… It’s a sports cliché that athletes have to remain hungry as a condition for future success. In this narrow sense, Linden’s recent triumph might seem like it could dampen her competitive fire. After all, how do you top winning the Boston Marathon? But Linden feels that, conversely, achieving her longtime goal of winning Boston is more likely to work in her benefit.
“I tailor all of my training for Boston and do my four-year buildups keeping that race in mind,” she says. “Having won, it does allow me to race differently. I can take risks; it’s okay if it falls apart. I can chase a PR. I can chase another major. Whatever it may be. I can do it with different tactics than before, because now I’ve done the one thing that I really wanted to do.”
… At 179 pounds, work has been the equalizer for Wallace.
“You may be bigger or faster than me, but you’re not going to outwork me,” Wallace said. “I like to keep that mindset.”
That’s why two days after Alabama defeated Georgia in the CFP national-championship game on Jan. 8, Wallace was at the EXOS training facility in Phoenix preparing for the NFL.
“I celebrated on the field with my teammates, and I was excited about that,” Wallace said. “But the next day came, and I knew I had to get ready for the Senior Bowl in a couple weeks. It’s all business. That’s how we train at Alabama. We’re always getting ready for the next game.”
Canadian-led research establishing that youth sport should be about building the whole person and not just the athlete needs to be more accessible if it is to find its way into the programming of the nation’s highest sport bodies, according to a new University of Alberta study.
“Research projects led by researchers across Canada have been producing some of the best findings in how to make youth sport a better place for kids,” said Kurtis Pankow, who is completing a PhD in positive youth development through sport. “But we found sport associations weren’t using it. That was when Nick (Holt, his supervisor) took a step back, reached out to other researchers and said, ‘I think we have to do something about this.’”
The research that was missing the mark, Pankow said, revolves around the idea that sport should be used to develop better people.
He explained that traditionally, sport and youth programs have looked at kids as problems to be fixed as opposed to strengths to be developed.
“The whole field of positive youth development arose from the idea that problem-free doesn’t mean fully prepared.”
The aim of the present study was to examine the impact of exercise-induced metabolic stress on regulation of the molecular responses promoting skeletal muscle mitochondrial biogenesis. Twelve endurance-trained men performed three cycling-exercise protocols characterized by different metabolic profiles in a randomized, counter-balanced order. Specifically, two work-matched low-volume supramaximal-intensity intermittent regimes, consisting of repeated-sprint (RS) and speed endurance (SE) exercise, were employed and compared with a high-volume continuous moderate-intensity exercise (CM) protocol. Vastus lateralis muscle samples were obtained before, immediately after, and 3h after exercise. SE produced the most marked metabolic perturbations as evidenced by the greatest changes in muscle lactate and pH, concomitantly with higher post-exercise plasma adrenaline levels in comparison with RS and CM (P < 0.05). Exercise-induced phosphorylation of CaMKII and p38 MAPK was greater in SE than in RS and CM. The exercise-induced PGC-1α mRNA response was higher in SE and CM than in RS, with no difference between SE and CM. Muscle NRF-2, TFAM, MFN2, DRP1 and SOD2 mRNA content was elevated to the same extent by SE and CM, while RS had no effect on these mRNAs. The exercise-induced HSP72 mRNA response was larger in SE than in RS and CM. Thus, the present results suggest that, for a given exercise volume, the initial events associated with mitochondrial biogenesis are modulated by metabolic stress. In addition, high-intensity exercise seems to compensate for reduced exercise volume in the induction of mitochondrial biogenic molecular responses only when the intense exercise elicits marked metabolic perturbations.
A comprehensive monitoring of fitness, fatigue, and performance is crucial for understanding an athlete’s individual responses to training to optimize the scheduling of training and recovery strategies. Resting and exercise-related heart rate measures have received growing interest in recent decades and are considered potentially useful within multivariate response monitoring, as they provide non-invasive and time-efficient insights into the status of the autonomic nervous system and aerobic fitness. In team sports, the practical implementation of athlete monitoring systems poses a particular challenge due to the complex and multidimensional structure of game demands and player and team performance, as well as logistic reasons, such as the typically large number of players and busy training and competition schedules. In this regard, exercise-related heart rate measures are likely the most applicable markers, as they can be routinely assessed during warm-ups using short (3-5 min) submaximal exercise protocols for an entire squad with common chest strap-based team monitoring devices. However, a comprehensive and meaningful monitoring of the training process requires the accurate separation of various types of responses, such as strain, recovery, and adaptation, which may all affect heart rate measures. Therefore, additional information on the training context (such as the training phase, training load, and intensity distribution) combined with multivariate analysis, which considers markers of (perceived) wellness and fatigue, should be considered when interpreting changes in heart rate indices. The aim of this article is to outline current limitations of heart rate monitoring, discuss methodological considerations of univariate and multivariate approaches, illustrate the influence of different analytical concepts on assessing meaningful changes in heart rate responses, and provide case examples for contextualizing heart rate measures using simple heuristics. To overcome current knowledge deficits and methodological inconsistencies, future investigations should systematically evaluate the validity and usefulness of the various approaches available to guide and improve the implementation of decision-support systems in (team) sports practice.
… Sports scientists are developing tests to identify player strengths and new coaching strategies, but one thing that has proven difficult to assess is agility — the ability to rapidly and tactically change speed or direction — a very important skill, especially for attacking players.
“During a soccer game, players frequently change their direction and speed in reaction to external factors, such as an opponent moving closer,” explains Professor Damir Sekulic from the University of Split in Croatia. “A player can also pre-plan quick changes in direction speed, such as running into a free space to get open for a pass. While both reactive and pre-planned agility are important in soccer, there is a lack of soccer-specific agility tests.”
Sekulic, along with Professor Haris Pojskic from Mid Sweden University and colleagues in Croatia and Sweden set out to develop a new agility test.
There is a strong case to be made for making sure you consume plenty of carbohydrate before endurance training, and also during longer workouts. You will feel better and perform better, especially in harder sessions and in sessions that are begun in a prefatigued state during heavy training periods.
But there is also a strong case to be made for withholding carbohydrate before and during endurance training. These is mounting evidence that exercising with low levels of glycogen in the muscles—which is what happens when carb restriction and prolonged exertion are combined—triggers specific physiological adaptations that enhance subsequent performance.
So, then, what should endurance athletes do: consume carbs before and during workouts or withhold them? Why not both? More and more elite-level coaches and athletes and sports scientists are thinking along these lines. But the devil is in the details. Precisely howshould athletes balance high-carb and low-carb training? A new scientific paper by researchers at Liverpool John Moores University takes us a step closer to answering this question.
Sleep is known to be important for creative thinking, but exactly how it helps and what role each sleep stage—REM and non-REM—plays remains unclear. A team of researchers have now developed a hypothesis, outlined in an opinion published May 15 in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, to explain how the interleaving of REM and non-REM sleep might facilitate creative problem solving in different but complementary ways.
“Suppose I give you a creativity puzzle where you have all the information you need to solve it, but you can’t, because you’re stuck,” says first author Penny Lewis, DPhil, a professor at the Cardiff University School of Psychology, in a release. “You could think of that as you’ve got all the memories that you need already, but you need to restructure them—make links between memories that you weren’t linking, integrate things that you weren’t integrating.”
Studies show that this kind of restructuring often happens while we are asleep, so Lewis and her co-authors drew on that literature, as well as physiological and behavioral data, to create a model of what might be happening during each stage. Their model proposes that non-REM sleep helps us organize information into useful categories, whereas REM helps us see beyond those categories to discover unexpected connections.
Since the first measurements of limb blood flow at rest and during nerve stimulation were conducted in the late 1800s, a number of methods have been developed for the determination of limb and skeletal muscle blood flow in humans. The methods, which have been applied in the study of aspects such as blood flow regulation, oxygen uptake and metabolism, differ in terms of strengths and degree of limitations but most have advantages for specific settings. The purpose of this review is to describe the origin and the basic principles of the methods, important aspects and requirements of the procedures. One of the earliest methods, venous occlusion plethysmography, is a noninvasive method which still is extensively used and which provides similar values as other more direct blood flow methods such as ultrasound Doppler. The constant infusion thermodilution method remains the most appropriate for the determination of blood flow during maximal exercise. For resting blood flow and light-to-moderate exercise, the non-invasive ultrasound Doppler methodology, if handled by a skilled operator, is recommendable. Positron emission tomography with radiolabeled water is an advanced method which requires highly sophisticated equipment and allows for the determination of muscle-specific blood flow, regional blood flows and estimate of blood flow heterogeneity within a muscle. Finally, the contrast-enhanced ultrasound method holds promise for assessment of muscle-specific blood flow, but the interpretation of the data obtained remains uncertain. Currently lacking is high-resolution methods for continuous visualization and monitoring of the skeletal muscle microcirculation in humans.
Scientific and medical research is eying the use of cell-based biosensors to perform internal functions that used to be done by other means, such as medications. In the past, these sensors were expensive and complex to develop, which kept them from reaching their potential for widespread scientific and medical use. Now, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany have developed a method to easily print graphene-based bio-compatible sensors.
In fact, scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering IBMT have already partnered with the M-era.Net industry project BIOGRAPHY to develop a prototype for cost-effective mass production of these biosensors using a roll-to-roll printing process, they said.
“Our system prototype can print about 400 biosensors per minute on a continuous foil,” said Dr. Thomas Velten, head of the Biomedical Microsystems Department at IBMT and project manager of BIOGRAPHY. IBMT scientists designed the process, while industry partners provided the printing equipment and graphene ink used for manufacturing.
This review explores the conceptual and technological factors integral to the development of laboratory-based, automated real-time open-circuit mixing-chamber and breath-by-breath (B × B) gas-exchange systems, together with considerations of assumptions and limitations. Advances in sensor technology, signal analysis, and digital computation led to the emergence of these technologies in the mid-20th century, at a time when investigators were beginning to recognise the interpretational advantages of nonsteady-state physiological-system interrogation in understanding the aetiology of exercise (in)tolerance in health, sport, and disease. Key milestones include the ‘Auchincloss’ description of an off-line system to estimate alveolar O2 uptake B × B during exercise. This was followed by the first descriptions of real-time automated O2 uptake and CO2 output B × B measurement by Beaver and colleagues and by Linnarsson and Lindborg, and mixing-chamber measurement by Wilmore and colleagues. Challenges to both approaches soon emerged: e.g., the influence of mixing-chamber washout kinetics on mixed-expired gas concentration determination, and B × B alignment of gas-concentration signals with respired flow. The challenging algorithmic and technical refinements required for gas-exchange estimation at the alveolar level have also been extensively explored. In conclusion, while the technology (both hardware and software) underpinning real-time automated gas-exchange measurement has progressively advanced, there are still concerns regarding accuracy especially under the challenging conditions of changing metabolic rate.
Physical activity (PA) has been shown to influence salivary cortisol concentrations in small studies conducted among athletes. We assessed the association of activity status and patterns with salivary cortisol in the general population. METHODS:
Cross-sectional study including 1948 adults (54.9% women, 45-86 years). PA and sedentary behaviour (SB) were measured for 14 days by accelerometry. Low PA and high SB status were defined, respectively, as the lowest and highest tertile of each behaviour. ‘Inactive’, ‘Weekend warrior’, and ‘Regularly active’ patterns were also defined. Four salivary cortisol samples were collected over a single day and the following parameters were calculated: area under the curve to ground (AUCg), awakening response (CAR) and diurnal slope. RESULTS:
After multivariable adjustment, low SB remained associated to steeper slopes relative to high SB (- 1.54 ± 0.03 vs. - 1.44 ± 0.04 nmol/l per hour). Non-significant trends were found for high PA relative to low PA with steeper slopes (- 1.54 ± 0.03 vs. - 1.45 ± 0.04) and lower AUCg (208.7 ± 2.0 vs. 215.9 ± 2.9 nmol.h/l). Relative to ‘Inactives’, ‘Regularly actives’ had lower AUCg (205.4 ± 2.4 vs. 215.5 ± 2.9) and ‘Weekend warriors’ had steeper slopes (- 1.61 ± 0.05 vs. - 1.44 ± 0.04). No associations were found for CAR. CONCLUSION:
Low SB and high PA are related to lower cortisol secretion as measured by different parameters of salivary cortisol, but the effects were only modest.
At the University of Alabama, Lizzie Hibberd, PhD, LAT, ATC, Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Science, conducts research on how to prevent injuries among developing athletes. An article from the Alabama NewsCenter explains that while working on her doctorate, Dr. Hibberd noticed many college student-athletes had developed bad physical adaptations over the years.
“I’ve been putting more emphasis on finding characteristics in youth athletes and how those relate to injuries,” Dr. Hibberd said. “When do they develop certain physical characteristics? How does their participation in training influence those characteristics, and how and when can we intervene?”
To help answer those questions, Dr. Hibberd created the Athletic Training Research Lab at Alabama. Its equipment includes a diagnostic ultrasound, inclinometers to measure range of motion, dynamometers to assess a strength test number, high-speed video cameras, and GoPro cameras. The best part about these tools is Dr. Hibberd can take them anywhere.
… Both [Stephen] King and [J.K.] Rowling’s foray into undercover writing reveals a harsh truth about success and social status — winners keep winning. This idea is formally known as cumulative advantage, or the Matthew effect, and explains how those who start with an advantage relative to others can retain that advantage over long periods of time. This effect has also been shown to describe how music gets popular, but applies to any domain that can result in fame or social status. I discovered this concept by reading Michael Mauboussin’s The Success Equation where he writes:
The Matthew effect explains how two people can start in nearly the same place and end up worlds apart. In these kinds of systems, initial conditions matter. And as time goes on, they matter more and more.
This explains how King and Rowling sell millions while Bachman and Galbraith don’t, despite being of similar quality. While I find these anecdotes and others useful, we can illustrate cumulative advantage using a simple simulation.
FiveThirtyEight, Christie Aschwanden and Mai Nguyen from
At first blush, the studies look reasonable enough. Low-intensity stretching seems to reduce muscle soreness. Beta-alanine supplements may boost performance in water polo players. Isokinetic strength training could improve swing kinematics in golfers. Foam rollers can reduce muscle soreness after exercise.
The problem: All of these studies shared a statistical analysis method unique to sports science. And that method is severely flawed.
The method is called magnitude-based inference, or MBI. Its creator, Will Hopkins, is a New Zealand exercise physiologist with decades of experience — experience that he has harnessed to push his methodology into the sports science mainstream. The methodology allows researchers to find effects more easily compared with traditional statistics, but the way in which it is conducted undermines the credibility of these results. That MBI has persisted as long as it has points to some of science’s vulnerabilities — and to how science can correct itself.