Monthly Archive for November, 2009

No Sprinting Advantage With Prosthetic Limbs

Published on November 24, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments
Unfair advantage? Because they produce less force with each step, lightweight sprinting prostheses probably don't give amputee athletes a leg up. Credit: Orthopedic Specialty Hospital

Unfair advantage? Because they produce less force with each step, lightweight sprinting prostheses probably don't give amputee athletes a leg up. Credit: Orthopedic Specialty Hospital

From Michael Torrice in ScienceNOW Daily News.

In 2007, South African double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius became the first disabled athlete to compete against able-bodied runners, placing seventh in the British Grand Prix. But his J-shaped carbon-fiber prostheses, called the Össur Flex-Foot Cheetah, sparked a debate within the athletic world: Do the devices give him an unfair advantage over able-bodied competitors? The answer, according to a new study of six amputee sprinters, is no.

Scientists debate whether the Össur Cheetah boosts performance. Some experts believed that Pistorius’s setup would allow him and other amputee sprinters to move their legs faster than able-bodied runners and reach high speeds more easily. But last summer, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge showed that Pistorius’s prosthetic limbs didn’t generate as much force against the ground as biological legs.

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New History of Sport Psychology

Published on November 13, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

212-673303-product_largetomediumimage-thumbChristopher Green of York University and Ludy Benjamin of Texas A&M University are editors of Psychology Gets in the Game: Sport, Mind, and Behavior, 1880-1960, a new book from the University of Nebraska Press.

Although sport psychology did not fully mature as a recognized discipline until the 1960s, pioneering psychologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making greater use of empirical research methodologies, sought to understand mental factors that affect athletic performance. Though the psychologists behind the studies described here worked independently of one another and charted their own distinct courses of inquiry, their works, taken together, provided the corpus of precedents and foundations on which the modern field of sport psychology was built. The essays collected in this volume tell the stories not only of these psychologists and their subjects but of the social and academic context that surrounded them, shaping and being shaped by their ideas.