A specific blog from me is a rarity recently because we have so many talented young scientists that have been providing thoughtful points on a wide-variety of topics - plus, all of our podcasts and videos keep us busy. You certainly don't need more clogging up your inbox. Read more

Starting today, Twitter has a new resident: the Cool Science of the Day twitter feed (@CoolScienceOTD).  This feed is a joint production of the Huffines Institute and a group of highly motivated, really smart doctoral students at Texas A&M University.  This twitter feed aims to highlight the really exciting, adventuresome, and impactful science that is being done in today’s world.  Too many times, science in today’s media and social settings is characterized as boring, overly complex, and not applicable.  Granted, sometimes these characterizations are true, but more often than not, the science that is published today is conceived and carried out by the smartest people in our world with unrelenting passion and dedication. Read more

Then there are the weeks in sports where you think: “How can this stuff really happen?  Are people really this maniacal and self-serving?”  Unfortunately, there are times when your naivety is stripped and it really appears that even decisions about appropriate health-care for athletes are decided by incompetent idiots on power trips.  Two extensive investigative reports this week dealing with the health of football athletes show convincingly that unfortunately, this incompetence, greed, and politics can and do dictate care for athletes.  Read more

One of our goals at the Huffines Institute is to encourage activity. But we also encourage common sense when you exercise. I don’t know if it is the time of the year (spring), a lack of proper guidance by society, or just youthful beliefs of invincibility, but the general lack of concern for their own basic safety that I’ve seen exhibited recently by runners, pedestrians, or bicyclists gives me pause. Read more

Science always brings us new facts that challenge us and challenge our perceptions of the world. For example, over the past five years, we have begun to see research into a type of compound, produced by the body, that is probably responsible for what we know as the ‘runner’s high’. Most of us know that the ‘runner’s high’ is the euphoric feeling that occurs when you run, but it also occurs when you do any task that is physiologically difficult. Linked with the runner’s high are a wide assortment of related biological properties such as a reduced pain sensation, relaxation, and a sense of well-being. Read more

For those of you that have written wondering where your podcasts have been, thanks for missing us (for those that didn't miss us, well...thanks for knowing we exist!).  As you can tell, we are back today, starting our weekly podcasts up again.  I had at least one wag who suggested that we were still partying from our 100th podcast, and while that would have been fun, unfortunately that wasn't the case. Read more

I’ve purposively not touched the Lance Armstrong story because it is so tragic on so many levels. While there has always been a lot of ‘smoke’ (allegations), there never has been the amount of evidence that was released a week ago by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA – link to the report). If you are at all interested in this story, I would encourage you to read USADA’s report. If you had any reasonable doubt about Armstrong’s actions, this document will remove those doubts. Read more

As someone who studies human performance, from time to time I have people ask why scientists will test animals to understand human performance.  In most cases, it is because to continue to understand why humans can do what they do (and how we can train them to do ‘it’ better), we have to use models that allow us to do things that we can’t do in humans.  For example, my lab has a long-running set of experiments where we are looking at humans’ drive to be active.  Much of this drive probably originates in the brain and to study that drive, we need samples of brain tissue from animals that we know are high active. Read more

My wife and I recently watched a documentary called “Forks Over Knives”.  The point of the film was that if you ate a plant-based diet (yep, no dairy or meat), you would lose weight, fix all your metabolic disorders, and probably would wind-up looking better to boot!  On the surface, it would seem that the film was well grounded in facts – the four primary characters in the film were Doctors (three M.D.s and one PhD), while the one contrarian quoted was a professional with only a ‘Masters degree’ (4 docs vs. 1 Masters = Docs win in most cases).  And to some extent, because I know the field, I would agree with a few of the points in the film.  But what really ticked me off was that the filmmakers made the film too one-sided.   Making a point is fine, but really, put in full disclosure! Read more

As Director of the Huffines Institute, I have ultimate responsibility for everything that goes up on the Institute’s website. While we have several staff members that in reality make the final judgment in many cases, the proverbial ‘buck’ stops at my desk regarding the content of our site. Thus, we had extensive debates over whether or not we should run this week’s podcast “Usurpers” that deals with gene doping, cross country racing, and the drive to win. While you can find pieces on these topics individually, it is not often that someone comes along that is able to integrate these topics in a compelling and provocative narrative. Read more

I’ve written here before about some of the championship demands of the modern-day marathon. For example, to just qualify for the US Olympic Marathon team, you would have had to run the 26.2 miles averaging 12.2 mph (that’s a mile every 4 minutes and 55 seconds). Sports Illustrated’s David Epstein – who visited College Station recently – has a new piece in the 4/16/12 edition of SI about the 2008 Olympic Marathon champion Sammy Wanjiru, who was found dead several months ago. I would highly recommend this piece, not only for Epstein’s analysis of how Wanjiru changed the marathon forever, but to get a sense of how dominating the Kenyans have become in this race…. Read more

I caught an interesting interview last week with Dr. Mark Emmert, the NCAA president. There were a variety of topics covered during this candid interview, including whether the NCAA Basketball tournament would ever be expanded beyond the current 68 teams, whether college athletes would ever become ‘more than amateurs’, the current web of regulations that college athletic programs have to work within, and whether there will ever be a playoff in the football bowl system division. Read more

Why do elite athletes risk take performance enhancing drugs (PED, dope)?  This question continues to be raised in light of Ryan Braun’s case.  Braun supposedly tested with extremely high levels of synthetic testosterone.  While Braun appears to have gotten away with taking PED’s because the appeal of his positive PED test was upheld yesterday based on ‘chain of custody’ issues, he risked some tremendous penalties by taking PEDs.  At minimum, the official penalty was a 50-game suspension.  Probably more damaging was the hit to his reputation as a clean player.  Read more

This past Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a piece on a Dr. A. Potti, a fairly renowned cancer researcher, who while at Duke University evidently manipulated his data so that his results would appear to better than they were.  There is no excusing this type of manipulation (or of data fabrication – which also happens in science as well), especially because it appears some cancer patients’ treatments may have been dictated by these flawed results.  But it leads to a bigger question: “Is scientific misconduct that prevalent?”  All in all, most studies into the matter indicate that scientific misconduct is fairly rare, but is not unknown. Read more

“Hey…pssstt….Did you know that about 25% of people die in their sleep? Frankly this concerns me so much, I may not go to sleep again.” Faced with that statement, most of us would scoff and continue with our life. So, why do we get so excited about people that die after they exercise? Is exercise so dangerous that we should all resolve to never exercise again? Read more

Having family in Cleveland, I watch the Browns play so I can at least sympathize with my long-suffering family who are all fans of the Browns. Maybe you caught the Brown’s Thursday night game on Dec. 8 against the playoff-bound Pittsburgh Steelers. This is and has been a huge rivalry game (at least for the Brown’s fans) and there was a lot of pride riding on it for the Browns. If you know the story, skip to the next paragraph…otherwise, let’s set-up the situation. Colt McCoy is the Brown’s young quarterback and he was having a good game. It was late in the 4th quarter, the Browns were behind 3-7, but had the ball and were marching down the field, with a chance to score and go ahead. Read more

This week has seen plenty of ‘off-the-field’ sports drama and tragedy. Recognizing that is has been a horrible week in the sports world (especially in college sports), it is important to remember that we normally look to sports for entertainment and to escape from our concerns of everyday life.  If f you want that type of sports drama (the ‘on-the-field’ type), there’s no better place to look this weekend than the last NASCAR race of the year from Homestead, FL on Sunday.  Read more

Everyone talks about 'reaching the masses', but rarely do you have a chance to do so. At the Huffines Institute, we are thrilled because our local newspaper - The Eagle - has agreed to start porting the content from our website to their website to a new Health section. They are starting with this blog, and will gradually port over the other content over the next couple of months. I'm noting this because it is important that 'we' all talk - I'm using the universal 'we' in this case to mean Sport Scientists (and all their flavors like Exercise Physiologists, Clinical Exercise Physiologists, etc.), Practitioners - like Coaches and Personal Trainers, and the lay public. Read more

This past weekend, I had the pleasure and honor to represent the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) at the Coca-Cola Track Walk at Texas Motor Speedway after one of the NASCAR races. If you’re not familiar with this program, in essence, Coca-Cola rents the racetrack and encourages NASCAR fans to come out and walk around the track (the Texas track is 1.5 miles around).  Coke provides entertainment (and sometimes food) and they usually have a couple of the “Coke Drivers” show up and talk to the crowd (this past weekend the Coke drivers were Kurt Busch and Bobby Labonte). These events are usually emceed by a radio-personality and ACSM has worked with Coke to provide an Exercise Professional at each event to talk to the crowd for a few seconds to stress the importance and benefits of walking. The track-walk program is usually held at 3-4 tracks every year and the overriding purpose of the event is to encourage activity (and of course, it serves as a marketing event for Coca-Cola). Read more

In many of our podcasts, articles, and some of my past blogs, the Huffines Institute continues to advocate getting people active. Many times we will use the phrase ‘moderately active’ which is generally interpreted to mean getting at least 30 cumulative mins of activity on a daily basis at a moderate intensity level. Indeed, many studies that have shown positive health effects from daily activity will often use the “30 mins of moderate activity” as a guideline/recommendation. What we forget as Sport Science professionals is that these minimal guidelines are often seen by the public as all they need to do. Read more

An individual diagnosed with a neurocognitive disease like Parkinson’s often face a difficult future, with their quality of life marked by difficult physical symptoms, including uncontrollable tremors. Often these tremors make walking, writing, and other movements that many of us take for granted, difficult, if not impossible. Pharmacological treatments for these tremors and other Parkinson’s symptoms work well, at least in the short term, but eventually, the brain adapts to these drugs and the tremors return. There is promise with more invasive surgeries and electrical stimulations, but these treatments are expensive, and frankly…invasive. No, the long-term story is not often a pleasant one when Parkinson’s is involved. Read more

It seems that there are times when popular literature seems to be all writing about the same thing (or maybe they all feed off each other?). At any rate, it seems that now is such a time with several popular books addressing whether performance and success is a result of inherent talent or practice and perseverance. Books like Bounce, The Talent Code, and Outliers all propose that inherent characteristics are not very important in determining final success. Rather, these authors would contend that the primary factor determining success is the environment, with much emphasis placed on practice, especially the magic 10,000 of practice Read more

Since we put up our podcast conversation with Dr. Carol Garber this past Friday, I've had couple of interesting email conversations, and one in particular with my friend Kevin, has struck a chord that needs to be amplified a bit.  I think if you listen to Dr. Garber, you may get the sense that Exercise Scientists are only interested in state licensure and are a bit elitist to boot.  I think it is critical that we drop back a couple of steps to look at some context for this conversation that adds another dimension to the discussion. Read more

In the last several years, the men and women of our military services are never far from any of our minds. While most of us are more likely to think of sports medicine as relating to athletic performance or normal exericse, many don't realize that our field has been linked to military service for many, many years. Ask many veterans what the initials "PT" mean to them and in most cases they will tell you 'physical training' (and maybe with a sneer in place). Read more

Have you ever heard of Seminole Firewater?  We recently put up a podcast with Dr. Jeff Zachwieja who was with the Gatorade Sport Science Institute, and of course, the importance of hydration during exercise with certain sports drinks was talked about.  That podcast led to an interesting email exchange with one of my colleagues (Dr. Maury Dennis) who happens to be a Florida State University alumn.  He wanted to know when we were going to do a podcast on "Seminole Firewater"...  I don't know about you, but I had never heard of Seminole Firewater.  But I've dug a bit and it is an interesting story... Read more

Why cheat? Good question. It is often thought that athletes cheat, especially those taking some form of Performance Enhancing Drug (PED), because they can not be the best any other way. However, as we all read about doping and PED scandals in many different sports, many times it is the elite athlete that is doping - the one that is already at the top of their game. So, why do they cheat? Read more

Even Scientists have to pay attention to what is new in their field. While we all read articles in the Sports Medicine journals, those articles are not the newest information available. For the newest discoveries, findings, and applications, we all attend 'meetings'. Sometimes these meetings are held on the state-level, sometimes the regional level, and sometimes the national / international level. This week sees the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), one of the largest gatherings of Exercise and Sports Scientists in the world. In fact, almost 40% of the papers presented at last year's ACSM were from international sports scientists so there is no doubt that the annual ACSM meeting is international in scope. Read more

Most exercise 'fads' come and go repeatedly, so I was interested in a recent session on Barefoot Running at the recent national American College of Sports Medicine meeting. Is barefoot running a fad or is there something more to it? Read more

Human performance still surprises the most cynical of us and truly shows that the machine we call the human body is capable of incredible feats. Yesterday (April 18, 2011), Geoffrey Mutai and Moses Mosop both ran the Boston Marathon in times approaching 2 hours and 3 mins, with Mutai winning in an official time of 2:03:02. What is amazing about this time (and Mosop's of 2:03:06) is that the world record in the marathon is currently 2:03:59 and that Mutai's time clipped almost a full minute off of the world record. Read more

Science fiction is a great way to stretch and exercise your imagination, especially when it is in areas that you know something about. For all you football fans out there, you should check out the Galactic Football League series by Scott Sigler as a great example of how science fiction can make you think about what you already know in different ways. For me, a particularly pertinent example of this 'reexamining what we know' came with the movie "Wall-E". Read more

One of the common themes of the conversations I heard after the Huffines Discussion was how much of the information was new or different than what was previously known.  These conversations were mostly among fitness professionals and academics who make their living researching how exercise interacts with various physiological pathways, but it reinforced to me the fact that there is so much information out there - not just in sports medicine, but in all of life sciences - that keeping up with it all is near impossible.  Read more

How do you know the Sports Medicine professional you are seeing knows what they are doing? When we go to a physician, or an accountatnt, or even hair stylists, we all know to look for some type of licensure or professional certification to ensure that the individual we are seeing has knowledge and experience that pertains to what we're there for. But how do you do this when you see Sports Medicine professionals? Read more

Where do you get your information about exercise, activity, or sports medicine? Can you trust that information? Those are two questions that seem to drive everyone in today's 'information age'. Information is ever present in our daily lives, from the seemingly endless news shows, to the incessant drone of radio-talk shows, to the pontificating experts on TV talk shows. So who should you believe? Read more

Our newest podcast is a great conversation with Kevin Hughes and I'd encourage everyone to download it and listen. Kevin is a long-time comedian with many honors and probably one of the deepest thinkers I've ever known. Plus, as most comedians are, he may be one of the most astute observers of human behavior out there. Kevin has had a long and burning interest in health - both physical and mental health - and often this interest and his observations come up in his comedy. So while we may laugh, what can we really learn from a comedian? Read more

A quick test: Raise your hand if you think that "Sports Medicine" only pertains to elite athletes..... This is an important question to us because after all, we are an "Institute of Sports Medicine and Human Performance". Does that mean that we are and should be only concerned about what happens on the practice field and in the arena? Or is there some way that what we do and study is applicable to everyone? Read more