More Proof That Caffeine Boosts Athletic Performance

UK scientists show for the first time that high doses of caffeine directly increase muscle power and endurance during relatively low-intensity activities.

New research shows increased muscle performance in sub-maximal activities, which in humans can range from everyday activities to running a marathon. With no current regulations in place, the scientists from Coventry University believe their findings may have implications for the use of caffeine in sport to improve performance.

The scientists present their work at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Meeting in Prague.
"A very high dosage of caffeine, most likely achieved via tablets, powder or a concentrated liquid, is feasible and might prove attractive to a number of athletes wishing to improve their athletic performance," explains lead researcher, Dr Rob James.

"A small increase in performance via caffeine could mean the difference between a gold medal in the Olympics and an also-ran," he added.

Caffeine is not currently listed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) as a banned substance at any concentration in blood or urine samples. Before 2004 WADA did set a specific level over which athletes could be banned, but this restriction was removed.  Muscle activity is divided into maximal, where the muscles are pushed to full capacity such as in sprinting or weight lifting, and sub-maximal, which covers all other activities.

A member of the team, Jason Tallis, tested the effect of caffeine on both the power output and endurance of soleus muscles (lower leg muscle) in mice, under both maximal and sub-maximal activities.

He found that a caffeine dosage of 70 µM enhanced power output by ~6% during both types of activity. This effect in humans is likely to be very similar, according to the researchers.

"70 μM caffeine concentration is the absolute maximum that can normally achieved in the blood plasma of a human, however concentrations of 20-50 μM are not unusual in people with high caffeine intakes," explains Dr James.

Resultant caffeine in blood plasma (70μM maximum) may act at receptors on skeletal muscle causing enhanced force production. Scientists already know that ingestion of caffeine can increase athletic performance by stimulating the central nervous system.  Additionally, 70μM caffeine treatment increased endurance during sub-maximal activity, but significantly reduced endurance during maximal activity.

Source: Society for Experimental Biology

See also: Starbucks' Secret Sports Supplement and How Should Cheating Be Defined In Sports?

Athletes In The Zone Feel The Flow

Robyn Beck/Getty Images

Tiger was in the zone.  On Saturday, in the third round of this year's U.S. Open, Woods made eight birdies, including five on the final nine holes, to come roaring back into contention.  "All the Opens I've won [three], I've had one stretch of nine holes," Woods said. "It doesn't have to be on a back nine or front, just a nine-hole stretch where you put it together." He knows that to win, he needs to find that "flow".

After a great performance, many athletes have described a feeling of being “in the zone.” In this state, they feel invincible, as if the game slowed down, the crowd noise fell silent and they achieved an incredible focus on their mission. What is this Superman-like state and how can players enter it when they most need it?

Like the feeling of being moved down a river by the current, this positive groove has been described as a "flow." In fact, Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, psychology professor at Claremont Graduate University in California, coined the term in his 1990 book, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” (Harper Row, 1990).

From his years of research, Csíkszentmihályi developed an entire theory around the concept and applied it not only to sports, but also to work life, education, music and spirituality.

Csíkszentmihályi identified nine components of the state of flow. The more of these you can achieve, the stronger your feeling of total control will be.

1. Challenge-skills balance is achieved when you have confidence that your skills can meet the challenge in front of you.

2. Action-awareness merging is the state of being completely absorbed in an activity, with tunnel vision that shuts out everything else.

3. Clear goals come into focus when you know exactly what is required of you and what you want to accomplish.

4. Unambiguous feedback is constant, real-time feedback that allows you to adjust your tactics. For example, fans and coaches will let you know how you're doing.

5. Concentration on the task at hand, with laser-beam focus, is essential.

6. Sense of control is heightened when you feel that your actions can affect the outcome of the game.

7. Loss of self-consciousness occurs when you are not constantly self-aware of your success.

8. Transformation of time takes place when you lose track of time due to your total focus on the moment.

9. Autotelic experience is achieved when you feel internally driven to succeed even without outside rewards. You do something because you love to do it.

Flow doesn't only happen to athletes. In any activity, when you're completely focused, incredibly productive and have lost track of time, you may be in the flow. You may not be trying to win the U.S. Open, but you can still say you are "in the zone."

See also: Tiger's Brain Is Bigger Than Ours and Tiger, LeBron, Beckham - Neuromarketing In Action

Youth Sports Coaches Should Prioritize Teaching Over Winning

Young athletes' achievement goals can change in a healthy way over the course of a season when their coaches create a mastery motivational climate rather than an ego orientation, University of Washington sport psychologists have found. A mastery climate stresses positive communication between coaches and athletes, teamwork and doing one's best. An ego climate, typified by many professional sports coaches, focuses on winning at all costs and being better than others.

"Much of life is affected by motivation and achievement," said Ronald Smith, a UW psychology professor and lead author of a new study. "Our study looked at children 9 to 13 years of age and there was no difference by age or sex. And it was also significant because it shows the influence of a mastery climate on children's achievement goals in a relatively short time, 12 weeks."

For several decades psychologists have believed that children under the age of 11 or 12 could not distinguish between effort and ability. That still may be true when it comes to academics, but the new research indicates that children as young as 9 can tell the difference between the two while participating in sports.
Frank Smoll, another UW psychology professor and co-author of the paper, said the research shows the importance of youth sport coaches at an earlier age than previously thought.  The study was recently published in the journal Motivation and Emotion.

"A coach can be the first non-parental figure who is a youngster's hero. People who volunteer to coach year after year don't affect just a few kids. They can be influencing thousands at very early ages," he said.

The study involved 243 children -- 145 boys and 98 girls -- playing basketball in two separate Seattle leagues. The athletes ranged in age from 9 to 13 and 80 percent were white. They were given questionnaires to fill out twice, once prior to the beginning of the season and again 12 weeks later when the season was almost over.

A previously published paper by the researchers from the same project showed that young athletes who played for coaches who were taught how to create a mastery climate reported lower levels of sport anxiety compared to youngsters who played for coaches who were not trained. The research also was the first to show that a coaching intervention is as effective with girls as it is with boys.

The new study found that athletes who played for coaches who used a mastery climate showed such things as greater enjoyment of basketball over the course of the season. In addition, levels of ego orientation dropped. The opposite was true for athletes playing for coaches relying on an ego-oriented style of leadership. These finding held for athletes across all ages.

"One consistent finding of our research is that a mastery climate retains more youngsters in sports. It keeps them coming back," said Smith. "Retention is a huge problem in some youth sports programs. An important reason to keep kids involved in sports is that it reduces obesity by helping them be more active."

Source: University of Washington

See also: Teaching Tactics and Techniques In Sports and Sideline Raging Soccer Moms (and Dads!) 

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Get Off The Treadmill And On The Trail

How much "green exercise" produces the greatest improvement in mood and sense of personal well-being? A new study in the American Chemical Society's semi-monthly journal Environmental Science & Technology has a surprising answer.  The answer is likely to please people in a society with much to do but little time to do it: Just five minutes of exercise in a park, working in a backyard garden, on a nature trail, or other green space will benefit mental health.

Jules Pretty and Jo Barton explain in the study that green exercise is physical activity in the presence of nature. Abundant scientific evidence shows that activity in natural areas decreases the risk of mental illness and improves the sense of well-being. Until now, however, nobody knew how much time people had to spend in green spaces to get those and other benefits.

"For the first time in the scientific literature, we have been able to show dose-response relationships for the positive effects of nature on human mental health," Pretty said.

From an analysis of 1,252 people (of different ages, genders and mental health status) drawn from ten existing studies in the United Kingdom, the authors were able to show that activity in the presence of nature led to mental and physical health improvements.
They analyzed activities such as walking, gardening, cycling, fishing, boating, horse-riding and farming. The greatest health changes occurred in the young and the mentally-ill, although people of all ages and social groups benefited. All natural environments were beneficial including parks in urban settings. Green areas with water added something extra. A blue and green environment seems even better for health, Pretty noted.
From a health policy perspective, the largest positive effect on self-esteem came from a five-minute dose.
"We know from the literature that short-term mental health improvements are protective of long-term health benefits," Pretty said. "So we believe that there would be a large potential benefit to individuals, society and to the costs of the health service if all groups of people were to self-medicate more with green exercise," added Barton.

A challenge for policy makers is that policy recommendations on physical activity are easily stated but rarely adopted widely as public policy, Pretty noted, adding that the economic benefits could be substantial.
Policy frameworks that suggest active living point to the need for changes to physical, social and natural environments, and are more likely to be effective if physical activity becomes an inevitable part of life rather than a matter of daily choice.

Source: American Chemical Society and What is the Best Dose of Nature and Green Exercise for Improving Mental Health? A Multi-Study Analysis. Environmental Science & Technology, 2010

See also: Running Addicts Need Their Fix and Barefoot Is Better

Exercise Pumps Up Your Brain

Regular exercise speeds learning and improves blood flow to the brain, according to a new study led by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine that is the first to examine these relationships in a non-human primate model. The findings are available in the journal Neuroscience.

While there is ample evidence of the beneficial effects of exercise on cognition in other animal models, such as the rat, it has been unclear whether the same holds true for people, said senior author Judy L. Cameron, Ph.D., a psychiatry professor at Pitt School of Medicine and a senior scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center at Oregon Health and Science University. Testing the hypothesis in monkeys can provide information that is more comparable to human physiology.

"We found that monkeys who exercised regularly at an intensity that would improve fitness in middle-aged people learned to do tests of cognitive function faster and had greater blood volume in the brain's motor cortex than their sedentary counterparts," Dr. Cameron said. "This suggests people who exercise are getting similar benefits."

For the study, the researchers trained adult female cynomolgus monkeys to run on a human-sized treadmill at 80 percent of their individual maximal aerobic capacity for one hour each day, five days per week, for five months. Another group of monkeys remained sedentary, meaning they sat on the immobile treadmill, for a comparable time. Half of the runners went through a three-month sedentary period after the exercise period. In all groups, half of the monkeys were middle aged (10 to 12 years old) and the others were more mature (15 to 17 years old). Initially, the middle-aged monkeys were in better shape than their older counterparts, but with exercise, all the runners became more fit.


During the fifth week of exercise training, standardized cognitive testing was initiated and then performed five days per week until week 24. In a preliminary task, the monkeys learned that by lifting a cover off a small well in the testing tray, they could have the food reward that lay within it. In a spatial delay task, a researcher placed a food reward in one of two wells and covered both wells in full view of the monkey. A screen was lowered to block the animal's view for a second, and then raised again. If the monkey displaced the correct cover, she got the treat. After reliably succeeding at this task, monkeys that correctly moved the designated one of two different objects placed over side-by-side wells got the food reward that lay within it.

"Monkeys that exercised learned to remove the well covers twice as quickly as control animals," Dr. Cameron said. "Also, they were more engaged in the tasks and made more attempts to get the rewards, but they also made more mistakes."

She noted that later in the testing period, learning rate and performance was similar among the groups, which could mean that practice at the task will eventually overshadow the impact of exercise on cognitive function.

When the researchers examined tissue samples from the brain's motor cortex, they found that mature monkeys that ran had greater vascular volume than middle-aged runners or sedentary animals. But those blood flow changes reversed in monkeys that were sedentary after exercising for five months.

"These findings indicate that aerobic exercise at the recommended levels can have meaningful, beneficial effects on the brain," Dr. Cameron said. "It supports the notion that working out is good for people in many, many ways."

Source: University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences.

See also: Take Your Brain To The Gym and Boomer Brains Need Exercise

Military Mindfulness Training May Also Help Athletes Handle Stress

A University of Pennsylvania-led study in which training was provided to a high-stress U.S. military group preparing for deployment to Iraq has demonstrated a positive link between mindfulness training, or MT, and improvements in mood and working memory. Mindfulness is the ability to be aware and attentive of the present moment without emotional reactivity or volatility.

The study found that the more time participants spent engaging in daily mindfulness exercises the better their mood and working memory, the cognitive term for complex thought, problem solving and cognitive control of emotions. The study also suggests that sufficient MT practice may protect against functional impairments associated with high-stress challenges that require a tremendous amount of cognitive control, self-awareness, situational awareness and emotional regulation.

To study the protective effects of mindfulness training on psychological health in individuals about to experience extreme stress, cognitive neuroscientist Amishi Jha of the Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Penn and Elizabeth A. Stanley of Georgetown University provided mindfulness training for the first time to U.S. Marines before deployment. Jha and her research team investigated working memory capacity and affective experience in individuals participating in a training program developed and delivered by Stanley, a former U.S. Army officer and security-studies professor with extensive experience in mindfulness techniques.

The program, called Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT™), aims to cultivate greater psychological resilience or "mental armor" by bolstering mindfulness.

 The program covered topics of central relevance to the Marines, such as integrating skills to manage stress reactions, increase their resilience to future stressors and improve their unit's mission effectiveness. Thus, the program blended mindfulness skills training with concrete applications for the operational environment and information and skills about stress, trauma and resilience in the body.

The program emphasized integrating mindfulness exercises, like focused attention on the breath and mindful movement, into pre-deployment training. These mindfulness skills were to regulate symptoms in the body and mind following an experience of extreme stress. The importance of regularly engaging in mindfulness exercises was also emphasized.

"Our findings suggest that, just as daily physical exercise leads to physical fitness, engaging in mindfulness exercises on a regular basis may improve mind-fitness," Jha said. "Working memory is an important feature of mind-fitness. Not only does it safeguard against distraction and emotional reactivity, but it also provides a mental workspace to ensure quick-and-considered decisions and action plans. Building mind-fitness with mindfulness training may help anyone who must maintain peak performance in the face of extremely stressful circumstances, from first responders, relief workers and trauma surgeons, to professional and Olympic athletes."

Study participants included two military cohorts of 48 male participants with a mean age of 25 recruited from a detachment of Marine reservists during the high-stress pre-deployment interval and provided MT to one group of 31, leaving 17 Marines in a second group without training as a control. The MT group attended an eight-week course and logged the amount of out-of-class time they spent practicing formal exercises. The effect of the course on working memory was evaluated using the Operation Span Task, whereas the impact on positive and negative affect was evaluated using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, or PANAS.

The Positive Affect scale reflects the extent to which a person feels enthusiastic, active and alert. The Negative Affect scale reflects unpleasant mood states, such as anger, disgust and fear. Working memory capacity degraded and negative mood increased over time in the control group. A similar pattern was observed in those who spent little time engaging in mindfulness exercises within the MMFT group. Yet, capacity increased and negative mood decreased in those with high practice time over the eight weeks.

The study findings are in line with prior research on Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR, programs and suggest that MMFT may provide "psychological prophylaxis," or protection from cognitive and emotional disturbances, even among high-stress cohorts such as members of the military preparing for deployment. Given the high rate of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental-health disturbances suffered by those returning from war, providing such training prior to deployment may buffer against potential lifelong psychological illness by bolstering working memory capacity.

In the several months prior to a deployment, service members receive intensive training on mission-critical operational skills, physical training and "stress-inoculation" training to habituate them to stressors they may experience during their impending mission. They also must psychologically prepare to leave loved ones and face potentially violent and unpredictable situations during their deployment.
Persistent and intensive demands, such as those experienced during high-stress intervals, have been shown to deplete working memory capacity and lead to cognitive failures and emotional disturbances.

The research team hypothesized that MMFT may mitigate these deleterious effects by bolstering working memory capacity.

Source:  University of Pennsylvania

See also: The Big Mo' - Momentum In Sports and Watching Sports Is Good For Your Brain

How To Evacuate 75,000 Fans In A Hurry

Wisconsin's Camp Randall Stadium

What sports fan hasn't grumbled while waiting in a long, snaking lines to get into the stadium for the big game? It's enough to discourage even a diehard fan. But if you think it's a hassle getting into a sold-out game, imagine trying to get out after a bomb explodes -- or even to get out under a bomb threat, for that matter.

Let's start with the emergency lights failing. If you're thinking of feeling your way out by the light of your cell phone, join the crowd -- they're right beside you, pushing fifty-across and a thousand-deep in a stampede. It's everyone for himself.

Scenes like this may sound like a trailer for a Hollywood thriller (think Black Sunday), but their grim prospect is all-too-real. Last year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI jointly warned of terrorist interest in attacking crowded stadiums. Small wonder: A bomb or noxious plume released over a throng of captive sports fans would cause major-league mayhem and terror.
Mindful of the threat, stadium sentinels have been laying plans to manage and minimize the anarchy that would follow such an attack. Just how would authorities whisk 70,000 people out the gates and onto the roads quickly and safely? For an evacuation on this scale, there are no dress rehearsals or practice drills -- just simulation software.


Now, a new breed of simulation software -- dubbed SportEvac -- is being funded by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) as part of the Southeast Region Research Initiative (SERRI), and developed and tested by the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety & Security (NCS4) at the University of Southern Mississippi.

"SportEvac isn't simply more realistic," says program manager Mike Matthews of S&T's Infrastructure and Geophysical Division. It will become a national standard."

Using blueprints from actual stadiums, the developers are creating virtual, 3D e stadiums, packed with as many as 70,000 avatars -- animated human agents programmed to respond to threats as unpredictably as humans. Security planners will be able to see how 70,000 fans would behave―and misbehave―when spooked by a security threat.

But a SportEvac avatar need not be a sports fan. The simulation includes make-believe stadium workers, first responders, even objects, such as a fire trucks or a fan's car. SportEvac tracks them all, accounting for scenarios both probable and improbable.

Simulating thousands of people and cars can impose a crushing load on software and hardware. That's why, unlike SportEvac, most evacuation software apps are unable to simulate a crowd much larger than 5,000. For a college or NFL football game, that's bush-league.

(Credit: SERRI)

Beyond scaling problems, earlier simulators did not account for the myriad variations that make human behavior hard to predict and human structures hard to simulate. How adversely, for example, would an evacuation be impaired if an audible were called -- a wet floor, a wheelchair, a stubborn aisle-seater, a fan fetching a forgotten bag, or an inebriated bleacher bum?

Conventional evacuation simulators couldn't say. SportEvac can. And like an open-source Web browser, the SportEvac software will get better and better because it's built on open, modular code. If your IT intern creates a module that can more accurately predict parking lot gridlock, just plug it in. This also means it can be customized for any sports arena.

By simulating how sports fans would behave in the minutes following an attack, SportEvac will help security experts across the country to plan and train and answer key questions, such as:

• How can my stadium be evacuated in the shortest time?
• How can civil emergency workers quickly get in as fans are dashing out?
• How can our stadium guards and ushers provide valuable information to civil responders and assist them as the evacuation unfolds?

"Interoperability is also a key goal," says Lou Marciani, NCS4 Director, who serves as the S&T project's principal investigator. Stadium security officers can use SportEvac to rehearse and refine procedures with civil responders. During a real evacuation, guards might use the same radios as the civil responders. And for every usher with a smartphone, a "SportEvac Lite" application will graphically show where fans or cars are bottlenecked.

Drawing on actual architectural CAD data, the Mississippi researchers are creating 3D virtual models of seven of the state's college sports stadiums. This year, in summits and workshops, security teams from the university athletic departments will test and refine SportEvac, with help from local police, Mississippi Homeland Security agents, the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, and security specialists from pro sports. It will then be deployed to the seven state universities. Once the schools give it the green light, S&T will make the advanced version available to other universities, pro sports venues, and amateur sports organizations.

While not quite as immersive as the recent 3-D movie Avatar, SportEvac will create a safe, virtual stadium where security teams can practice guiding fans to safety, without risking life, limb, or lawsuit.

Source: US Department of Homeland Security - Science and Technology

See also: Designing The Connected Stadium 2.0 and The Cognitive Benefits Of Being A Sports Fan

Is Exercise The Cure For Depression?

Exercise is a magic drug for many people with depression and anxiety disorders, and it should be more widely prescribed by mental health care providers, according to researchers who analyzed the results of numerous published studies.


"Exercise has been shown to have tremendous benefits for mental health," says Jasper Smits, director of the Anxiety Research and Treatment Program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "The more therapists who are trained in exercise therapy, the better off patients will be."

Smits and Michael Otto, psychology professor at Boston University, based their finding on an analysis of dozens of population-based studies, clinical studies and meta-analytic reviews related to exercise and mental health, including the authors' meta-analysis of exercise interventions for mental health and studies on reducing anxiety sensitivity with exercise. The researchers' review demonstrated the efficacy of exercise programs in reducing depression and anxiety.

The traditional treatments of cognitive behavioral therapy and pharmacotherapy don't reach everyone who needs them, says Smits, an associate professor of psychology.

"Exercise can fill the gap for people who can't receive traditional therapies because of cost or lack of access, or who don't want to because of the perceived social stigma associated with these treatments," he says. "Exercise also can supplement traditional treatments, helping patients become more focused and engaged."

The researchers presented their findings March 6 in Baltimore at the annual conference of the Anxiety Disorder Association of America. Their workshop was based on their therapist guide "Exercise for Mood and Anxiety Disorders," (Oxford University Press, September 2009).

"Individuals who exercise report fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression, and lower levels of stress and anger," Smits says. "Exercise appears to affect, like an antidepressant, particular neurotransmitter systems in the brain, and it helps patients with depression re-establish positive behaviors. For patients with anxiety disorders, exercise reduces their fears of fear and related bodily sensations such as a racing heart and rapid breathing."

After patients have passed a health assessment, Smits says, they should work up to the public health dose, which is 150 minutes a week of moderate-intensity activity or 75 minutes a week of vigorous-intensity activity. At a time when 40 percent of Americans are sedentary, he says, mental health care providers can serve as their patients' exercise guides and motivators.

"Rather than emphasize the long-term health benefits of an exercise program -- which can be difficult to sustain -- we urge providers to focus with their patients on the immediate benefits," he says. "After just 25 minutes, your mood improves, you are less stressed, you have more energy -- and you'll be motivated to exercise again tomorrow. A bad mood is no longer a barrier to exercise; it is the very reason to exercise."

Smits says health care providers who prescribe exercise also must give their patients the tools they need to succeed, such as the daily schedules, problem-solving strategies and goal-setting featured in his guide for therapists.

"Therapists can help their patients take specific, achievable steps," he says. "This isn't about working out five times a week for the next year. It's about exercising for 20 or 30 minutes and feeling better today."


Source: Southern Methodist University

See also: Exercise May Help Schizophrenia Patients and Boomer Brains Need Exercise

Bad Air Affects Women More Than Men In Marathons

Poor air quality apparently affects the running times of women in marathons, according to a study by Virginia Tech civil and environmental engineer Linsey Marr.  Her findings come from a comprehensive study that evaluated marathon race results, weather data, and air pollutant concentrations in seven marathons over a period of eight to 28 years.

The top three male and female finishing times were compared with the course record and contrasted with air pollutant levels, taking high temperatures that were detrimental to performance into consideration.

Higher levels of particles in the air were associated with slower running times for women, while men were not significantly affected, Marr said. The difference may be due to the smaller size of women's tracheas, which makes it easier for certain particles to deposit there and possibly to cause irritation
"Although pollution levels in these marathons rarely exceeded national standards for air quality, performance was still affected," Marr said.

Her work, done in collaboration with Matthew Ely, an exercise physiologist at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, appears in the official journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, Medicine and Science in Sports & Exercise.

Her studies were conducted where major U.S. marathons are located, such as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, where pollution tends to be highest. Although the person might not be significantly impacted by low-yet-still-acceptable air quality, marathoners are atypical because of their breathing patterns, she said.

"Previous research has shown that during a race, marathon runners inhale and exhale about the same volume of air as a sedentary person would over the course of two full days," Marr said. "Therefore, runners are exposed to much greater amounts of pollutants than under typical breathing conditions."
Particulate matter appeared to be the only performance-altering factor in air quality, with carbon monoxide, ozone, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide levels not impacting race times.


Source: Virginia Tech and Marr, Linsey C.; Ely, Matthew R. Effect of Air Pollution on Marathon Running Performance :. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2010; 42 (3): 585 DOI: 10.1249/MSS.0b013e3181b84a85

See also: Barefoot Is Better and Running Addicts Need Their Fix

Fit Kids Get Better Grades

Physical fitness is associated with academic performance in young people, according to a report presented at the American Heart Association's 2010 Conference on Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism.

"As children's health continues to be a concern -- especially when it comes to obesity -- some have suggested that children's physical fitness is associated with their academic performance," said Lesley A. Cottrell, Ph.D., study presenting author and associate professor of pediatrics at West Virginia University in Morgantown, W.Va. "The research, however, had not developed enough to define the nature of that relationship."

To study the association between children's physical fitness and academic performance, Cottrell and colleagues analyzed the body mass index percentiles, fitness levels and standardized academic test scores of 725 fifth grade students in Wood County, W.Va. The researchers focused more on the children's fitness level than their weight. They then compared that data to students' fitness and academic performance two years later, in the seventh grade...

They separated the participants into four groups of students who were:

* in high physical fitness levels in fifth grade and remained so in seventh grade;
* fit in fifth grade but had lost their fitness by seventh grade;
* not fit in fifth grade but were physically fit by seventh grade;
* not physically fit at the beginning of the study, in fifth grade, nor at the end of the study, in seventh grade.

Children who had the best average scores in standardized tests in reading, math, science and social studies were fit at the start and end of the study, researchers found. The next best group, academically, in all four subjects, was made up of children who were not fit in fifth grade but had become fit by seventh grade. The children who had lost their fitness levels between fifth and seventh grades were third in academic performance. Children who were not physically fit in either the fifth or seventh grades had the lowest academic performance.

"The take-home message from this study is that we want our kids to be fit as long as possible and it will show in their academic performance," Cottrell said. "But if we can intervene on those children who are not necessarily fit and get them to physically fit levels, we may also see their academic performance increase."

Youth who are regularly active also have a better chance of a healthy adulthood. The American Heart Association recommends that children and adolescents should do 60 minutes or more of physical activity daily and they participate in physical activities that are appropriate for their age and enjoyable.

The study suggests that focusing more on physical fitness and physical education in school would result in healthier, happier and smarter children, Cottrell said.

Source: American Heart Association.

See also: For Kids' Health, Just Let Them Play and Kids Who Exercise Can Get Better Grades

High Intensity Workout Gets The Job Done

The usual excuse of "lack of time" for not doing enough exercise is blown away by new research published in The Journal of Physiology.  The study, from scientists at Canada's McMaster University, adds to the growing evidence for the benefits of short term high-intensity interval training (HIT) as a time-efficient but safe alternative to traditional types of moderate long term exercise. Astonishingly, it is possible to get more by doing less!

"We have shown that interval training does not have to be 'all out' in order to be effective," says Professor Martin Gibala. "Doing 10 one-minute sprints on a standard stationary bike with about one minute of rest in between, three times a week, works as well in improving muscle as many hours of conventional long-term biking less strenuously."

HIT means doing a number of short bursts of intense exercise with short recovery breaks in between. The authors have already shown with young healthy college students that this produces the same physical benefits as conventional long duration endurance training despite taking much less time (and amazingly, actually doing less exercise!) However, their previous work used a relatively extreme set-up that involved "all out" pedaling on a specialized laboratory bicycle.



The new study used a standard stationary bicycle and a workload which was still above most people's comfort zone -about 95% of maximal heart rate -- but only about half of what can be achieved when people sprint at an all-out pace.

This less extreme HIT method may work well for people (the older, less fit, and slightly overweight among us) whose doctors might have worries about them exercising "all-out." We have known for years that repeated moderate long-term exercise tunes up fuel and oxygen delivery to muscles and aids the removal of waste products. Exercise also improves the way muscles use the oxygen to burn the fuel in mitochondria, the microscopic power station of cells.

Running or cycling for hours a week widens the network of vessels supplying muscle cells and also boosts the numbers of mitochondria in them so that a person can carry out activities of daily living more effectively and without strain, and crucially with less risk of a heart attack, stroke or diabetes.

But the traditional approach to exercise is time consuming. Martin Gibala and his team have shown that the same results can be obtained in far less time with brief spurts of higher-intensity exercise.

To achieve the study's equivalent results by endurance training you'd need to complete over 10 hours of continuous moderate bicycling exercise over a two-week period.

The "secret" to why HIT is so effective is unclear. However, the study by Gibala and co-workers also provides insight into the molecular signals that regulate muscle adaptation to interval training. It appears that HIT stimulates many of the same cellular pathways that are responsible for the beneficial effects we associate with endurance training.

The upside of doing more exercise is well-known, but a big question for most people thinking of getting fit is: "How much time out of my busy life do I need to spend to get the perks?"

Martin Gibala says "no time to exercise" is not an excuse now that HIT can be tailored for the average adult. "While still a demanding form of training," Gibala adds, "the exercise protocol we used should be possible to do by the general public and you don't need more than an average exercise bike."

The McMaster team's future research will examine whether HIT can bring health benefits to people who are overweight or who have metabolic diseases like diabetes.

As the evidence for HIT continues to grow, a new frontier in the fitness field emerges.


Source: A practical model of low-volume high-intensity interval training induces mitochondrial biogenesis in human skeletal muscle: potential mechanisms 

See also: The Physiology Of Speed and Exercise Burns Fat During But Not After Your Workout

Nobody Wants To Lose To The Underdog

Members of a group or team will work harder when they're competing against a group with lower status than when pitted against a more highly ranked group, according to a new study.

The results run contrary to the common belief that underdogs have more motivation because they have the chance to "knock the higher-status group down a peg," said Robert Lount, co-author of the study and assistant professor of management and human resources at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.  "We found over and over again across multiple studies that people worked about 30 percent harder when their group was competing against a lower-status group."

"It seems surprising to many people that the high-status team has more motivation, but it really makes sense," Lount added. "The higher-ranked group has more to lose if they don't compare well against a lower-status group. But if you're the lower-status group and lose to your superior rival, nothing has changed -- it just reaffirms the way things are."

Lount conducted the study with Nathan Pettit of Cornell University. Their results appear in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The researchers conducted five studies involving college students. In most of the studies, the students were asked to complete a simple task -- for instance, crossing out all the vowels in a random string of letters. They were told to do as many as they could in a specific period of time.


Participants were told a group of students from another specific college were simultaneously completing the same task. The logo of the participants' school and the competing school appeared on their worksheets, so the fact that this was a competition was clear.

In some cases, the competing school was one that was clearly more highly ranked than the participants' school (based on U.S. News and World Report rankings), while other times it was similarly ranked, or ranked lower.

The tasks were always simple, so that the students' ability wouldn't be tested -- only their motivation to complete as much of the task as possible.  Overall, the students completed about 30 percent more when they were competing against lower-ranked schools than they did when competing against more highly ranked colleges.

"The motivation gains were there when students felt their group's superior status was threatened," he said.

He noted that students didn't perform worse when they were pitted against higher-ranked teams than they did against similarly ranked teams. But it was only when students competed against lower-ranked teams that they actually were motivated to work harder.  One of the studies clearly showed how participants were motivated by the threat of losing to a team they considered inferior.

In this study, before the students completed the task, they were asked to think and write about a core value of themselves or their group.  Some wrote a group affirmation, in which they selected the value that was most important to people at their university -- such as relationships with family or maintaining ethical standards. Others wrote a self-affirmation, in which they listed a core personal value and why it was central to who they were as an individual.

The affirmations are designed to make the participants feel secure in their group identity (the group affirmation) or feel like they are personally moral and competent (self affirmation). A control group did not write an affirmation.

When students competed against a lower-status group, those who completed self or group affirmations finished less of the task than those who did no affirmations.  Writing the affirmations made the students feel like they were good members of their group, or that their group itself was good. Because they no longer felt threatened, they didn't feel they had to work as hard to prove themselves when competing against the lower-ranked team.

"The affirmations act as a buffer against threat," Lount said.

Meanwhile, students in this study who competed against higher-ranked teams showed no difference in how much of the task they completed, regardless of whether they wrote affirmations or not.


The findings may apply in a variety of settings, from workplaces to sports teams.  Bosses and coaches who manage groups competing against lower-status rivals should use that fact to motivate the people at their company or team.

"If you're a coach of a favored team, it would make sense to highlight this favored status to your players," he said. "Coaches should let players know that there's a lot at stake in their game -- they could lose their high status. That should be a big motivating factor for your team."

In any setting, motivation will depend a lot on who people and groups are compared against.

"If groups just focus on ways to gain status, they're missing out on a motivational opportunity," he said. "People are going to work harder to not lose what status they already have than they will to try to become higher status."

See also: How Nerves Affect Soccer Penalty Kicks and The Big Mo' - Momentum In Sports

Source: Ohio State University

Atomic Physicist Proposes Winning Formula For Baseball Success

(Credit: Photo by Bob Elbert)

Kerry Whisnant, the Iowa State University physicist, studies the mysteries of the neutrino, the elementary particle that usually passes right through ordinary matter such as baseballs and home-run sluggers.

Kerry Whisnant, the St. Louis Cardinals fan, studies the mathematical mysteries of baseball, including a long look at how the distribution of a team's runs can affect the team's winning percentage.

Whisnant, a professor of physics and astronomy who scribbles the Cardinals' roster on a corner of his office chalkboard, is part of baseball's sabermetrics movement. He, like other followers of the Society for American Baseball Research, analyzes baseball statistics and tries to discover how all the numbers relate to success on the field.

The results are ideas, analyses, formulas and papers that dig deep into the objective data.
Whisnant recently took up a decades-old formula written by Bill James, the baseball author and statistician who inspired sabermetrics and is a senior adviser for baseball operations for the Boston Red Sox. The basic formula, which has been tweaked over the years, uses the number of runs scored per game (RPG) and runs given up per game to estimate a team's winning percentage.



Whisnant took that formula a step further by considering run distributions. What happens, in other words, when you consider how much a team's run production varies? Does it help if a team consistently scores runs? Does it hurt if a team scores a lot of runs one day and very few the next? And is slugging percentage (SLG, total bases divided by at bats) a good measure of that consistency?

Whisnant's answer, based on a Markov chain analysis that simplifies and simulates an infinite number of baseball games while eliminating the random fluctuations found by analyzing actual data from a finite number of games:

W1/L1 = (RPG1/RPG2)^a (SLG1/SLG2)^b

where a = 0.723 (RPG1 + RPG2)^.373 and b = 0.977 (RPG1 + RPG2)^( -.947)

"I hated math in school, just write me a very condensed summary Kerry," a baseball fan wrote to dugoutcentral.com, a Web site for baseball talk and analysis, when Whisnant posted his formula there.
Whisnant's reply: "Bottom line: More consistent teams (narrower run distribution) tend to win more games for the same RPG (runs per game). Teams with higher SLG (slugging percentage) tend to have a narrower run distribution. Given two teams with the same RPG, a team with a SLG .080 higher will on average win one more game a season. If their pitching/defense has the same RPG allowed but a SLG allowed .080 lower, that would add another game."

So there you have it: "The more consistent a team is in scoring runs, game to game, the better the team's winning percentage for the total number of runs scored," Whisnant said.

"My study shows that runs alone don't tell the whole story," he said. "Consistency is another factor. You want to score runs, and you want to be consistent."

Across an entire 162-game season, Whisnant said more consistency could mean two additional wins. And that can be the difference between making the playoffs and calling it quits the first week in October.

Whisnant's paper explaining the formula was recently named one of four finalists in a contest sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston on March 6.

And while he's at the conference to present his paper, other baseball researchers are telling Whisnant to introduce himself to general managers of Major League Baseball teams. You never know, maybe the Cardinals are looking for a statistical consultant.

Nothing against neutrinos, Whisnant said, "but it would be a dream job to be a part-time analyst for the Cardinals."

See also:Virtual Reality Lab Proves How Fly Balls Are Caught and Baseball Brains - Hitting Into The World Series

Source:Iowa State University

For Olympic Nordic Skiers, Its All About The Glide

Friction -- or the lack of it -- in cross-country skiing events at the Winter Olympic games in Vancouver is a decisive factor in who wins the gold. Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) explain the physics behind what makes the best glide.

Fully seven of Norway's 11 Olympic medals to date have been won by residents of the small counties of Nord and Sør-Trondelag, which is also home to Norway's main science and engineering university, NTNU. Among the university's researchers are experts on the physical demands of cross country skiing, the physics of ski glide, physical training and the aerodynamics of ski jumping.

Felix Breitschädel, a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has studied the interplay between the choice of skis and wax that makes a winning combination for skiers.

Cross-country skiing takes enormous physical skill and endurance -- but it also takes the right skis and the right wax to bring home the gold, as Norway's elite athletes have learned during the Vancouver Olympic Games.



The wrong wax, wrong skis or mistakes in preparation of the base of the ski, "might lead to a change for the worse by up to 3 per cent," he says.

Cross-country skiers are able to kick and glide because of the way the wax and the physical structure of the ski and its base interact with the snow. When the skier presses down on one ski during a kick, the wax and ski base grip the snow, enabling the skier to push off and glide on the other ski.

Breitschädel, who is in Vancouver with the Norwegian national team, says ski preparation specialists that travel with racing teams have developed a four-step process that helps them decide how the skis should be prepared and what will work best. The steps are:

1) Different skis are tested on the track the day of the race to see what works best.

2) Once a ski itself has been chosen, the prep specialists go to work to create a micro structure on the ski base that will work in specific snow conditions. This structure is tested prior to the race.

3) Just a few hours before the race, the prep specialists have to test different waxes and wax combinations and wax the skis, which are then tested.

4) Just minutes before the race, the base of the ski is fine-tuned.

Breitschädel reports that the weather and track conditions at the Whistler Olympic Park in the Callaghan Valley are very special. "The arena is located 10 km west from Whistler, and about 200 km from the Pacific Ocean, and the area gets an average snow fall of 10 m in the surrounding mountains," he says. "Currently, the average snow depth is 1.2 m at the Nordic area."

Even though the site is not directly on the coast, it is still affected by coastal weather he says. The average temperature in February has been + 0.6°C, far warmer than the -1.4°C that has been the 4 year February average temperature.

But as long as there is enough snow, why does snow temperature matter to skiers? Breitschädel, says the mild temperatures in combination with regular showers increase the speed at which the snow changes structure, transforming pointy freshly fallen snowflakes into rounded snow grains. Regular freeze-thaw cycles further increase the snow grain size. Clusters of wet and round bonded snow crystals are the consequence.

Because the ski slides on the snow, the actual amount of surface area on the ski base is one important factor that determines how much friction there is.

If there is too much real surface contact area, the skier will actually experience some suction under wet conditions, but if it is colder, lots of surface area generates enough frictional heat to generate a thin water film for the ski to glide on.

"The ski base structure has to fit to the given snow grain condition," Breitschädel says. "New snow, with its complex snow crystals, requires a different ski base structure than old transformed snow grains." That means cold conditions call for fine grinds while coarse grinds are best for wet snow.

But what of the disappointing results for the Norwegian men's team in the 15 km freestyle race during the first week of the Winter Olympics? After race favourite Petter Northug turned in a disappointing finish, Norwegian media speculated that the wax might have been wrong. Breitschädel says that's an overly simplistic assessment.

"Waxing is one out of four parameters which affect the total performance of a ski. In addition to the ski characteristic, structure and track conditions, the waxing and the final ski tuning with a manual rilling tool are all important," he says. Each team carefully guards its wax and ski structuring secrets, but mistakes happen. The 3 per cent decrease in performance wouldn't make much of a different for the average skier, he says, but "at such a high level they are crucial and can make the difference whether an athletes wins a medal or not."

See also: Vancouver Olympians Prepared For High And Low Altitudes and Aerobic Efficiency Is Key To Olympic Gold For Cross-Country Skiers

Source: The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Vancouver Olympians Prepared For High And Low Altitudes

Lindsey Vonn winning gold

For winter sports athletes, including Olympians competing in Vancouver this week, the altitude of the sports venue can have a significant impact on performance, requiring athletes in skill sports, such as skating, ski jumping and snowboarding, to retool highly technical moves to accommodate more or less air resistance.

When considering the challenges and benefits of training and performing at sea level verses altitude, people often think of the effect altitude can have on oxygen delivery to muscles -- at higher altitudes, the body initially delivers less oxygen to muscles, which can result in fatigue occurring sooner during exercise. Higher altitudes also have less air density -- about 3 percent reduction for every 1,000 feet -- which can result in faster speeds in ski and skating races due to less aerodynamic drag, but can also affect timing and other technical components in skill sports.

"Many athletes perform thousands upon thousands of moves so they get a certain motor pattern ingrained," said Robert Chapman, an expert in altitude training at Indiana University. "A different altitude will change the feedback they get from balance and proprieception. In an endurance sport such as cross country skiing or biathlon, for competition at altitude it takes about 10-14 days to adjust. For a skill sport, it's harder to judge how long it will take to acclimate to the reduced air density at altitude. Hopefully, these athletes have incorporated this into their training, maybe in the last year or for a period of time, not just the two weeks leading up to competition."

Chapman, an exercise physiologist in the Department of Kinesiology in IU's School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, wrote about the topic in a special Winter Olympics issue of the journal Experimental Physiology.

The Winter Olympics are being held in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is practically at sea level. The ice events also are nearly at sea level, with other venues ranging from altitudes of around 2,600 feet for the sled events to around 5,000 feet for women's and men's downhill skiing.

Shaun White enjoying some altitude

Chapman said fans should expect few record times in speed skating events because of the low altitude and greater air resistance facing athletes. He and his co-authors note in their paper that current world records for men and women in every long-track speed skating event from the 500-meter to 10,000-meter races were set in Olympics held in either Calgary, at an altitude of 3,400 feet, or Salt Lake City, with an altitude of 4,300 feet. They note that every Olympic record for all individual event distances was set at the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, with none topped in the 2006 Winter Olympics held in Turin, which lies at an altitude of 784 feet.

"The general thought is that altitude slows you down because you have less oxygen going to your muscles," Chapman said. "But at altitude, just as it is easier to hit a home run in the thin air of Denver, speed skaters in Calgary and Salt Lake City could skate faster, move through the air faster, because there was less drag. Eight years after Salt Lake City, we have natural improvements that you'd expect to see involving training, coaching and technology, but we won't see many records in Vancouver. It doesn't mean the athletes are worse, if anything they're probably better. It's the effects of altitude on athletes' times."

Air density can have a dramatic effect on ski jumping, he said, requiring athletes to change the angle of their lean depending on the altitude. Chapman said the women's and men's Olympic downhill skiing, freestyle skiing and snowboarding events take place at higher altitudes this month and could require technical adjustments by the athletes.

Chapman and his co-authors make the following recommendations concerning training and performing at altitude:

• Allow extra time and practice for athletes to adjust to changes in projectile motion. Athletes in sports such as hockey, shooting, skating and ski jumping may be particularly affected.
• Allow time for acclimatization for endurance sports: Three to five days if possible, especially for low altitude (1,640-6,562 feet); one to two weeks for moderate altitude (6,562-9,843 feet); and at least two weeks if possible for high altitude (more than 9,843 feet). Chapman said altitude affects breathing, too, with breathing initially being harder at higher altitudes.
• Increase exercise-recovery ratios as much as possible, with a 1:3 ratio probably optimal, and consider more frequent substitutions for sports where this is allowed, such as ice hockey. Recovery refers to the amount of time an athlete eases up during practice between harder bouts. If an athlete runs hard for one minute, following this with three minutes of slower running would be optimal before the next sprint. The recovery period gives athletes more time to clear lactic acid build up from their muscles.
• Consider the use of supplemental oxygen on the sidelines in ice hockey or in between heats in skating and Alpine skiing to help with recovery. Chapman said this helps calm breathing, which can be more difficult at altitude.
• Living at high altitudes while training at low altitudes can help athletes in endurance sports improve performance at lower altitudes.

See also: Wind Tunnel Is A Drag For Olympic Skeleton Riders and Aerobic Efficiency Is Key To Olympic Gold For Cross-Country Skiers

Source: Indiana University and Altitude training considerations for the winter sport athlete. Experimental Physiology

Sports Fans Have Selective Memories

In a novel study that used historical tape of a thrilling overtime basketball game between Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, brain researchers at Duke have found that fans remember the good things their team did much better than the bad.  It's serious science, aimed at understanding the links between emotion and memory that might affect Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and how well people recall their personal histories.

Struggling to find a way to measure a person's brain while subjecting them to powerful emotions, Duke scientists hit on the idea of using basketball fans who live and die with each three-pointer. Using game film gives researchers a way to see the brain deal with powerful, rapid-fire positive and negative emotions, without creating any ethical concerns.

"You can get much more emotional intensity with a basketball film than you could ethically otherwise," said study co-author David Rubin, the Juanita M. Kreps Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke. Similar studies, for example, might use pictures of flowers versus mutilated bodies.

Two dozen college-aged men from both Duke and UNC who had passed a basketball literacy test to determine their true fandom were shown an edited tape of the Feb. 3, 2000 game at UNC's Dean Smith Center, which Duke won 90-86 in overtime. They watched the full game three times with a few like-minded friends, and then went into an MRI machine individually to watch a series of 12-second clips leading up to a shot. Each of the 64 taped segments ends just as a player releases the shot, and the subjects had to answer whether it went in the basket or not.

 Test subjects were more accurate at remembering a successful shot by their own team than a miss by their team or a successful shot by the other team. Positive emotion improved their memory and "broadened their attention," according to neuroscientist Kevin LaBar, who co-authored the study, which appeared in the Feb. 10 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Subjects watched game video that froze just as a shot was released and had to recall if  it went in or not. | Courtesy of Duke Athletics

What the researchers saw in the MRI scan is multiple areas of the brain being recruited to assemble a memory. The fan's connection to the game includes an emotional component from the amygdala, a memory component from the hippocampus, and some empathy from the pre-frontal cortex as the subject feels some relation to the player or to the other fans on his side, LaBar said. Some of the sensory-motor areas light up, too, as if the subject is imagining himself as the shooter. Brain areas that control attention were more active for plays that benefitted the fan's team than for those that did not.

These brain regions function together to improve memory storage, particularly for emotionally intense plays, said LaBar, who is an associate professor of psychology & neuroscience.

Unfortunately, traumatic events can be stored in memory the same way, making them persistent and difficult to handle, said Rubin. "Brain imaging provides details we could not get with earlier technologies, such as studies of brain damage."

Ongoing studies by the same researchers are monitoring fans in real time as they watch a game to get a glimpse of what brain areas are involved in forming positive and negative memories in the first place. Rubin would also like to see how the brains of emotionally impaired and depressed people might respond differently.

A pilot study for the basketball experiment included a half-dozen women who had passed the super-fan test, but even after five or six showings of the game, their recall of the shots was too low to be useful. The researchers aren't sure why that happened, but would like to try again with women who played basketball or by using a tape of a women's basketball game to see if that makes a difference.

Rubin said the Duke fans and the UNC fans did equally well on the recall test, though the Duke fans tended to answer quicker and tended to be more sure of themselves. "They thought there were better, but they weren't," he said. Roberto Cabeza, a professor of psychology & neuroscience, Anne Botzung, a postdoctoral fellow, and Amanda Miles, who is now a graduate student, also participated in the research, which was supported by two grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health.

Source: Duke University

See also: The Cognitive Benefits Of Being A Sports Fan

Aerobic Efficiency Is Key To Olympic Gold For Cross-Country Skiers

Cross-country skiing is one of the most demanding of all Olympic sports, with skiers propelling themselves at speeds that exceed 20-25 km per hour over distances as long as 50 km. Yet the difference between winners and losers in these grueling races can be decided by just the tip of a ski, as a glance at any recent world-class competition will show. So just what gives top racers the advantage?

In an article to be published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, Øyvind Sandbakk, a PhD candidate in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's Human Movement Science Programme, reports with his colleagues on the metabolic rates and efficiencies of world-class skiers. Sandbakk's research offers a unique window on what separates the best from the rest in the world of elite cross-country racers.

"Skiers need high aerobic and anaerobic energy delivery, muscular strength, efficient techniques and the ability to resist fatigue to reach and maintain top speeds races," Sandbakk says. Those physical attributes may not be so very different from other world-class athletes, except that cross-country skiers also need to have mastered a variety of techniques and tempos, depending upon the course terrain, Sandbakk notes.

These challenges mean that the importance of the athlete's different physical capacities will differ in different sections of races, and between different types of competitions. For example, during the 10- and 15-km freestyle (skate) races in the Vancouver Olympics (the first of which are scheduled for February 15, with a 10km women's race and a 15 km men's race), skiers with high aerobic power (often referred to as maximal oxygen uptake per kilo body mass) will have an advantage in maintaining high speeds during the race, especially in the uphill terrain, Sandbakk says.

He says it is the uphill terrain that normally separates skiers the most during freestyle races. However, the 10- and 15-km courses also contain a great deal of level terrain, where an athlete with higher muscle mass and anaerobic power may have the edge needed to win.

Cross-country skiing also challenges skiers to master a great range of techniques for different speeds and slopes. Sandbakk predicts this factor will be crucial in the technically difficult Vancouver competition tracks. In skating races, skiers have as many as seven different skiing techniques (much like the gears on a bicycle) at their disposal, and they constantly shift between these different techniques during a single race.

"Skiers even adapt these seven techniques depending on the speed and slope," Sandbakk says. "The best skiers tend to ski with longer cycle lengths (the number of metres a skier moves his centre of mass per cycle), but with a similar cycle frequency," he says. "But during the last part of the race, the cycle frequency seems to be higher in the better skiers."

Another crucial aspect of technique is when the skier pushes off with his or her skate ski, and the skier's ability to recover quickly from the tremendous physical demand of providing a forceful push. "The ability to resist fatigue seems tightly coupled to the ability to maintain technique and keep up the cycle lengths and frequencies during a race," Sandbakk says. "In two skiers of otherwise equal fitness, this may be the deciding factor during the last part of the race in determining who wins the gold."

See also: The Physiology Of Speed and For Rock Climbers, Endurance Is Key To Performance

Source: The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)  and Metabolic rate and gross efficiency at high work rates in world class and national level sprint skiers. European Journal of Applied Physiology

Top Athletes Can React Quicker

A study conducted by scientists at Brunel University and at the University of Hong Kong has found that expert sportsmen are quicker to observe and react to their opponents' moves than novice players, exhibiting enhanced activation of the cortical regions of the brain.

The results of the study, which appear in the most recent issue of NeuroReport, show that more experienced sports players are better able to detect early anticipatory clues from opposing players' body movements, giving them a split second advantage in preparing an appropriate response.
 
Recent studies have demonstrated how expertise affects a range of perceptual-motor skills, from the imitation of hand actions in guitarists, to the learning of action sequences in pianists and dancers. In these studies, experts showed increased activation in the cortical networks of the brain compared with novices.

Fast ball sports are particularly dependent on time-critical predictions of the actions of other players and of the consequences of those actions, and for several decades, sports scientists have sought to understand how expertise in these sports is developed.

This most recent study, headed by Dr Michael Wright, was carried out by observing the reaction time and brain activity of badminton players of varying degrees of ability, from recreational players to international competitors. Participants were shown video clips of an opposing badminton player striking a shuttlecock and asked to predict where the shot would land.

In all participants, activation was observed in areas of the brain previously associated with the observation, understanding and preparation of human action; expert players showed enhanced brain activity in these regions and responded more quickly to the movements of their opponents.

Expertise in sports is not only dependent on physical prowess, then, but also on enhanced brain activity in these key areas of the brain. The observations made during this study will certainly have implications for how we perceive the nature of expertise in sport and perhaps even change the way athletes train.

See also: The Cognitive Benefits of Being a Sports Fan and How To See A 130 MPH Tennis Serve

Source:  Wolters Kluwer Health / Lippincott Williams & Wilkins and Functional MRI reveals expert-novice differences during sport-related anticipation : Neuroreport

Month Of Birth Determines Success In Sports

The month of your birth influences your chances of becoming a professional sportsperson, an Australian researcher has found.  Senior research fellow Dr. Adrian Barnett from Queensland University of Technology's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation studies the seasonal patterns of population health and found the month you were born in could influence your future health and fitness.

The results of the study are published in the book Analysing Seasonal Health Data, by Barnett, co-authored by researcher Professor Annette Dobson from the University of Queensland.
Barnett analysed the birthdays of professional Australian Football League (AFL) players and found a disproportionate number had their birthdays in the early months of the year, while many fewer were born in the later months, especially December.

The Australian school year begins in January. "Children who are taller have an obvious advantage when playing the football code of AFL," Dr. Barnett said. "If you were born in January, you have almost 12 months' growth ahead of your classmates born late in the year, so whether you were born on December 31st or January 1st could have a huge effect on your life."

Dr. Barnett found there were 33 percent more professional AFL players than expected with birthdays in January and 25 percent fewer in December. He said the results mirrored other international studies which found a link between being born near the start of school year and the chances of becoming a professional player in the sports of ice hockey, football, volleyball and basketball.

"Research in the UK shows those born at the start of the school year also do better academically and have more confidence," he said. "And with physical activity being so important, it could also mean smaller children get disheartened and play less sport. If smaller children are missing out on sporting activity then this has potentially serious consequences for their health in adulthood."

Dr. Barnett said this seasonal pattern could also result in wasted talent, with potential sports stars not being identified because they were competing against children who were much more physically advanced than them. He said a possible solution was for one of the sporting codes in Australia to change the team entry date from January 1st to July 1st.


Source: Springer and Analysing Seasonal Health Data.

Swiss Team Bobbing For Gold In Vancouver

Switzerland has a long tradition of bobsledding and the Swiss Bobsleigh Federation has a remarkable record at international competitions. Currently, Switzerland even boasts two reigning world champions: Ivo Rüegg in the two-man bob and junior world champion Sabina Hafner. Moreover, pilot Beat Hefti won last year’s world cup season – also in the two-man bob.

To be better than the rest, the athletes not only need talent and experience, but also a fast bobsled. No one knows this better than former bobsledder and leader of the “CITIUS” project, Christian Reich: “for a pilot, being able to rely on a strong team and fast equipment is the key to good performance.”

Consequently, three years ago a joint venture between the Swiss Bobsleigh Federation (SBSV), researchers from ETH Zurich and Swiss industrial companies set about building a high-speed bobsled from scratch. “We wanted to build a bobsled that was faster than the competition because in bobsledding you can’t afford to sit back”, explains Peter J. Schmid, Central President of the SBSV.

The project was named “CITIUS” after the motto of the Olympic Games, “Citius, altius, fortius” (faster, higher, stronger). Last Fall, after thousands of hours of development and numerous trials in the wind tunnel and on the ice track, the developers and federation representatives handed over the new high-tech sled to the Olympic bobsled squad in front of the media.

Eliminating brake sources

As far as ETH Zurich was concerned, about two dozen researchers from the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Process Engineering and Materials Science were involved in the development of the bobsled. It was their job to refine the material whilst keeping to the specifications of the International Bobsleigh Federation and optimize the runners, aerodynamics, stability and vibrations.

Professor Ueli Suter, Program Coordinator at ETH Zurich, said that, “For a vehicle without an engine that hurtles down an ice track at 150 km/h, finding all the important brake sources, then eliminating them and still producing a safe piece of equipment for the athletes is a complex interdisciplinary undertaking.”

Extensive industrial expertise sought
The results of the research conducted at ETH Zurich were passed on to project supervisor Christian Reich, who in turn passed them on to the development, training and production workshops of the specialist industrial companies (see box). Dr. Jürg Werner, the head of V-Zug AG’s development department, said, “The industrial partners involved contributed their expertise to the project because they feel an affinity to Swiss bobsledding. The collaboration with ETH Zurich and among industrial partners resulted in a welcome transfer of knowledge. CITIUS stands for innovation, as do the industrial partners involved.”

The countdown is on!
A total of six two-man bobsleds and three four-man bobsleds of the “CITIUS” model have been constructed and are ready to compete for hundredths of a second. The final test runs are scheduled for the second half of October in Cesana/Turin before the Swiss pilots are given their first and only opportunity to train with the new bobsleds on Whistler’s Olympic bobsled track. Shortly afterwards, the world cup season gets underway with the first race in Park City.

The bobsled competition at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver will be held from February 20 – 27 2010. By then at the latest, we should know whether the big efforts of all those involved in the “CITIUS” project have paid off and whether Switzerland can add to its medal collection as a bobsledding nation.

Source: ETH Zuerich