How to measure how stress affects athletes’ performance
Pick a sport where they don’t move much, and study skin flushing
How much stress is good for an athlete? Surprisingly, since modern, professional sport of all sorts now seems to be in the hands of number crunchers trying to extract another zillionth of a percent of performance from their charges, no one knows. The reason is that, to avoid decrements in performance of equal and opposite magnitude, top athletes are rarely willing to carry even the tiniest monitoring devices when in competition. And when they are not in competition such measurements would be meaningless.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Bring me my bow of burning gold”
From the January 28th 2023 edition
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