… “I thought I was good enough. I knew once I got the size, I’d be able to play pretty well. I knew there were opportunities out of Northern Iowa,” says Smith.
“But it was going to take a lot of work.”
That belief fueled one of the most remarkable physical transformations you’ll ever find in an athlete. Smith added nearly 70 pounds to his towering frame and became one of the strongest players in college football.
Three time world champion surfer, Mick Fanning learnt about breathing techniques from his scoliosis. He claims they have helped him to improve his anxiety, pain, stress, and his physical performance in training, saying these different breathing techniques have been key to his success.
Tony Balzevich, a Professor of Biomechanics and director of the Centre for Exercise and Sports Science Research at Edith Cowan University, speaks with John Stanley. He spoke about the truth and science behind these breathing techniques and how it is not just “weird hippy stuff”. [audio, 10:53]
… While they are normally only used before or after an activity, a recent study aimed to determine whether foam rolling during the halftime of a soccer match could mitigate the significant performance drop that tends to appear at the beginning of the second half, often attributed to a decrease in muscle temperature. In the study, participants performed a series of sprints to simulate the first half of a match. During a fifteen minute “halftime” period, some of the participants used the foam roller to massage their leg muscles, while the others rested passively. Then the participants repeated the same series of sprints, and the researchers compared their performances in this second half to those from the first half.
… Getting less hours of sleep impacts an athlete’s performance and ability to recover, possibly affecting their abilities that are specific of the sports discipline, the cognitive skills or parameters such as submaximal strength or anaerobic power. Moreover, due to the impact of sleep on the immune function and the nervous system, many studies associate the number of hours of sleep to the risk of injury. For example, a study performed by Milewski et al. that analysed 112 teenage athletes showed that those who slept less than 8 hours on average at night had 1.7 times more risk of becoming injured than those who slept 8 hours or more.11 Another study about the relationship between sleep and the risk of injury analysed 340 teenage elite athletes, and found that those who slept more than 8 hours during the week reduced the possibilities of becoming injured by approximately 60%. Besides, another study that has recently been published analysed basketball players from the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) showed that athletes suffered injuries more frequently when they had poor sleep. According to the study, an additional hour of sleep was linked to the decrease of the risk of injury by 43% the next day.
Given that the reduction of the quality and quantity of sleep affects athlete’s recovery and their mental and physical performance, how could more hours of sleep affect them? Although there is not enough evidence about it, a recent study performed with cyclists and triathletes showed a reduction of the time trial after three consecutive nights of extended sleep (~ 8.4 hours of sleep each night) in comparison to the athletes’ regular sleeping hours (~ 6.8 hours of sleep each night).14 For that reason, researchers concluded the study suggesting that “endurance sports athletes should sleep more than 8 hours in order to optimise their performance”.
U.S. Ski & Snowboard announced that Per Lundstam has rejoined the organization as Director of Alpine Sport Science.
Lundstam rejoins the organization after an 11-year stint with Red Bull, where he served as the High Performance Manager. Prior to Red Bull, Lundstam worked with U.S. Ski & Snowboard from 1994 to 2010 as Head Strength Coach, working with the likes of Olympic champions Tommy Moe, Bode Miller, Ted Ligety, Lindsey Vonn, and Julia Mancuso.
High Performance Director Troy Taylor is eager to bring Lundstam back into the U.S. Ski & Snowboard fold heading into the 2021-22 season, highlighted by the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. “There are very few (if any) people in the world that can match Per’s knowledge and experience of alpine sport science support, from being a former; World Cup level athlete, coach and sport science manager at U.S. Ski & Snowboard and most recently the Director of Athlete Performance at Red Bull,” commented Taylor. “Per’s re-hiring clearly demonstrates U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s continued commitment to providing “Best in the World” support to our athletes and I’m excited for the role that Per will play in driving us forward as we help athletes to fulfill their dreams”.
University of Birmingham (UK), Research Perspectives from
… From a psychological and psychosocial standpoint, sometimes the best technique to break a bad run of form is to simply refresh the day-to-day routine. This may come in the shape of an extended recovery between games, or even extended time off and days away from the training ground, in hope that this will revitalise and reenergise the players. A lot of potential methods to break a rut orientate around the objective of breaking the monotonous cycle and removing the tedious nature of repetitive tasks to try and entice a reaction to attempt to impact the psychological factors that may influence poor performance. From a tactical perspective, management may have to vary their training sessions and periodization to alter the stimuli in order in bring about meaningful performance changes. Managers and coaches may try to bring playfulness and enjoyment back into training sessions to try and improve the atmosphere and attitude within the club. Furthermore, the management or coaching staff may choose to change the team selection or formation to try and find the perfect formula for the group of players they have available. This may involve removing the “bad eggs” whose negativity and bad form may be becoming contagious within the team. The management may also wish to alter the physical training stimulus in order to bring about meaningful performance changes. The coaching staff and sports science department may wish to manipulate the physical loading of the players to see whether an adjustment to their training week may cause noticeable changes.
Unfortunately, the difficulty of identifying and then actually resurrecting the problem which may be causing the “rut” is an extremely difficult task within elite football, especially with the high pressure and limited time frame in which clubs need to turn performances around.
Chris Citowicki somehow got a phone number for the former coach of the United States women’s national soccer team when he was working his way up the coaching ranks.
The third-year Montana coach got about 15 minutes to talk with Anson Dorrance, who led the U.S. to the 1991 FIFA Women’s World Cup title. He was surprised that a lowly NCAA Division III head coach like himself got even that much time to talk with the likes of Dorrance, who also has coached the North Carolina women to 21 NCAA championships since 1979.
Citowicki was interested in incorporating technology into his team’s training and got to pick Dorrance’s brain. He’s ramped up the technology he’s used at Montana this spring, from GPS wearables to marrying fitness data with film to in-game electronic communication.
The development of non-invasive, wearable devices that can detect biomolecules from bodily fluids would enable real-time diagnosis of health conditions and medical intervention, as well as continuous monitoring of athletic performance and optimization of training regiments. However, the experimental techniques traditionally used to isolate or selectively detect a biomolecular target require sophisticated instrumentation, preventing their translation from the laboratory to a portable sensor.
In a new Perspective, Shana O. Kelley and colleagues provide an overview of research advances in reagentless biomolecule detection, focusing specifically on electrochemical sensing platforms that are easily miniaturized and compatible with the analysis of opaque fluids
… “In this work, we introduced a strategy that provides a reliable tool for identifying with high accuracy the environmental and operational device degradation pathways and subsequently eliminating the main sources of instabilities to achieve stable devices,” said lead author Hamna Iqbal, a graduate student who worked closely with Professor of Physics Oana Jurchescu on the research.
Device stability has remained one of the biggest challenges in flexible organic electronics, keeping potentially life-changing inventions – smart bandages that monitor the healing of an injured arm, flexible transparent solar cells, or smart tablets that roll up conveniently into a pen – both expensive and often stuck in the prototype stage.
Continuous multiple data health monitoring has high potential to detect abnormal conditions or early stages of diseases in the future. To monitor a continuous small vital signal, one of the promising architectures is an attachable flexible multimodal sensor system, which can detect multiple health conditions from the skin surface. Recent breakthroughs have realized continuous sweat chemicals or physical conditions using flexible sensors. However, multimodal sensor integration to monitor chemical and physical information simultaneously and precisely is still a challenge. In this study, we present a multimodal wearable sensor sheet, which allows us to monitor sweat glucose, electrocardiograms, and skin temperature. Furthermore, to prevent the accumulation of glucose on the sensor surface for precise monitoring, a fluidic channel is also integrated to refresh the sweat from the sensor surface, resulting in the precise measurement of chemical substances in real time. This multimodal and flexible sensor platform takes a significant step toward realizing wearable healthcare applications to diagnose the early stages of diseases in advance.
The human body is host to a multitude of bacteria, fungi, viruses and other species in the intestine, collectively known as the microbiota. Dietary carbohydrates which bypass digestion and absorption are broken down and fermented by the microbiota to produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs). Previous research has established the role of SCFAs in the control of human metabolic pathways. In this review, we evaluate SCFAs as a metabolic regulator and how they might improve endurance performance in athletes. By looking at research conducted in animal models, we identify several pathways downstream of SCFAs, either directly modulating metabolic pathways through second messenger pathways or through neuronal pathways, that contribute to energy utilisation. These pathways contribute to efficient energy metabolism and are thus key to maximising substrate utilisation in endurance exercise. Future research may prove the usefulness of targeted dietary interventions allowing athletes to maximise their performance in competition. [full text]
Revenue generated by women’s sport in the UK is projected to grow to £1bn a year by 2030 – up from £350m a year currently – according to data released by the Women’s Sport Trust and data and insight agency Two Circles.
The pair released the projections as part of the release of ‘Closing the Visibility Gap’, a new study into the commercial drivers of women’s sport in the UK, while the organisations also say the ‘key’ unlocking growth is ‘increased visibility’ of female athletes and teams.
For centuries, sports have been built off a model designed by men for men. Women simply inherited these models and tried to build upon them. The modern sports industry model generates revenue through three main sources – ticket sales, sponsorships and TV viewership from lengthy media-rights deals.
“COVID has completely shifted that,” said Sports Innovation Lab CEO Angela Ruggiero, a Hockey Hall of Fame member. “Therein lies the opportunity for women’s sports to rethink how we do business, and quite frankly, do it better. Sports as a whole are shifting, fans are shifting, technology is shifting. It’s a moment in time we’ve truly never had in the sports industry. It’s a really exciting time for women’s sports to bubble up and for women to get involved. It takes a woman to know what women want, and we need more women at the table.”
What if pro sports were owned, designed and run by women? How might the experiences change or stay the same? That was the theme of the Aspen Institute’s Future of Sports conversation series event on April 16