Vegetarian diets are associated with several health benefits, but whether a vegetarian or vegan diet is beneficial for athletic performance has not yet been defined. Based on the evidence in the literature that diets high in unrefined plant foods are associated with beneficial effects on overall health, lifespan, immune function, and cardiovascular health, such diets likely would promote improv...

Objective. Many organization theories suggest that divergent goals can hamper an organization’s pursuit of its primary mission. This study analyzes the effect of the pursuit of divergent goals on American public schools. Methods. Using an educational production function, this paper assesses the relationships between athletic budgets and various aggregate measures of academic performance. Result...

This study aimed to evaluate and compare the hydration states prior to different sporting events (training sessions, friendly and official matches) in elite female soccer players and relate that to the importance that the player attached to the hydration state as a determinant of sports performance. The hydration state of 17 female elite soccer players (age: 21.5 ± 3 years; body mass: 62 ± 6 kg...

Proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) is common practice for increasing range of motion, though little research has been done to evaluate theories behind it. The purpose of this study was to review possible mechanisms, proposed theories, and physiological changes that occur due to proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation techniques. Four theoretical mechanisms were identified: autoge...

We conducted three experiments to examine the relationships between emotions and subcomponents of performance. Experiment 1 revealed that anger was associated with enhanced gross muscular peak force performance but that happiness did not influence grammatical reasoning performance. Following Lazarus (1991, 2000a), we examined hope rather than happiness in Experiment 2. As hypothesized, hope yie...

Human physical performance is notably reduced with ageing. Although the effects of ageing are often compounded by disuse, the study of master athletes provides an opportunity for investigating the effects of ageing per se. It is often held that sprinting is more affected than endurance performance. However, past analyses of master athletic world record data have yielded opposite observations. W...

Many constraints of organismal design at the cell and organ level, including muscle fiber types, musculoskeletal gearing and control-surface geometry, are believed to cause performance trade-offs at the whole-organism level. Contrary to this expectation, positive correlations between diverse athletic performances are frequently found in vertebrates. Recently, it has been proposed that trade-off...

Goal setting difficulty has been shown to contribute to athletic performance (Burton et al., 2000). However, the potential mediating mechanism of goal difficulty on performance is unclear. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to verify the effect of goal setting difficulty on serving success in table tennis, and determine if self-regulation is the mediating variable. The current study used ...