Sports & the Body in Motion
10 pieces · 53 min of reading
Why We Care So Much About Games
You've never met the players. The outcome changes nothing about your job, your health, or your relationships. And yet a missed shot in the final seconds can ruin your entire evening. That reaction isn't irrational — it's a very old piece of psychology, running on modern hardware it was never designed for.
Quick read3 min02What Makes an Elite Athlete
Genes really do matter for athletic performance — but not in the simple, fixed way "talent" gets talked about. Some of what looks like natural gift is actually an accident of birth month. Some of what looks purely genetic still depends heavily on how it's trained.
Quick readInteractive4 min03The Rules of the Big Sports, Fast
Six of the world's biggest sports, explained well enough to actually follow a game — how you score, how the clock works, and the one rule that trips up every newcomer.
Quick readInteractive4 min04How Practice Actually Works (Deliberate Practice)
"10,000 hours" is one of the most repeated numbers in self-improvement — put in 10,000 hours at anything and you'll become world-class. It's also a significant misreading of the research it claims to summarize, according to the psychologist whose work it came from. The real finding is more useful than the sound bite, and it explains why some people practice for decades and plateau while others improve steadily the whole way.
Read5 min05Strength Training, Demystified
Walk into a gym for the first time and it looks like a foreign country: racks, plates, people grunting, a vocabulary of "sets," "reps" and "PRs." It is easy to conclude that lifting is a hobby for a certain kind of person. It isn't. Underneath the noise is one simple idea, and you can use it with a pair of dumbbells in your living room.
Read6 min06Running Without Wrecking Yourself
Running is the cheapest sport there is, and one of the easiest to get hurt doing. Most of those injuries come from two habits: going too far, too soon, and running too hard, too often. Both are fixable.
ReadInteractive7 min07Recovery: What Actually Works (and What's Mostly Marketing)
You don't get fitter during a workout. A hard session leaves you slightly weaker, a little damaged and tired. The fitness arrives afterwards, while your body repairs and over-builds. That makes recovery half of training, and it explains why an entire industry now sells it to you: ice tubs, massage guns, compression boots, cryo-chambers, recovery drinks, wristbands that score your "readiness."
Read7 min08Choking Under Pressure: Why Skilled People Fall Apart When It Matters
Wimbledon, 1993. Jana Novotná leads Steffi Graf 4–1 in the deciding set of the final and is serving with a point to go 5–1. Then she double-faults. Her serve, her timing and her nerve all seem to leave at once, and Graf wins the next five games and the title. At the trophy ceremony Novotná cries on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent.
Read6 min09The Olympics: A Short, Honest History
"The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part." It's the most famous line in Olympic history, and it usually gets credited to Pierre de Coubertin, the Frenchman who revived the Games. He did popularize it. But the idea came from a sermon given by an American bishop, Ethelbert Talbot, in London during the 1908 Games, and Coubertin's own wording changed over the years.
Read6 min10The Business of Sport: Where the Money Actually Comes From
Ask a fan where a club's money comes from and the answer is usually "tickets." It's a reasonable guess. You can see the crowd, and you know what you paid to get in. It is also mostly wrong. For the biggest teams and leagues in the world, the people in the stadium are now a minority of the business. The real customer is the one watching at home, and the companies that want that person's attention.
Read5 min