Real quick-fire today, with some links and things I found interesting this week: [ribbon toplink=true]1. The elite athlete and age: Follow up on my last post[/ribbon] On Wednesday, I wrote a short thought on whether the conventional wisdom around how elite athletes “expire” and fade with age may be outdated. Seems to me that we […]
Physiology
The aging of elite performance: “Geriatric champions” and have the rules for getting older changed?
Yesterday, I was sent this link. It says that Dwain Chambers, he of THG and a doping ban in 2004 (!), is making a comeback, hoping to qualify for Team GB at the European Indoor Championships. At the age of 40. Well, almost 41. My first thought was “Of course he is”, and then upon […]
Letter to BJSM reinforcing call for retraction of IAAF research on testosterone in women
Along with two prominent scientists, we have recently called for the research study on testosterone’s effects in women athletes to be retracted. This research is part of the IAAF’s policy on hyperandrogenism in athletics, but we have analyzed aspects of the study, and discovered significant and numerous errors. This article describes those errors, and calls for scientific integrity and transparency from both the IAAF and the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
The physiology of the cold: Why might women out-‘survive’ men?
Boston 2018 was one for the archives. A brutally cold, wet and windy day made for incredible, unpredictable elite races, and a whole lot of DNFs! There’s a theory that women did better in this regard than men, and this post explores cold physiology, and what factors MIGHT explain why women MIGHT be able to handle the extreme cold better than men
Pacing physiology and the limit to performance: A #fourminute mull
The latest four minute mull explores pacing strategies, physiology and fatigue. In so doing, I offer a theory for the limits to human performance existing at the point where the “reserve” that physiology maintains is no more, the endspurt disappears, and humans are at the limits of what is physiologically possible.