Global sports policy

Globalization is a key part of everyday lives, and sport itself is an increasingly global phenomenon. This book successfully brings the two together, locating the study of sports policy within a broader consideration of global processes, practices and consequences.

Drawing upon a range of empirical case studies, Palmer successfully illuminates issues that have not previously been discussed. Exploring the relationship between the local and the global, globalization and governance, new technologies, human rights, environment and corporate responsibility, Palmer sets out the ground for a new and refreshed understanding of policy making in sport and how this affects society moreover.

Original and timely, this book is a must for sports students on all levels. It will also be of immense use for students on courses that deal with public and social policy making.

Telephone delivered health coaching improves anxiety outcomes after myocardial infarction : the 'ProActive Heart' trial

Background: Recently, we found a telephone-delivered secondary prevention programme using health coaching (‘ProActive Heart’) to be effective in improving a range of key behavioural outcomes for myocardial infarction (MI) patients. What remains unclear, however, is the extent to which these treatment effects translate to important psychological outcomes such as depression and anxiety outcomes, an issue of clinical significance due to the substantial proportion of MI patients who experience depression and anxiety. The objective of the study was to investigate, as a secondary hypothesis of a larger trial, the effects of a telephone-delivered health coaching programme on depression and anxiety outcomes of MI patients.

Design: Two-arm, parallel-group, randomized, controlled design with six-months outcomes.

Methods: Patients admitted to one of two tertiary hospitals in Brisbane, Australia following MI were assessed for eligibility. Four hundred and thirty patients were recruited and randomly assigned to usual care or an intervention group comprising up to 10 telephone-delivered ‘health coaching’ sessions (ProActive Heart). Regression analysis compared Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale scores of completing participants at six months (intervention: n = 141 versus usual care: n = 156).

Results: The intervention yielded reductions in anxiety at follow-up (mean difference = -0.7, 95% confidence interval=-1.4,-0.02) compared with usual care. A similar pattern was observed in mean depression scores but was not statistically significant.

Conclusions: The ProActive Heart programme effectively improves anxiety outcomes of patients following myocardial infarction. If combined with psychological-specific treatment, this programme could impact anxiety of greater intensity in a clinically meaningful way.

On the acoustic performance of a precast panel system made from environmentally sustainable concrete : application in sports hall buildings

The use of green building materials and products promotes conservation of non-renewable resources and help reduce associated environmental impacts. This article reports the acoustical performance of a precast panel system made largely from concrete waste material. Two major applications for such panels that are being investigated currently include walls and claddings to industrial and commercial buildings and sound barriers for urban freeways. In this study, the application of the concrete panels for optimizing reverberation time (RT) in sports halls is tested using numerical simulations. As an innovative approach, additional layers are added to the precast panels to improve their appearance. The absorption coefficients of the concrete panel improved significantly with the architectural finish. The material can be tuned according to the required peak frequency. The architectural finish helped reduce the RT for frequencies above 500 Hz. Its application to different types of ceilings revealed that the RT of curved ceiling reduced up to 40% compared to flat and hybrid ceiling. A comparison of wall and ceiling modifications in small, medium and large sports halls showed that medium-sized halls have better acoustical performance compared with small and large halls with ceiling as well as wall treatment.

Family support and ease of access link socio-economic status and sports club membership in adolescent girls : a mediation study

Background Much research has been conducted into the determinants of physical activity (PA) participation among adolescent girls. However, the more specific question of what are the determinants of particular forms of PA participation, such as the link between participation through a sports club, has not been investigated. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationships between participation in a sports club and socio-economic status (SES), access to facilities, and family and peer support, for female adolescents.

Methods A survey of 732 female adolescent school students (521 metropolitan, 211 non-metropolitan; 489 Year 7, 243 Year 11) was conducted. The survey included demographic information (living arrangements, ethnicity indicators, and indicators of SES such as parental education and employment status and locality); access to facilities; and family and peer support (travel, encouragement, watching, praise, joint participation). For each characteristic, sports club participants and non-participants were compared using chi-square tests. Multiple mediation analyses were used to investigate the role of access, family and peer support in the link between SES and sport participation.

Results There were significant associations (p<0.05) between sports club participation and: all demographic characteristics; all measures of family and peer support; and access to sport-related facilities. Highest levels of participation were associated with monolingual Australian-born families, with two parents, at least one of whom was well-educated, with both parents employed, and high levels of parental assistance, engagement and support. Participation in club sport among both younger and older adolescent girls was significantly positively associated with the SES of both their neighbourhoods and their households, particularly in metropolitan areas. These associations were most strongly mediated by family support and by access to facilities.

Conclusions To facilitate and promote greater participation in club sport among adolescent girls from low SES neighbourhoods and households, strategies should target modifiable determinants such as facility access and parental support. This will involve improving access to sports facilities and promoting, encouraging and assisting parents to provide support for their daughters’ participation in sport clubs.

On self-propagating methodological flaws in performance normalization for strength and power sports

Performance in strength and power sports is greatly affected by a variety of anthropometric factors. The goal of performance normalization is to factor out the effects of confounding factors and compute a canonical (normalized) performance measure from the observed absolute performance. Performance normalization is applied in the ranking of elite athletes, as well as in the early stages of youth talent selection. Consequently, it is crucial that the process is principled and fair. The corpus of previous work on this topic, which is significant, is uniform in the methodology adopted. Performance normalization is universally reduced to a regression task: the collected performance data are used to fit a regression function that is then used to scale future performances. The present article demonstrates that this approach is fundamentally flawed. It inherently creates a bias that unfairly penalizes athletes with certain allometric characteristics, and, by virtue of its adoption in the ranking and selection of elite athletes, propagates and strengthens this bias over time. The main flaws are shown to originate in the criteria for selecting the data used for regression, as well as in the manner in which the regression model is applied in normalization. This analysis brings into light the aforesaid methodological flaws and motivates further work on the development of principled methods, the foundations of which are also laid out in this work.

Anxiety versus fundamental emotions as predictors of perceived functionality of pre-competitive emotional states, threat, and challenge in individual sports

The objectives of this study were to examine the contribution of anxiety and fundamental emotions to perceived emotion functionality and evaluate the informational value of anxiety measures used in sport versus measures of fundamental emotions in terms of appraisal. A battery of questionnaires comprising the somatic and cognitive subscale of the Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (CSAI-2), the State Anxiety Inventory, the Differential Emotions Scale–IV, a perceived functionality of emotions single item, and two items assessing challenge and threat appraisals was administered to 202 athletes competing in individual sports in the United Kingdom. They were tested on recalled pre-competitive emotions experienced before their best and worst competition ever and momentary emotions experienced one hour before an actual competition. In general, measures of fundamental emotions with clear approach or avoidance action tendencies were better predictors of emotion functionality than anxiety measures. Results also suggested that the CSAI-2 does not convey clear information about an athlete’s appraisal of a competition. Measures of negative and positive fundamental emotions with clear action tendencies were better indicators of athletes’ appraisal patterns. It was concluded that assessment of athletes’ emotional state should not be exclusively based on anxiety measures but should encompass or be replaced with measures of emotions conveying unambiguous information about the athlete-competition relationship.

Triple G girls get going in tennis : resource manual

Physical activity is ranked second in importance only to tobacco control in health promotion and disease prevention in Australia. Individuals can be active in many ways every day, including –walking to and/or from school, work and other places of interest; participating in sports clubs; going to the YMCA or community leisure centre where you can be active through gyms, group fitness classes or in the swimming pool; visiting local parks and walking trails, and even at home and in the backyard. You can always find ways to be active in the community.

Promoting physical activity to young people is important for developing healthy lifestyles now and maintaining them for the future. A physically active lifestyle can be of benefit to physical, mental and social health. Despite these benefits, adolescent girls and young women are considerably less active than their male counterparts, and sport participation decreases dramatically among girls during their secondary school years. Many physical education teachers have also expressed concern about girls minimising their participation in school physical education. Consequently, it is timely that a project such as Triple G ‘Girls Get Going in Tennis, in Football, and at the YMCA’ should be developed and implemented in an effort to arrest the decline in girls’ participation in sport, physical activity and physical education.

The Triple G program aims to develop, implement and evaluate a program to promote participation in physical activity by girls in rural and regional schools and communities. The impact of the Triple G program on the mental and physical wellbeing of the girls will also be evaluated. The program specifically aims to create school and community linkages through the introduction of tennis coaches, football coaches, and YMCA instructors into the physical education class to team teach with physical education staff during the 2011 school year. As part of the school-based program, Year 7 – 9 girls will participate in a YMCA unit and one of tennis or football during their physical education classes (6 sessions x 100mins each). Each unit is then followed by an eight week afterschool program at the local tennis or football club, or YMCA centre.

Computer simulation based parameter selection for resistance exercise

In contrast to most scientific disciplines, sports science research has been characterized by comparatively little effort investment in the development of relevant phenomenologi-cal models. Scarcer yet is the application of said models in practice. We present a framework which allows resistance training practitioners to employ a recently proposed neu-romuscular model in actual training program design. The first novelty concerns the monitoring aspect of coaching. A method for extracting training performance characteristics from loosely constrained video sequences, effortlessly and with minimal human input, using computer vision is described. The extracted data is subsequently used to fit the underlying neuromuscular model. This is achieved by solving an inverse dynamics problem corresponding to a particular exercise. Lastly, a computer simulation of hypothetical training bouts, using athlete-specific capability parameters, is used to predict the effected adaptation and changes in performance. The software described here allows the practitioner to manipulate hypothetical training parameters and immediately see their effect on predicted adaptation for a specific athlete. Thus, this work presents a holistic view of the monitoring-assessment-adjustment loop.