Physiological Limits Of Athletic Performance example essay topic

Appendix A "h Physiologists have made several evaluations as to what makes the athlete perform better mentally. There are many different ways that an athlete can overcome mental barriers, one of which by using these four factors: Concentration (ability to maintain focus), Confidence (believe in one's abilities), Control (ability to maintain emotional control regardless of distraction), Commitment (ability to continue working to agreed goals). "h With many advancements in athletic equipment competitors have been allowed to perform to a higher standard and achieve improved times. "h For many years, physiologists said that it was inconceivable for an athlete to run under four minutes for the mile. Everyone began to think that a four minute mile would be a barrier that no human would be capable of breaking. Many world class athletes allowed the mythical time to rule them. "h Typical stereotypes have suggested that women are of a lesser athletic ability than men. "h Records, of course, are made to be broken. With more scientific training methods, records have consistently improved. "h Coaches also influence a person's performance from the differential treatment given to training methods resulting in the level of developed physical prowess. "h It is a direct result of its sound knowledge of mechanics and effective technique "h The steady improvement in records of all sporting events may, at first glance, look like biological evolution, but this couldn't be further from the truth. "h Living as we now do, in large, increasingly homogenized populations, any mutation that might crop up and that could be of value for athletic performance (e.g. an enormously large lung capacity for marathoners) would quickly be diffused in the gene pool. "h That's not to say changes can't happen. Could a species stuck with our bipedal design evolve and someday run as fast as ostriches?

Maybe we " re still so unspecialized for the task of running that selective breeding could accomplish this. But even if we attempted that unthinkable experiment! If we bred humans like, say, racehorses, along lines of pedigree! The project would probably have to continue uninterrupted for hundreds or thousands of years. We have no idea what makes a Secretariat different from an also-ran, but if we want to beat a Secretariat, we begin with Secretariat genes. Still, if we did create human thoroughbreds, there's good reason to believe the physical "improvement" would eventually stop; despite selective breeding, thoroughbreds haven't gotten any faster in the last 100 years.

Why should it be any different with us? Genetically we " re pretty much the same as we " ve been for hundreds of thousands of years; the basic changes for running, throwing, jumping, and the like were made long ago, and the trajectory, and eventual endpoint, were determined then as well. Physiologically speaking, on average we may well be devolving, so to speak. Q. During the TV coverage of the Atlanta Olympics, it seemed that sports records were falling right and left. Can this trend go on indefinitely? I am mainly interested in swimming. A. The Olympics have always lived up to its motto, cities, altus, forties -- swifter, higher, stronger.

Since the first modern games were held in Athens in 1896, records have fallen steadily in every sport. Will this continue? No one knows for sure, of course. Some scientists believe the end of the trend is in sight and may occur early next century for many sports. They see a physiological limit to increases in strength and endurance and note that athletes are just about pushing their bodies to the maximum. They also point out that performance enhancing facilities and equipment may have reached their limits, at least in sports like swimming.

The Georgia Tech Olympic Aquatic Center, for instance, has specially designed lane lines that create glass like swimming surface, and swimmers wear virtually drag-free suits -- what more can be achieved? On the other hand, there are those who disagree with this notion and contend that records will fall in the future as in the past. They argue that: "h Sports nutrition is still more art than science. Increasingly sophisticated research will likely come up with dietary wrinkles that will enhance performance among world-class competitors. Athletes are training smarter not harder. Coaches are learning how to avoid overtraining in their charges.

Overtraining sidelines many top athletes with chronic fatigue, aggravated symptoms of exercise-induced asthma, or colds, flu and other ailments resulting from a weakened immune system. "h Sports psychology is having an increasing impact on record breaking performance, most notably in the areas of building confidence and tolerating the physical and emotional stresses of training. "h Computers and devices for evaluating technique are advancing rapidly. This is contributing to a better understanding of intricate physical movements such as the stroke mechanics in swimming. Also, in technology-intense sports like cycling, there appear to be no limits to improvement. "h Pharmacology may also have a positive (although illegal and unethical) impact as athletes come up with novel ways to supercharge their bodies with energy producing substances that can't be detected by drug testing. "h The international pool from which to select athletes will widen. As the economy of the underdeveloped countries improves, more high level sport training opportunities will be available to a much larger portion of the world's population. "h Finally, there will always be the occasional athletic phenomenon. Olympic Records in Endurance Events Will Continue to Fall As Physiological Limits of Athletes Still Not Reached The Sciences Considers Biological Impact on Performance; State of Artificial Intelligence, Racial Profiling Also Explored New York, NY... As the 2000 Olympic Games prepare to open in Sydney, sports fans around the world will continue to see new records being set-especially in endurance events such as swimming, cycling and long-distance running-predicts a scientist studying the physiological limits of athletic performance.

Writing in the September / October issue of The Sciences, University of Cambridge biochemist Guy C. Brown reports that world records in many events have not begun to taper off and, in fact, they seem to show steady improvement with each passing decade. "If there is a physiological maximum to the running speed of a human being, one would expect that as athletes approached that limit, improvements would become both rarer and smaller", Brown says. "Remarkably, neither of those trends has shown up, with world-record running times having declined almost linearly in the past hundred years". Brown notes, for example, that the men's record for the 1,500-meter run decreased from 4: 06.2 in 1900 to 3: 26.0 in 1998, at roughly ten-second intervals every quarter century. He also points out that although women have generally been unable to match men's records, their world marks are improving faster than the men's are. "If the rates of improvement continue, women will outrun men in most events by the year 2035, and much sooner in endurance events such as the marathon", Brown says.

According to projections made by The Sciences of world-record times for selected events, women will surpass the men's record in the 10,000-meter run by the year 2020. In his article, Brown looks closely at the chain of events that begins with the intake of oxygen by the lungs and ends with the consumption of energy by the contracting muscles. He also takes a peek at the future, when advanced surgeries, implants and genetic engineering may play a role in athletic performance. September / October Sciences Also in this issue of! The Sciences Toy Stories: The ubiquitous Furby and other interactive playthings offer a window into the digital environment of the future, dense with intelligent machines. (Pg. 25) Mark Pesce, founding chair of the Interactive Media Program of the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California, reports on the state of artificial intelligence.

He asserts that the toy sensation Furby is the harbinger of a new kind of device that will fill ordinary life with a digital ecology of flexible, trainable and unpredictable robotic gadgets. He describes how sophisticated new robots are "taught" to sense their physical environment, to respond to it in relatively simple ways, and to "learn" from past experience. Race Counts: The refined list of racial categories on the 2000 U.S. census form belies the fluidity and deep ambiguity that attend any attempt to classify human groups. (Pg. 38) The deeply troubling practice of racial profiling by the police has become a major political issue in the 2000 presidential campaign. But profiling, of course, is hardly limited to the police; classifying people according to racial and ethnic categories is as old as the Republic and continues to have profound consequences for everyone. Freelance writer David Berreby focuses on a context in which the category makers and their deliberations about the categories they are making are exceptionally well documented: the records of the U.S. census.

As he writes, "even in the realm of written, official definitions, the answers to questions about race depend on what is being asked, who is asking it, and why". For example, the much-trumpeted "browning of America" did not happen overnight, but was largely an artifact of the way census questions were asked. Lost City: Preservationists stalled excavations at Jamestown for a century. Ironically, they proved to be the archaeologists' best friends. (Pg. 16) One of the oldest settlements of Europeans in the U.S., Jamestown, Virginia, was virtually abandoned until a small group of dedicated women, members of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA), took the site under its wing. Regular contributor to The Sciences Robert Zimmerman chronicles how APVA strove throughout much of the century to preserve the site, in effect keeping archaeologists from working on large parts of Jamestown Island.

Ironically, that policy protected the most important artifacts from being ravaged by the less sophisticated archaeological methods of decades past. New techniques have now exposed the foundations of a long-lost fort, built during the first year of the settlement, as well as the grave sites of settlers who may have been mentioned in historical documents.