NEW AT THIS SITE | |
Mary Ann Wallace |
The annual American College of Sports Medicine conference took place in hot, steamy Orlando. We've got two reports highlighting a number of presentations. Will Hopkins reviews some of the research presented on ergogenic aids, fuel for exercise, the performance enhancement symposium, and gives some good advice on preparing better abstracts in Performance Enhancement at ACSM 1998. I've followed up on my pre-conference report in our last issue by reporting on overtraining, the triathlon clinical lecture, tendon injuries, the Wolffe lecture, as well as some other topics in ACSM: Limits to Performance.
Ferret reports on genetic predisposition, the effect of thinking about what you're doing during performance, and the problems of accessing other researchers' raw data. Share your research interest with others: send a paragraph or two to ferret=AT=sportsci.org.
Is cross-training of benefit? John Hawley looks at whether training in more than one sport results in performance enhancement in his latest Train Gain column.
Louise Burke, in her CompEat column, looks at methods of determining athletes' energy intake requirements and explains the conditions under which energy requirements vary.
Frank Katch highlights the contributions of another History Maker. Frederick Gowland Hopkins won the 1929 Nobel Prize for identifying the structure of the amino acid, tryptophan. In addition to proving that vitamins prevented the development of deficiency diseases, his work in experimental physiology employed new methods to isolate lactic acid in muscle.
Todd Allinger explains to coaches how they can take some guesswork out of their coaching in our biomechanics column. Does jump height improve when ski poles are gripped in a lower position? What's the tradeoff between different positions in synchronized swimming? Todd addresses these questions as well as how to use video analysis quantitatively in Coaches Learn to Use Video Analysis.
Ken Daley's newsletter has a variety of sites to tell us about. Exercise resources, a health news and information directory, links to Powerpoint training, lessons, and tips are just some of what he has to share with us.
There's been much research on altitude training and whether living and/or training at altitude results in a performance enhancement, but just what can we conclude? Our Training & Technology review article, Altitude Training for Sea-Level Competition, looks at the research and strategies available for getting altitude exposure to enhance performance in competition at low altitudes or sea level.
In A New View of Statistics, Will has provided researchers with plain-language definitions of confidence interval and statistical significance to help sport scientists provide more meaningful results summaries in their published research. He has also expanded his material on using mixed modeling to do repeated measures with the Statistical Analysis System and added individual differences and covariates. For those of you who attended his talks at the ACSM meeting in Orlando, here's where you'll find material that covers those topics with specific applications and programs you can use.
Special
thanks to contributing editors, webmasters, and the advice from our editorial
board in putting this issue out in spite of conferences, research, teaching,
travel and jet-lag! And special thanks to our readers for their understanding
of our commitment to publishing a quality issue that may take a little
longer at times.