Surfboard Sensor Success Stokes Scientists

UC San Diego mechanical engineering undergraduates
outfitted a surfboard with a computer and
accompanying sensors

Computers are everywhere these days -- even on surfboards. University of California, San Diego mechanical engineering undergraduates outfitted a surfboard with a computer and accompanying sensors -- one step toward a structural engineering Ph.D. student's quest to develop the science of surfboards.

The UC San Diego mechanical engineering undergraduates installed a computer and sensors on a surfboard and recorded the speed of the water flowing beneath the board. While the students surfed, the onboard computer sent water velocity information to a laptop on shore in real time.

This is part of Benjamin Thompson's quest to discover if surfboards have an optimal flexibility -- a board stiffness that makes surfing as enjoyable as possible. Thompson is a UC San Diego structural engineering Ph.D. student studying the fluid-structure interaction between surfboards and waves. By outfitting a surfboard with sensors and electronics that shuttle data back to shore, the mechanical engineering undergraduates built some of the technological foundation for Thompson's science-of-surfboards project.

Read more »

Knee-Friendly Landings Reduce Force By 56 Percent

Anterior cruciate ligament injuries are a common and debilitating problem, especially for female athletes. A new study from UC Davis shows that changes in training can reduce shear forces on knee joints and could help cut the risk of developing ACL tears.

"We focused on an easy intervention, and we were amazed that we could reduce shear load in 100 percent of the volunteers," said David Hawkins, professor of neurobiology, physiology and behavior at UC Davis. Hawkins conducted the study at the UC Davis Human Performance Laboratory with graduate student Casey Myers.

The anterior cruciate ligament lies in the middle of the knee and provides stability to the joint. Most ACL injuries do not involve a collision between players or a noticeably bad landing, said Sandy Simpson, UC Davis women's basketball coach.

"It almost always happens coming down from a rebound, catching a pass or on a jump-stop lay-up," Simpson said. "It doesn't have to be a big jump."

Read more »

Sports Superstitions Just Might Work

Don't scoff at those lucky rabbit feet. New research shows that having some kind of lucky token can actually improve your performance -- by increasing your self-confidence.

"I watch a lot of sports, and I read about sports, and I noticed that very often athletes -- also famous athletes -- hold superstitions," says Lysann Damisch of the University of Cologne. Michael Jordan wore his college team shorts underneath his NBA uniform for good luck; Tiger Woods wears a red shirt on tournament Sundays, usually the last and most important day of a tournament. "And I was wondering, why are they doing so?"

Damisch thought that a belief in superstition might help people do better by improving their confidence. With her colleagues Barbara Stoberock and Thomas Mussweiler, also of the University of Cologne, she designed a set of experiments to see if activating people's superstitious beliefs would improve their performance on a task.

Read more »

Body Checking Not The Main Cause Of Youth Hockey Injuries

Hockey fans likely would assume that body-checking -- intentionally slamming an opponent against the boards -- causes the most injuries in youth ice hockey. But they would be wrong.  Findings from a new study, the largest and most comprehensive analysis to date of young hockey players, show that 66 percent of overall injuries were caused by accidentally hitting the boards or goal posts, colliding with teammates or being hit by a puck.

Only 34 percent of the injuries were caused by checking. Moreover, the accidental injuries were more severe than those from body checks.

These results, which appeared in June issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, were a surprise to many, including the researchers at the University at Buffalo who conducted the five-year study.

"There is an image of body checking as a form of violence that is condoned by the game of hockey," says Barry Willer, PhD, UB professor of psychiatry and rehabilitation sciences and senior author on the study.  "However, this study found that body checking did not account for a large proportion of injuries. Perhaps as important, body checking did not lead to a rise in intentional injuries."

Read more »

Too Much Altitude Training Can Hurt Athletic Performance

New research suggests that athletes and footballers may want to limit the time they spend training at altitude to improve their performance. An Oxford University study has found that people with a rare condition that mimics being at high altitude for long periods show metabolic differences that actually reduce their endurance and physical performance.

The study is published in the journal PNAS and was funded by the British Heart Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.

Athletes from many endurance disciplines use altitude training as part of their yearly training programme. England footballers, as with many of the teams in the World Cup, spent time at altitude acclimatising for the competition in South Africa.

The body reacts to the low levels of oxygen at high altitude, first of all by breathing harder and the heart pumping more blood, but then through producing more red blood cells and increasing the density of blood vessels in the body's muscles. All of this serves to get more oxygen and fuel to the muscles.
However, an extended stay at altitude can bring a loss of the muscle's ability to use oxygen to carry out work. The number of mitochondria, the oxygen-using powerhouses of the cell, falls with a prolonged stay at high altitude.

Read more »

Racial Physiology Differences Determine Race Performances

In the record books, the swiftest sprinters tend to be of West African ancestry and the faster swimmers tend to be white.  A study of the winning times by elite athletes over the past 100 years reveals two distinct trends: not only are these athletes getting faster over time, but there is a clear divide between racers in terms of body type and race.

Last year, a Duke University engineer explained the first trend -- athletes are getting faster because they are getting bigger. Adrian Bejan, professor of engineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, now believes he can explain the second trend.

In a paper published online in the International Journal of Design and Nature and Ecodynamics, Bejan, and co-authors Edward Jones, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University currently teaching at Howard University, and Duke graduate Jordan Charles, argue that the answer lies in athletes' centers of gravity. That center tends to be located higher on the body of blacks than whites. The researchers believe that these differences are not racial, but rather biological.

Read more »

Surprising Study Says Inactivity Not The Cause Of Childhood Obesity

A new report from the EarlyBird Diabetes Study suggests that physical activity has little if any role to play in the obesity epidemic among children. Obesity is the key factor behind diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.  EarlyBird is based at the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth, UK, and has been observing in detail a cohort of city school children for the past 11 years.

A review published in 2009 of all trials using physical activity to reduce childhood obesity showed weight loss amounting to just 90g (3oz) over three years, and the EarlyBird study wanted to know why the trials were so ineffective. So they challenged some popular paradigms.

It is well known that less active children are fatter, but that does not mean -- as most people assume it does -- that inactivity leads to fatness. It could equally well be the other way round: that obesity leads to inactivity.

And this is the question EarlyBird was uniquely placed to answer. With data collected annually over several years from a large cohort of children, it could ask the question -- which comes first? Does the physical activity of the child precede changes in fatness over time, or does the fatness of the child precede changes in physical activity over time?

Read more »

Women Should Use New Formula For Maximum Heart Rate

Women who measure their peak heart rates for exercise will need to do some new math as will physicians giving stress tests to patients.  A new formula based on a large study from Northwestern Medicine provides a more accurate estimate of the peak heart rate a healthy woman should attain during exercise. It also will more accurately predict the risk of heart-related death during a stress test.

"Now we know for the first time what is normal for women, and it's a lower peak heart rate than for men," said Martha Gulati, M.D., assistant professor of medicine and preventive medicine and a cardiologist at Northwestern Medicine. "Using the standard formula, we were more likely to tell women they had a worse prognosis than they actually did."

Gulati is the lead author of a study published June 28 in the journal Circulation.

"Women are not small men," Gulati added. "There is a gender difference in exercise capacity a woman can achieve. Different physiologic responses can occur. " Gulati was the first to define the normal exercise capacity or fitness level for women in a 2005 study.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

Goalkeepers Use Clues To Guess Direction Of Penalty Kick

In the split second before foot meets ball, a soccer player's body betrays whether a penalty kick will go left or right, according to recent research in cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The findings could explain how some top goalkeepers are able to head off a penalty kick, diving in the correct direction in advance of the kick. It could also point the way to changes in how players kick, and goalies react.

The research, performed by Rensselaer doctoral student Gabriel J. Diaz, employed motion capture technology and computer analysis to identify five early indicators of the direction a ball would ultimately be kicked. Diaz said his research stemmed from an observation of real-world penalty kicks, in which players aim for the left or right side of the goal while hiding their choice from the goalkeeper.

"When a goalkeeper is in a penalty situation, they can't wait until the ball is in the air before choosing whether to jump left or right -- a well-placed penalty kick will get past them," Diaz said. "As a consequence, you see goalkeepers jumping before the foot hits the ball. My question is: Are they making a choice better than chance (50/50), and if so, what kind of information might they be using to make their choice?"

Read more »

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).

Read more »

Morning Type Pitchers Do Better In Day Games

A Major League Baseball pitcher's natural sleep preference might affect how he performs in day and night games, according to a research abstract presented June 9, 2010, in San Antonio, Texas, at SLEEP 2010, the 24th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC.

Results indicate that pitchers who were morning types performed statistically better overall than those who were evening types. In early games that started before 7 p.m., the earned run average (ERA) of pitchers who were morning types (3.06) was lower than the average ERA of pitchers who were evening types (3.49); however, in games that started at 7 p.m. or later, pitchers who were evening types performed slightly better (4.07 ERA) than morning types (4.15 ERA).

"We were surprised to see that chronotype did affect pitching," said principal investigator and lead author W. Christopher Winter, MD, medical director of the Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Va. "We were also surprised to see that pitchers who were more 'morning type' seemed to do better overall."

Individual pitchers showed a trend toward higher ERAs in the late games. According to Winter, this supports previous research showing that the peak performance time for most athletes is between mid-afternoon and early evening.

Read more »