Sleep is an important aspect of life; you don’t need me to tell you that. Indeed, over the last few years, there has been a number of research papers and a flurry of books illustrating the importance of sleep such as The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time
After tackling adaptation as last month’s theme, our focus at HMMR Media moves on to rest and recovery in December. To kick things off we sat down with Dean Benton, one of the leading practitioners in this area. Benton is currently head of Sports Science for the England Senior Rugby Team. In this role he is responsible for the co-ordination, design and delivery of athletic performance, sport science, recovery, rehabilitation, reconditioning to the England Senior Rugby team in the lead into the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan. Read more
The world of technology and science has had a massive impact on sports performance. Just take one quick look at modern surgical techniques, rehabilitation protocols, testing analysis and training monitoring to see how much things have changed compared to just a decade ago. It is very easy then to get swept up in the tidal wave of amazing tools that are being marketed to the masses as the missing element in a program that will take one’s performance to the next level. Some of these may have merit, but what is disturbing is how often factors that have a much greater influence get lost in that tidal wave. Read more
Welcome back to another monthly installment of our sports science round up. This month, we look at low carbohydrate, high fat diets; usually this is the context of endurance performance, but this time we look at it from the perspective of power performance. We also have an interesting case study of unexplained underperformance syndrome, commonly referred to as overtraining, and papers examining mechanisms underpinning muscle hypertrophy, stretching, chronotype, and the genetics of injury. As always, we finish with a quick fire round-up of other interesting papers that have caught my eye this month. Read more
Welcome back to another monthly round up of recent research in the sports science world. This month we finally have some objective evidence on the use of high fat, low carbohydrate diets for elite athletes – perhaps this will lessen the debate, although I expect not. We also have a look at the training of elite endurance athletes, early versus late specialization in Olympic Athletes, sleep (as always), oxidative stress, and the use of hot baths after exercise, amongst others. Enjoy. Read more
When you watch rugby sevens it’s not going to surprise people to hear it’s the most physically demanding sport I have ever witnessed. Just look at a standard tournament: 6 14-minute matches over two days in hot conditions. Look at each match: players average 1.5 kilometers of ground covered at 115 meters/minute, along with many collisions and contacts thrown in. In each match players reach high acceleration speeds of over 8 meters/second several times. In simple terms, it’s a stressful sport with up to 14 minutes of maximal effort 6 times over two days. Most people who know the sport are familiar with this, however one hidden stressor added on top of all of this is the extreme travel involved with the Sevens World Series. Read more
Welcome back to the fourth installment of Sports Science Monthly. This month’s edition will cover one of my favorite topics: sleep. But it will also spread out to discuss recovery, the extra-time period in soccer, how to measure strength, whether sex reduces performance, circadian rhythms, and the use of ketones as a performance enhancing agent. The first overview will be free for everyone, but to read the complete August edition you must be a HMMR Plus Member. HMMR Plus is a new offering we have that gives users access to exclusive content like our article archive, webinars, online meet ups, and of course Sports Science Monthly. Therefore sign up now to gain access to Sports Science Monthly and more. To see what Sports Science Monthly is about, our April and May editions are available for free. Read more
