Sports Science

I'm a Steelers guy now but I was a late fan. Where I was young in Pennsylvania, three teams in New York and two in Pennsylvania were the same distance to drive - and we did not drive to any of them.  So I remained a Cowboys fan.(1) My brother, though, was an Eagles fan of early on. And he's never wavered. Ants think that's the proper way to be. Eagle fans hold grudges and ants respect that, but there is no comparison between the level of grudge Philadelphia has against Michael Strahan or Terrell Owens or Kevin Allen or Jerome McDougle and what ants have against their enemies.…

Influences buoyed by epidemiological claims about gimmick diets can make fitness intimidating but ignore them. Even if you don't lose weight, if you exercise your belly fat is still going to be healthier than someone who does nothing. It just takes some consistency.  Exercising burns calories so if you exercise enough, or reduce calories, you will lose weight 100 percent of the time, and regardless of claims about ultraprocessed foods or needing a shot. Even if you don't lose weight you're still better off. The research team grew fat tissue in the lab from cells collected from both…

Risk factors like salt and sugar intake and high blood pressure for heart attacks and disease need constant rethink if they are going to be more than folk wisdom. Low-salt and sugar-free have too many vested interests to get critical thinking on how valid population-level statistics are for individuals, and 'high' blood pressure rarely gets questions about how reliable the correlation was that picked 130/85 mmHg (millimeters of mercury) as high blood pressure for everyone. Thosa blood pressure numbers are the clunkily-named systolic on top over the diastolic below. The top is the pressure in…

Advances in technology in recent decades have obviated the need and desire for humans to move. Many of the world’s population sit for long periods throughout the day, whether in front of a computer at work or in front of a TV at home. Given that the human body is made to move, all this sitting is clearly bad for our health. A new study from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), confirmed this – and then some. A total of 5,856 female participants aged 63 to 99 years were asked to wear an activity monitor on their hip for seven days at the start of the study. The researchers then…

Athletes use custom-​made insoles because they know a fraction of a second can make the difference between victory and defeat, but to do that specialists must first create a pressure profile of the feet. Athletes walk barefoot over pressure-​sensitive mats, where they leave their individual footprints and then orthopedists create customized insoles by hand. The optimization and adjustment takes a lot of time and if you are a wealthy elite, the money is less of a worry but for people with musculoskeletal pain the cost may be out of reach. A new tool replaces pressure-​sensitive mats in a…

It rarely happens to play a regular chess game with no clear mistakes. When the game is a blitz one, though, this is exceedingly rare. A blitz game is one where both players have 5 minutes to make all their moves, and the first who runs out of time automatically loses (provided the opponent realizes it).Because of the very short time to make decisions, blitz chess games are an adrenaline-producing, intense brain activity. So much so that when people talk to me during a blitz game I simply do not record the words they speak, for the whole duration of the game; after the end, I often find…

Elite performance takes natural ability coupled with elite levels of training. That last part has an effect later in life, according to a new analysis. It found that one in four retired Olympians have some level of osteoarthritis, which causes changes in the joint and can lead to discomfort, pain and disability. Researchers quizzed 3,357 retired Olympians aged around 45 on injuries and the health of their bones, joints, muscles and spine. They were also asked if they were currently experiencing joint pain, and if they had an osteoarthritis diagnosis. For comparison, 1,735 people aged around…

Bad dietary habits start young, as do most bad habits, from smoking to drug use. Good habits tend to be the same. It is known that movement on a regular basis keeps kids healthy but a new study found that physical fitness is also linked to concentration and health-related quality of life for primary school pupils. The study involved 3,285 girls and 3,248 boys from Bavaria's Berchtesgadener Land district. The key criteria were physical strength and endurance, the ability to concentrate and health-related quality of life, as determined by the scientists according to internationally standardized…

Do amputee sprinters using running prostheses, or blades, have a competitive advantage? The world’s fastest 400-meter sprinter, Blake Leeper, was ruled ineligible to compete in the Tokyo Olympics due to having an assumed advantage, but a new study with the most comprehensive set of data ever collected from elite runners with bilateral leg amputations compared performance data from Leeper, South African “blade runner” Oscar Pistorius and other bilateral amputee sprinters with those of the best non-amputee sprinters in the world across five performance metrics and found no advantage. For the…

Exercise is healthy. That is common knowledge. But just how rigorous should that exercise be in order to really impact a person’s fitness level? And, if you sit all day at a desk, but still manage to get out and exercise, does that negate your six, seven, or eight hours of sedentary behavior?  These were the sort of questions Matthew Nayor and his team at Boston University School of Medicine set out to answer in the largest study to date aimed at understanding the relationship between regular physical activity and a person’s physical fitness.  Their findings, which appear in the…