THIS STUDY TESTED TWO HYPOTHESES (1) compared with amateurs and young elite, expert table tennis players are characterized by enhanced cortical activation in the motor and fronto-parietal cortex during motor imagery in response to table tennis videos; (2) in elite athletes, world rank points are associated with stronger cortical activation. To this aim, electroencephalographic data were recorde...

To advance our understanding of the hormonal contribution to athletic performance, we examined the temporal associations between individual changes in testosterone (T) and/or cortisol (C) concentrations, training motivation and physical performance in elite and non-elite trained men. Two male cohorts classified as elites (n = 12) and non-elites (n = 12) completed five testing sessions over a si...

Team sports place high demands on visuospatial and other cognitive skills. However, there is a lack of research on visuospatial skills of elite athletes and there are heterogeneous results on basic cognitive skills of this population. Therefore, this series of studies tested different cognitive skills in elite team sports athletes. In Experiment 1, elite athletes were compared to recreational a...

Genetic polymorphism is considered to be associated with human physical performance. The angiotensin I-converting enzyme insertion/deletion (ACE I/D) and the α-actinin-3 gene (ACTN3) R577X polymorphisms have been widely investigated for such associations, and functional ACE I/D and ACTN3 R577X polymorphisms have been associated with sprinter performance. The aim of this study was to determine t...

High-dimensional optimization problems are ubiquitous in every field nowadays, which seriously challenge the ability of existing optimizers. To solve this kind effectively, paper proposes an elite-directed particle swarm (EDPSO) with historical information to explore and exploit high-dimensional solution space efficiently. Specifically, EDPSO, is first separated into two exclusive sets based on...

deficiency that manifests as life threatening opportunistic infections and malignancies, i.e., the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The gut mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT, e.g., Peyer's patches) is a major locus of CD4+ cells. HIV's asymptomatic and insidious destruction of these cells compromises the integrity of the gut mucosa, allowing translocation (leakage) of microbes ...

OBJECTIVE AND METHODS Asthma is often reported by elite athletes, especially endurance athletes. The aim of this article is to review current knowledge of mechanisms and management of exercise-induced asthma (EIA) in adult elite athletes. RESULTS The mechanisms underlying EIA is incompletely understood, but the two prevailing hypotheses are the hyper-osmolarity and the thermal hypothesis. Bot...

This paper estimates the causal effect of elite college admission on students’ chances of reaching top management positions, and decomposes the total effect into a component attributable to ties formed between college peers and a component attributable to other institutional inputs. I construct a novel dataset linking archival records of applications to elite colleges in Chile to the census of ...

Although elite styles are important to the formation of generalised dress styling trends, the elite fashions that appear in the mass media are inaccessible to most consumers. When people buy new mass produced clothing, they choose necessarily from the limited range of styles available in nearby retail stores that are also within their income-based price threshold. In turn, the styles available ...

This study highlights recent observations in tennis which have revealed that the head position and gaze direction during the hitting process distinguished significantly elite players (with significant results in Grand Slam tournaments) from other top players: Elite players spent more time tracking the ball and fix the contact zone (or hitting zone) throughout the hitting action. These character...