The Athlete’s Clock: How Biology and Time Affect Sport Performance offers an engaging, interdisciplinary consideration of some of the most compelling questions in sport and exercise science. This unique text takes a broad look at the physiological clock, offering students, researchers, coaches, and athletes a unique approach to understanding how various aspects of time affect sport performance.
The Athlete’s Clock explores the ways in which time and its relationship to athletic effort can optimize sport performance. Readers can investigate challenging questions such as these:
If physiological responses to training vary rhythmically throughout the day, what is the optimal time of day for training?
If a coach thinks that a high stroke count leads to a better time in a particular swim event, should the athlete go with it? Or is it better to stick to a more intuitively normal cadence?
Do endurance athletes consciously control their pacing, or are they under the control of unconscious processes within the central nervous system?
In what ways do aging and rhythmic biological variations over time control athletic performance?
Can athletes use cognitive strategies to subdue or overcome limits imposed by biological factors out of their control?
Chapter 1. Who’s in Charge Here? Setting the Race Pace
Chapter 2. Marching to the Same Drummer: Cadence in Endurance Events
Chapter 3. Dragsters, Tiger Beetles, and Usain Bolt: Time and Speed
Chapter 4. Circadian Rhythms and Sport Performance
Chapter 5. It’s All in the Timing: Keeping Your Eye on the Ball
Chapter 6. Peaks and Valleys: The Development of Athletic Skill - A Conversation With Bob Malina
Chapter 7. Over The Hill: Aging and Sport Performance
Thomas W. Rowland, MD, is director of pediatric cardiology at the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he established an exercise testing laboratory. The author of Children’s Exercise Physiology, Second Edition, and editor of the journal Pediatric Exercise Science, he has extensive research experience in exercise physiology of children.
Rowland has served as president of the North American Society for Pediatric Exercise Medicine (NASPEM) and was on the board of trustees of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). He is past president of the New England chapter of the ACSM and received the ACSM Honor Award in 1993.
Since receiving BS and MD degrees from the University of Michigan in 1965 and 1969, Rowland has been an assistant and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester (1977 to 1990) and an assistant and associate clinical professor of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston (1975 to the present). He is professor of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine and a past adjunct professor of exercise science at the University of Massachusetts.
Rowland is a competitive tennis player and distance runner. He and his wife, Margot, reside in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. In his free time he enjoys playing tennis, running, and acting.