SportsGeezer

The Frozen Shoulder Mystery and What to Do About It

The strangest thing about frozen shoulder is that no one knows what brings it on. A woman--70 percent of the afflicted are middle-aged women-- wakes up one morning and whammo, she cannot move her shoulder. It's frozen, hence the name: frozen shoulder. What to do? The Boston Globe offers this advice: don't wait; get to a doctor pronto and tell him or her that you are suffering from adhesive capsulitis. The Globe claims that if treated soon enough, frozen shoulder can be melted with a simple shot of cortisone, while those who wait too long, hoping the condition will heal itself, can spend a year in therapy. Your choice. Read more about adhesive capsulitis in the Boston Globe.

Two Words on Matching Body Type to Sport: Forget It

If you're small, you should run, and if you're tall, you should swim. So goes the common wisdom about what kind of bodies perform better at what kind of sports. In this somewhat conflicted piece in the New York Times, Gina Kolata explains the physiological and physical reasons why tall swimmers do generally swim faster than short swimmers and why small, thin runners generally run faster than tall, heavily-built runners.
She points out that, among other things, tall swimmers also have an advantage because when bodies are horizontal in the water, long bodies have an automatic edge. Distance running, says Kolata, prefers another kind of body. Because running requires that you lift your body off the ground with each step, propelling yourself forward, the lighter you are, the easier the lift, and the faster you go.
Having said all that, Kolata reminds us that unless we plan to compete in the next Olympics, and Geezer does not, it matters less what we excel at than what we enjoy.
Read more in the New York Times.

Is Your Team Lackiing Spirit? Try This:

Study Shows Brain Injury Risks of Soccer

A small--OK, very small --study of 10 men who play college soccer and 10 men who don't has found evidence of reduced gray matter in the brains of the soccer players.The Scientific American reports that researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Ohio used MRI scans to look at the brains of the 20 subjects. The scans revealed reduced gray matter (which controls thinking and memory) in the anterior temporal cortex. Sciam reports that the significance of the relatively smaller gray matter volume and density seen in these players is not yet clear. Of the 10 soccer players in study, which is published in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine, only two said they had suffered concussions. Read more in the Scientific American.

Four High School Athletes Try to Get it Back, 30 Years Later

LA Times writer Jeannine Stein has some fun these four short profiles of high school athletes who, 30 years later, return to their chosen sports. Stein talks to a 47-year-old swimmer, a 46-year-old pole vaulter, a 40-year-old figure skater, and a 60-year-old wrestler. How'd they do? Better than you might think. Have a look.

How to Look Like a World Cup Player Without Really Playing

The  L. A. Times's Janet Cromley takes note of the remarkable physiques of World Cup soccer players and wonders if there is some way, any way, for the rest of us to look like that. The best answer, predictably, is to play soccer several hours a day, preferably with other World Cup players.  For those who lack that opportunity, Cromley's chosen experts suggest that for a quickie soccer body, think legs, abs, back and arms.
• For glutes, quads and calves — try squats with barbells on the shoulder. Set the weight so you can do 15 to 20 repetitions. You may wish to supplement that with lunges while holding dumbbells.
• For abs — try the "front plank." This exercise is performed lying on the stomach, with arms bent at the elbow. Raise up onto the elbows, keeping elbows shoulder width, and straighten the body, toes pointed downward, to look like what the exercise is called, a plank.
• For the back — do the "bird dog." Start on all fours, extend the right hand straight in front, extend the left leg straight behind, then bring both down to the original position. Repeat 15 to 20 times, then switch to the other side.
•  For arms — try machine chest presses or bench presses with dumbbells. The key is to get toned without bulking up, a hallmark of elite soccer players.

But sadly, Cromley concludes, capturing the soccer player's broad appeal may take more than a proportioned body and toned physique. Some say part of it boils down to something simpler: skimpy uniforms and good hair.
Read more from Cromley in the L.A. Times.

Paragliding Allegedly Offers More Fun Than Danger

Geezer wants to know if the fact that France has approximately 25,000 people who enjoy paragliding is a recommendation of the sport or a condemnation. The New York Times seems to cite it as evidence that the U.S. is, once again, behind the times. Still, the paper sees hope for us, and this interesting story, suggesting that paragliding is not nearly as dangerous as an intelligent person might assume, offers an encouraging account of the writer's first flight. The piece quotes a family physician and paragliding pilot who has studied accidents for Ushpa, saying he believes paragliding's injury rate is similar to that of activities like motorcycling, horseback riding and snowmobiling. Read more in the Times, or visit Google's first page of links to sites about paragliding, where, curiously, one finds sponsored links for life insurance.

Snowkiting: Excellent Thrills, and a Pretty Good Chance of Survival

Question: After discovering that one could travel over water at dangerously high speed by standing on a board and hanging onto a giant kite, how long did it take "sports enthusiasts" to try the same stunt on snow?  Answer: As long as you would expect it to take someone who enjoys travelling at twice the speed of the wind.
Snowkiting, the nordic version of kiteboarding, is a new sport, and Geezer fears that its longevity may depend on the ability of boarders to stay alive long enough to tell others how much fun it is. In this piece from the Boston Globe, world traveling writer and photographer David Arnold reports on such fun from Kitestorm, New England's third annual snowkiting festival, which drew 1,000 kiters to Lake Champlain. Arnold tells us that snowkiting "may be the only sport where you go up faster than you come down. There are no lifts, no lift lines, no lift tickets, and no out-of-control skiers and snowboarders threatening from above. In fact, there is no above; there's no hill -- or hardly any gravity, so it seems."
Even better, Arnold's piece reveals that the odds of survival are surprisingly good--at least, surprisingly good for a sport that allows one to jump 100 feet off the ground. In 2004, more than 2,000 snowkites were sold in the U.S.,  and so far, only two snowkiters have been killed. Read more about snowkiting.

Vision Training: What You See Is What You Get

Sports vision training programs may look like (extremely unimaginative) videogames, but their purpose is somewhat higher than the destruction of creatures from another planet. They are intended to improve our ability to hit balls, catch balls, analyze fast moving terrain, and basically win lots of games that we might lose if we hadn't spend a half hour three times a week wearing three-D glasses and sitting  in front of computer. The New York Times new and occasional sports magazine, Play reports that vision training has exploded in popularity, winning converts in almost every professional league, from the National Basketball Association to the PGA Tour, and that a growing number of sports vision clinics offer amateurs the chance to improve their games by sharpening their vision. The piece quotes Dr. Paul Berman, an optometrist in Hackensack, N.J., and the former president of the American Optometric Association's Sports Vision Section, saying that an average person can focus on three separate places in a second, but with training can look at five. "That," says Berman, "can make the difference between being good at your sport and being elite."
The Play magazine piece includes helpful links and four exercises that my improve your sports vision.

Competition: The Less Than Super Part of the Super Bowl

A physicist at Boston University has some surprising news for the 90 million people who will spend much of tomorrow night waiting for commercial breaks in the Super Bowl to get up and  go to the bathroom: the game is not that exciting. At least, it's not that exciting if excitement = likelihood of an upset. As this piece in BU Today reports, Sidney Redner and colleagues crunched a century’s worth of numbers, more than 300,000 games from the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the English Premier League (soccer), to determine the relative competitiveness of each sport. The researchers based the notion of competitiveness on the probability of an upset victory by the team with a lesser record of wins and losses. And when it comes to this measure of competitiveness, it turns out, the NFL comes up a loser, with a 36.4 percent chance of an upset in any given game. What the most competitive game? Soccer. In that sport, Redner found, the underdog pulls off a victory 45.2 percent of the time.