literature with regards to physiology and pathophysiology of ultra-marathon running. The number of ultra-marathon races and the number of official finishers considerably increased in the last decades especially due to the increased number of female and age-group runners. A typical ultra-marathoner is male, married, well-educated, and ~45 years old. Female ultra-marathoners account for ~20% of the total number of finishers. Ultra-marathoners are older and have a larger weekly training volume, but run more slowly during training compared to marathoners. Previous experience (e.g., number of finishes in ultra-marathon races and personal best marathon time) is the most important predictor variable for a successful ultra-marathon performance followed by specific anthropometric (e.g., low body mass index, BMI, and low body fat) and training (e.g., high volume and running speed during training) characteristics. Women are slower than men, but the sex difference in performance decreased in recent years to ~10–20% depending upon the length of the ultra-marathon. The fastest ultra-marathon race times are generally achieved at the age of 35–45 years or older for both women and men, and the age of peak performance increases with increasing race distance or duration. An ultra-marathon leads to an energy deficit resulting in a reduction of both body fat and skeletal muscle mass. An ultra-marathon in combination with other risk factors, such as extreme weather conditions (either heat or cold) or the country where the race is held, can lead to exercise-associated hyponatremia. An ultra-marathon can also lead to changes in biomarkers indicating a pathological process in specific organs or organ systems such as skeletal muscles, heart, liver, kidney, immune and endocrine system. These changes are usually temporary, depending on intensity and duration of the performance, and usually normalize after the race. In longer ultra-marathons, ~50–60% of the participants experience musculoskeletal problems. The most common injuries in ultra-marathoners involve the lower limb, such as the ankle and the knee. An ultra-marathon can lead to an increase in creatine-kinase to values of 100,000–200,000 U/l depending upon the fitness level of the athlete and the length of the race. Furthermore, an ultra-marathon can lead to changes in the heart as shown by changes in cardiac biomarkers, electro- and echocardiography. Ultra-marathoners often suffer from digestive problems and gastrointestinal bleeding after an ultra-marathon is not uncommon. Liver enzymes can also considerably increase during an ultra-marathon. An ultra-marathon often leads to a temporary reduction in renal function. Ultra-marathoners often suffer from upper respiratory infections after an ultra-marathon. Considering the increased number of participants in ultra-marathons, the findings of the present review would have practical applications for a large number of sports scientists and sports medicine practitioners working in this field. [full text]
International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism from
This study systematically examined the influence of carbohydrate (sucrose), sodium and caffeine on the fluid retention potential of beverages under euhydrated conditions, using the beverage hydration index (BHI) method. Three cohorts, each of 12 young, healthy, active men, ingested 1L of beverages containing four different concentrations of a single component (sucrose, sodium or caffeine) in a double blind, crossover manner. Urine output was collected for the subsequent 4-h. Cumulative urine output was lower and net fluid balance were higher after 10% and 20% sucrose beverages than 0% and 5% sucrose beverages (P<0.05), and after 27mmol/L and 52mmol/L sodium beverages than 7mmol/L and 15mmol/L sodium beverages (P<0.05). No difference in urine output or net fluid balance was apparent following ingestion of caffeine at concentrations of 0 - 400 mg/l (P=0.83). Consequently, the calculated BHI was greater in beverages with higher sucrose or sodium content, but caffeine had no effect. No difference was observed in arginine vasopressin or aldosterone between any trials. These data highlight that the key drivers promoting differences in the fluid retention potential of beverages when euhydrated are energy density, likely through slowed fluid delivery to the circulation (carbohydrate content effect), or electrolyte content through improved fluid retention (sodium content effect). These data demonstrate that beverage carbohydrate and sodium content influence fluid delivery and retention in the 4-h after ingestion, but caffeine up to 400mg/L does not. Athletes and others can use this information to guide their daily hydration practices.