PURPOSE Tai Chi exercise, an ancient Chinese martial art, has drawn more and more attention for its health benefits. The purpose of the study was to identify the effects of a Sun-style Tai Chi exercise on arthritic symptoms (joint pain and stiffness), motivation for performing health behaviors, and the performance of health behaviors among older women with osteoarthritis. METHODS Total of 72 ...

Cognitive and motor processes are essential for optimal athletic performance. Individuals trained in different skills and sports may have specialized cognitive abilities and motor strategies related to the characteristics of the activity and the effects of training and expertise. Most studies have investigated differences in motor-related cortical potential (MRCP) during self-paced tasks in ath...

In an attempt to test the conceptual model by Lane and Terry, the purposes of this study were 1) to assess mood states in non-depressed and depressed young karate athletes; 2) to assess mood states in relation to performance in young karate athletes. The participants were recruited from the 2004 Malaysian Games (72 males, 19.20 ± 1.16 years; 37 females, 18.78 ± 0.88 years). The athletes were di...

Hip arthroscopy is a minimally invasive surgical technique often performed in athletes who want an expeditious return to sport. To the authors' knowledge, no studies in the literature provide a time frame or criteria for return to sport after hip arthroscopy. The purpose of this study was to develop an aggregate recommendation for return to sport after hip arthroscopy based on data assimilated ...

BACKGROUND Aging is associated with a decrease in physical skills, sometimes accompanied by a change in quality of life (QOL). Long-term martial arts practice has been proposed as an avenue to counter these deleterious effects. The general purpose of this pilot study was to identify the effects of an adapted karate training program on QOL, depression, and motor skills in 50-year-old men. METH...

Predicting the outcome of sporting events make for an interesting and not altogether trivial AI and machine learning problem. In spite of the popularity of both AI and sports, most applications were of unsupervised learning to discover interesting new structure in sports. Of sports predictors, there has only been a single paper written: MYMAIT, which used neural networks to predict rugby result...

We describe a method for introducing variations into predefined motion sequences using a chaotic symbol-sequence reordering technique. A progression of symbols representing the body positions in a dance piece, martial arts form, or other motion sequence is mapped onto a chaotic trajectory, establishing a symbolic dynamics that links the movement sequence and the attractor structure. A variation...

In her article "Virtuality, Nationalism, and Globalization in Zhang's Hero" Ping Zhu examines how Yimou Zhang's martial arts film dislodges the historical tale from its spatiotemporal context by creating virtual images, characters, narratives, and ideologies, and presents the virtual idea of tianxia (天下) (all under heaven) as an active mode of participation in the virtual global. Amidst the sur...

In this study, we analyzed the swing motions of more experienced practitioner and new practitioner of iaido players by using tri-axial acceleration sensor and gyro sensor. Iaido is a modern Japanese martial art/sport. In this way, the acceleration and gyro sensor measurement enabled detailed motion information at the installation points to be displayed in a short time, thus making it possible t...

Left-handers may have strategic advantages over right-handers in interactive sports and innate superior abilities that are beneficial for sports. Previous studies relied on differing criteria for handedness classification and mostly did not investigate mixed preferences and footedness. Footedness appears to be less influenced by external and societal factors than handedness. Utilizing latent cl...