For how we live.
Sport through the lens of injury, recovery, and performance science.
Across 16,893 high school athletes screened over 15 years, 0.36% had T-wave inversions. Four were later found to have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a leading cause of sudden cardiac death in the young.
A small double-blind trial found a single 5.5 mg/kg dose lifted sprint power for hours, alongside higher noradrenaline and lower perceived effort — but it was 12 people, mostly men.
A Swedish study of 10,693 ACL reconstructions in registered football players found no link between graft type and revision surgery. Age and playing level mattered far more.
A hamstring analysis separated pre-injury from return-to-sport sprint mechanics at AUCs near 0.79. A multi-team rugby model tried to predict injuries before they happened, and could not.
A 32-study review attaches a five- to eight-fold per-tackle concussion risk to one body position, and finds youth players use it more often. A New Zealand school study maps where the force lands.
The same audit found high-performance female athletes well represented in the field — and that the studies generating prevalence figures lean on self-reported food records and MET lookup tables.
The range is the finding, not a failure of the study. 1,712 former players died between 2008 and 2021; 338 brains were examined, and who donates a brain is not random.
No accredited anti-doping lab exists in Russia, and won't before Los Angeles 2028. Every sample from a Russian Olympic hopeful will be flown out and analyzed abroad instead.
That's how thin Minnesota's pitching depth has gotten during a playoff push — a light-toss session six months into Tommy John recovery counts as encouraging, and a teammate's oblique strain still stings.
Eli Perry, a natural pro bodybuilder, and Myles Fiatsi, a bodybuilder and content creator, have sponsored Titan Recovery since 2024. Both partnerships check out independently.
A players' association says arm injuries more than doubled this year. A 46-year analysis of tour matches finds a slower, steadier rise. Both can be true, and neither settles the calendar question.
Exercise equipment injured more people than any other single category. The count has now risen every year since a pandemic-era low in 2020, but 2024's 17% jump broke from a run of smaller annual increases.
ACL tears fell 25% and matched a seven-season low. On the turf-versus-grass argument, two independent studies reached the same statistical conclusion as the league — and for reasons worth understanding.
He said he thought he was done. What actually lets a 41-year-old compete at the NBA level isn't a secret supplement — it's sleep, hydrotherapy, and training loads built around recovery, not just output.
Ball played 72 games last season, his second-most ever — a real improvement after two years in which ankle injuries limited him to 58 games combined. Minnesota's own front office isn't fully sold it will last.
Kevon Looney went from a Warriors ironman to 21 games with New Orleans in a single year. Los Angeles is betting that was an aberration, not a decline.
From LA28, every entrant in an Olympic female-category event is screened for one Y-chromosome gene. Geneticists, including the man who found it, say the test answers a narrower question than the policy asks.
An umbrella review of 17 meta-analyses found that adding endurance work did not blunt strength, power or hypertrophy compared with lifting alone. Almost none of that data came from highly trained athletes.
The fitness race just closed its biggest season and crowned new world champions in Stockholm. A preprint from a Munich trauma unit gives the sport its first injury numbers, and they are not small.
A 67-study meta-regression found muscle growth keeps rising with weekly sets, with diminishing returns. A 15-site trial of 297 lifters found stretch-position partial reps produced effects close to zero versus full range.
FIFA gave every World Cup match a mandatory three-minute break and the ATP set its first WBGT thresholds. Physiologists who study cooling say three minutes in direct sun does little to core temperature.
The same sport that a 300,000-person Swedish cohort associated with a 40% lower death rate carries an injury incidence in professionals roughly six times that of amateurs. The difference is dose.
Pooled randomised data show incretin drugs shed lean mass in about the same proportion as lifestyle weight loss. The evidence gap is people who train seriously, and it has not been filled.
A 614-donor autopsy study tied advanced CTE to dementia independently of other brain disease. A separate imaging report in three former athletes hints at a test for the living. The caveats on both are heavy.
A meta-analysis of 26 trials found creatine raises serum creatinine without markers of kidney injury. Weeks earlier, a Nature Communications paper reported that supplementation promoted metastasis in mice.
Two NCAA surveys nine weeks apart put the share of Division I men's basketball players receiving abuse tied to betting at 36% and 46%. The gap between them is the most informative part.
The 2026 Arnold Classic paid a record $750,000. Two European Heart Journal cohorts covering 29,733 IFBB competitors put sudden cardiac death rates far above what athlete screening programmes usually report.
The paper is a literature review, not a new trial — it synthesizes existing research rather than testing anything new. The authors argue return-to-play protocols may need to treat ADHD as a distinct variable.
A sibling-controlled cohort of 1.1 million men, a genetic analysis of 712 traits and a UK Biobank study of fitness change converge — and they agree on where the exception is.
A meta-analysis of 51 studies found no effect on race time or time to exhaustion. The 2026 review of post-exercise compression for soreness rated its own evidence very low certainty.
A 2026 meta-analysis of 86 randomised trials found body mass, waist circumference and maximal oxygen uptake still better than baseline more than six months after training stopped. Not everything held.
A meta-regression of 23 hypertrophy studies found total intake the strongest predictor and no timing effect after adjustment. A later network meta-analysis of 116 trials still favours post-exercise, narrowly.
A 2026 meta-analysis of 19 trials found training at maximal fat-oxidation intensity cut body weight by 3.66 kg. Head-to-head trials against interval training find no consistent winner on body fat.
An umbrella review of 29 systematic reviews and 863 randomised trials found most treatments resting on critically low-quality evidence. Animal work suggests soreness can arise without muscle damage at all.
In a meta-analysis of 25 randomised trials and 26,610 participants, stretching produced no reduction in sports injuries. Strength training cut them to under a third — on a much smaller evidence base.
A tightly controlled crossover trial separated low energy availability from low carbohydrate availability for four days. One hormone moved clearly; most did not, and performance did not move at all.
A survey of 322 college students found a dose-response pattern: the more intensely someone specialized in a single sport young, the greater their odds of chronic injury, nearly fivefold.
Pooling five studies that confirmed cycle phase by hormone testing, researchers found no significant VO2 max difference between phases, though the base is too thin to rule an effect out.
A twelve-athlete study tested morning, late-afternoon and late-evening sessions across the fasting month — and found the deficit was specific to time of day, not spread evenly across it.
Three cohorts, 147,374 people, 30 years and 35,798 deaths. The dose-response curve flattened above 120 minutes per week, and the cancer signal appeared at the low end, not the high end.
A review of 18 studies covering more than 13,000 young athletes found up to three-quarters combine protein supplements with drugs like ibuprofen. Fewer than 1 in 10 tell a clinician.
A stepped-wedge trial across 165 women's and girls' Australian football teams shows how far implementation support moves uptake — and how much larger a trial would need to be to prove it prevents injuries.
Games missed to rest or load management rose 125% over nine NBA seasons while serious injuries rose 43% — and players who sat out for rest showed no significant reduction in subsequent injury risk.
A network meta-analysis compared the ways athletes split training across intensity zones. Every credible interval crossed zero — and the model ranked first for aerobic capacity was not the popular one.
A review of 42 studies on South Africa's Comrades Marathon finds medical encounters at up to 20 per 1,000 starters — mostly dehydration and cramping, not the cardiac events that draw the most attention.
Researchers estimate about 58% of athletes are habitual low drinkers by a standard fluid-intake benchmark — and argue the field has barely studied what that means for long-term kidney and metabolic health.
An analysis across the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga and Ligue 1 found economic losses from player injuries topped 730 million euros in a season, with hamstrings hit hardest.
Among 1.2 million participants in Paris endurance races over ten years, 17 suffered sudden cardiac arrest. Nearly all of them lived, and researchers still can't explain almost half the cases.
In 388 female athletes, a per cent fat Z-score below −1.0 more than doubled sensitivity for amenorrhoea against standard BMI thresholds. It gave up specificity to do it.
Four players averaging 18-plus points a game are out for the 2026 NCAA tournament's opening round — as many as the previous 20 tournaments combined, by one count.
The 2026 tournament ran on tiered pitch counts and mandatory rest days meant to protect arms — but clubs still layered on their own limits, and some want the whole event moved.
Fifty-five per cent of surveyed cricketers over 70 reported a basal cell carcinoma. A 29% response rate and self-reported diagnoses mean the number cannot be read as a rate — which is the finding.
Trials measuring it are small but consistent: nasal breathing lowers peak oxygen uptake and feels harder at intensity. The interesting findings sit at submaximal effort, not maximal.
The first large instrumented-mouthguard dataset from elite Australian football finds women absorb greater rotational acceleration per impact, and that men's ruckmen sit in a category of their own.
Pooling 94 cohort studies, grip strength tracked with later dementia, depression and disability. The authors rate their own confidence in the numbers as limited to moderate.
The NCAA's fifth GOALS study surveyed 20,887 athletes. Sleep is up across almost every sport. Comfort talking to coaches about mental health has barely moved in a decade.
Ten years of national anti-doping reports show NSAID declarations flat at about 45%, a significant shift away from COX-2 selective drugs, and glucocorticoids making up around 13% of all prohibited-substance findings.
The International Testing Agency closed its six-month pre-Games programme with 7,100 controls and a near-doubling of testing. It also says a share of the untested come from the highest-risk disciplines.
Seven seasons of records on 569 students found 9.0 injuries per 1,000 exposure days in the upper school. Most injuries came on gradually, and a quarter were recurrences.
The famous Stanford basketball study had eleven players and no control group. Fifteen years on, sleep extension is still the best-supported sleep intervention in sport, and still barely studied.
WADA's 2026 list adds non-diagnostic carbon monoxide use as prohibited method M1.4. The single-dose haemoglobin test that put the gas in elite endurance sport stays legal — which is the whole difficulty.
Heading rates rise about 13% with each age group from under-9s to seniors. Unintended head impacts during headers were rare — 31 in 687 matches — and most common in adults.
A ten-season analysis of 3,750 matches quantifies the load argument footballers have been making. It also states plainly what it cannot show: anything about injury.
Anti-doping is defended mainly as a health protection regime. The 2027 Code approved in Busan adds an intelligence standard and rebuilds the data-protection rules — and leaves the hardest health question untouched.
Nearly a million conscripts followed for three decades: obesity carried a 3.1-fold hazard for sepsis, and high cardiorespiratory fitness was associated with a 42% lower risk of dying from bacterial infection.
In 132 Minnesota school athletes, each step up a housing-based measure of socioeconomic status predicted about 24% fewer days to return-to-play clearance. Childhood adversity did not lengthen recovery.
A decade-on review of chronic traumatic encephalopathy research reports that 5 of 70 veteran donors had features of the pathology and none met the full definition. A small UK rugby study looks elsewhere.
Sequencing hundreds of single neurons from 15 donors with CTE and 4 with repetitive head impacts but no CTE, researchers found the genomic damage tracked the disease, not the exposure.
A small prospective cohort followed 62 reconstructions for a quarter century. The graft type made no difference, and the uninjured comparison group dropped out of sport faster.
Fourteen studies covering 265 elite athletes used six different methods to identify relative energy deficiency. The spread in the answers is mostly a spread in the definitions.
Seventy-two runners were sampled before and after the 2024 Boston Marathon. Every marker of kidney and intestinal injury rose, and staying hydrated did not change that.
Three BJSM reviews underpinning the FAIR consensus pooled 1.5 million participants and 108 concussion studies. Women and girls were 2.4% of the lower-limb evidence base.
Ten weeks of a legal broad-spectrum CBD product produced detectable cannabigerol and cannabidivarin in most participants. After a 90-minute ride, detection rates rose to 74% and 84%.
A survey of all 211 FIFA member associations found screening near-universal in South America and rare in Oceania, with youth screening starting anywhere from age 6 to 17.
The first large replication project in the field found effect sizes shrank substantially on repeat, and reports that many original authors declined to engage with the attempt.