If you want to be a professional athlete in most sports, it helps to be born at the right time of year. In basketball, baseball and ice hockey, players born in the first quarter of their selection year — the cutoff for which age-group teams are picked, which is normally the school year — are […]
Venus Williams was the first of the Williams sisters to make a splash in professional tennis. But Richard Williams, their father, was always convinced that Serena — 15 months younger than Venus, and the youngest of Oracene Price’s five daughters — would go on to have the better career. Richard Williams was right. While Venus […]
Christie Aschwanden’s new book, “Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery,” is available this week. In it, she examines the latest recovery trends among athletes — including Tom Brady’s infrared pajamas, Sue Bird’s coffee naps and Michael Phelps’s “cupping” ritual. She also tests some […]
A few years ago, as I started researching my book about the science of exercise recovery, I found something curious: the methodological flaws that have roiled psychology were also lurking in sports science. The problems were hiding in plain sight. As I plowed through the published studies in the sports and exercise science literature, I […]
Graphics by Ella Koeze At first blush, the studies look reasonable enough. Low-intensity stretching seems to reduce muscle soreness. Beta-alanine supplements may boost performance in water polo players. Isokinetic strength training could improve swing kinematics in golfers. Foam rollers can reduce muscle soreness after exercise. The problem: All of these studies shared a statistical analysis […]