Structural brain differences between ultra-endurance athletes and sedentary persons

Cognitive and neural basis of vigilance advantage in soccer players: Evidence from the drift-diffusion model and magnetic resonance imaging

Soccer is a sport that requires athletes to be constantly aware of rapidly changing and unpredictable environments and to react adaptively. Previous studies have found that soccer players typically exhibit a vigilance advantage, but the underlying cognitive and neural basis for this is unclear. In this study, 27 soccer players, 17 age-matched artistic gymnasts, and 57 college students were recruited to participate in a psychomotor vigilance task. Compared to the college students, the soccer players demonstrated higher vigilance, whereas the artistic gymnasts did not. Drift-Diffusion Modeling revealed that soccer players' non-decision time was significantly lower than that of college students, while drift rate and boundary were not significantly different between the two groups. This suggests that the vigilance advantage of soccer players stems from their shorter information encoding and action generation time. Vigilance was not only correlated with Right Ventral lateral (rtVL), Left Intralaminar (ltIL), Left Mediodorsal medial magnocellular (ltMDm) and Right Mediodorsal medial mag-no-cellular (rtMDm) thalamic subregions, and also correlates with the functional connectivity be-tween the thalamic subregions of rtVL and Right Intralaminar (rtIL), and rtVL and Left Ventral anterior (ltVA). And, rtVL may be an important region of vigilance dominance in soccer players. This finding not only helps to deepen the understanding of the computational process of vigilance in players, but also provides a reference for subsequent more in-depth studies of neural computational mechanisms.

Effects of Functional Phenolics Dietary Supplementation on Athletes' Performance and Recovery: A Review

In recent years, many efforts have been made to identify micronutrients or nutritional strategies capable of preventing, or at least, attenuating, exercise-induced muscle damage and oxidative stress, and improving athlete performance. The reason is that most exercises induce various changes in mitochondria and cellular cytosol that lead to the generation of reactive species and free radicals whose accumulation can be harmful to human health. Among them, supplementation with phenolic compounds seems to be a promising approach since their chemical structure, composed of catechol, pyrogallol, and methoxy groups, gives them remarkable health-promoting properties, such as the ability to suppress inflammatory processes, counteract oxidative damage, boost the immune system, and thus, reduce muscle soreness and accelerate recovery. Phenolic compounds have also already been shown to be effective in improving temporal performance and reducing psychological stress and fatigue. Therefore, the aim of this review is to summarize and discuss the current knowledge on the effects of dietary phenolics on physical performance and recovery in athletes and sports practitioners. Overall, the reports show that phenolics exert important benefits on exercise-induced muscle damage as well as play a biological/physiological role in improving physical performance.