In the 2013 World Junior Championships sprint, half of the male competitors in the final were born in the last five months of the eligibility window. Is this a case of a relative age effect - and what are the implications for elite sports on the whole, or retaining youngsters to be recreational athletes for life?
Regardless of whether breathing xenon gas was a prohibited method before WADA bothered to expressly ban it this spring, it would be hard to ban anyone for using it without direct evidence or a positive test. One group of German scientists has been working on developing just such a test, and says that their initial trials indicate that it may be a good match for anti-doping efforts.
In April, researchers got into a fight about whether Tylenol should be banned by WADA; looked at the effects of breathing pure oxygen between laps in a team sprint; considered the difference in fatiguability between male and female athletes; and checked whether you should be mixing up your strength training with sprints (hint: you should).
This winter, researchers built a rollerski with strain gauges to measure force application and work on technique; studied the microclimate inside your ski boots; put out a consensus statement about overuse injuries in young athletes; and studied the female athlete triad, an energy deficiency syndrome which can lead to bone loss.
Most studies of how climate change will impact the ski industry focus on downhill skiing, and on losses like tourism dollars and jobs at ski resorts. But what about welfare and happiness? In Oslo, a team of researchers explored how much skiers were willing to pay, in time and money, to reach trails under different weather conditions - and determined that skiing has a very high value, indeed.
Kids are at particular risk of sunburn, and possibly later cancer, when they head out for a ski; athletes in weight-sensitive sports like skiing are at risk for developing eating disorders, and the IOC is trying to do something about it; new "designer" drugs for doping; and stop stressing out, coaches! Your job is bad for you!
Researchers have completed a "cradle-to-grave" life cycle analysis of a pair of skis, estimating the environmental impact of everything from how the raw materials are procured to the manufacturing process to distribution and throwing away an old pair. Turns out, your skis are probably more sustainable than your hiking boots, but there's still ways to improve.
This month in scientific journals, researchers investigated how teammates affect performance in individual sports, which has rarely been considered; six Canadian skiers took part in the study. Also, how do you plan intervals? Uphill, or on the flat? Based on heart rate, percent of VO2Max, or anaerobic threshold? Two papers investigated.
By the time we hit 70, the physiological differences in how men and women respond to exercise have disappeared. Plus, we'll be smiling and thanking our parents for making us ski, because ex-athletes experience fewer fractures at that age. In other research, continuing the definition of "athlete's heart" and confirming a genetic basis of the training response.
We look at two recent studies about interval training, each coming to a different conclusion about what's best - and then ask the question, how does this apply to real-life training? Pros and cons of academic research into endurance training, considered.
Plus, two different studies look at how different types of muscle used in various athletic activities might inform training. In the first, static stretching is worse for cycling than running; in the second, think about small-muscle strength exercises.
FasterSkier is starting a once-a-month series looking at new research in the field of sports science. Periodically, we’ll flip through some of the world’s best peer-reviewed medical journals and summarize, in plain English, studies that we think will be of interest to skiers. Here’s our second installment; you can check out the first in a recent paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports. “The pathophysiology of the condition is poorly understood,...