How bodies produce force, learn skills and adapt — reported from the research rather than from the gym floor.
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Sports Science
Dip before you jump and you jump higher. The gap between a countermovement jump and a squat jump is treated as a readout of elastic energy — but a review of the mechanisms concludes elastic energy is a small contributor, and that a bigger gap may be the worse sign.
Sports Science
The ITF approves four balls for adult tennis. Put their specifications side by side and they agree exactly on weight and on how far they squash — and differ on diameter, on how high they bounce, and on how much shape they have got back before the load comes off.
Sports Science
Cycling has long put the benefit of drafting at somewhere between a third and a half. A study simulating two 121-rider pelotons at nearly three billion cells apiece, checked against four wind-tunnel tests, found that deep inside a packed bunch the figure is not a third. It is a twentieth.
Sports Science
Drag rises with the square of speed, so an object with a very large drag area and very little mass decelerates violently. A study that built and validated a flight model for the shuttlecock found the term that dominates everything — and proposed replacing badminton's own speed test with it.
