Archive

This 20 minute Ted talk is definitely worth listening to and sharing with anyone worrying about summer exams, work deadlines or health in ageing. I have written about sleep before in my posts ‘sleep for performance’ and ‘sleep nutrition’ and believe research categorically shows that good sleep is really important for performance and beneficial for […]

In 1998 the Nobel Prize for medicine was given to three American pharmacologists for their discovery, that inside the body the  gas nitric oxide (NO) is an important mediator of a wide variety of vital bodily functions. At the time this was an amazing discovery and their initial work, done in the 1980s resulted in a […]

I have read many articles, books and scientific papers that promote the value of assimilating marginal gains, the process of making a change, testing that change and then improving on it, slowing increasing performance. This type of process has been credited with the breakaway performance of UK Cycling over the last decade and is now used […]

Matthew Syed is a British journalist and broadcaster, who has worked for The Times newspaper since 1999. Before this he was an English table tennis international, England’s number one and competed at two Olympic Games. He is a wonderful public speaker and for the last decade has studied, written and talked about the relationship between talent and training in the creation of elite sports […]

We spend about a third of our lives asleep but until recently we have known virtually nothing about why we do. For decades sleep disturbance has been known to effect academic and athletic performance as well as health but how has not been clear. Jeff Iliff’s concise 12minute Ted talk describes how his groups research is coming closer […]

In last years post ‘So you want to be an Olympian’, I discussed talent identification and the research that looks at body type, size and genetics, trying to determine whether it is possible to pick out a future olympian before all the training. My conclusion was that although there have been some very successful talent identification […]

Cramps and stitches are very common. At some time or other, every athlete and school team player has suffered and cramp can severely compromise performance and cause individuals to worry about future events. WHAT DO WE KNOW…… The 4minute video summary below gives a good overview on the causes of sport related cramping and side stitches. Given by […]

An article published this week in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport concluded that  “Adversity-related experiences are vital in the development of superior Olympic Performances”. It suggested that carefully managed adversity can provide the perfect growing conditions for elite development. The research reminded me of a speech given in 2008 by JK Rowling to graduating […]

David Epstein is an investigative reporter who covers sports, science and medicine and how they interact. In this very entertaining 15minute video for Ted, he looks at sporting achievements over the last decades, from which it seems like humans have got faster, better and stronger in nearly every way. Yet as David Epstein points out we […]

In 1998, the iconic Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie said he had been able to break the 2000m record by “synching his (running) cadence with the beat of the pop song Scatman” (by Scatman John), which was playing during his race at the Birmingham National Indoor Arena. At the time the benefits of using music to […]