A New York Times Sports and Fitness Bestseller “The definitive tour through a bewildering jungle of…claims that compose a multibillion-dollar recovery industry.” —David Epstein, best-selling author of The Sports Gene Acclaimed science journalist Christie Aschwanden takes readers on an entertaining and enlightening tour through the latest science on sports and fitness recovery. She investigates claims about sports drinks, chocolate milk, and “recovery” beer; examines the latest recovery trends; and even tests some for herself, including cryotherapy, foam rolling, and Tom Brady–endorsed infrared pajamas. Good to Go seeks an answer to the question: Do any of these things actually help the body recover and achieve peak performance?
The first comprehensive, practical exploration of the art and science of athletic rest from a certified cycling, triathlon, and running coach. If you’ve hit a wall in your training, maybe it’s because your body isn’t recovering enough from each workout to become stronger. In The Athlete’s Guide to Recovery, Sage Rountree will guide you to full recovery and improved performance, revealing how to measure your fatigue and recovery, how much rest you need, and how to make the best use of recovery tools. Drawing on her own experience along with interviews with coaches, trainers, and elite athletes, Rountree details daily recovery techniques, demystifying common aids like ice baths, compression apparel, and supplements. She explains in detail how to employ restorative practices such as massage, meditation, and yoga. You will learn which methods work best and how and when they are most effective. The Athlete’s Guide to Recovery explores: Periodization and overtraining Ways to measure fatigue and recovery including heart rate tests, heart rate variability, EPOC, and apps Stress reduction Sleep, napping, nutrition, hydration, and supplements Cold and heat like icing, ice baths, saunas, steam rooms, whirlpools, and heating pads Home remedies including compression wear, creams, and salts Technological aids like e-stim, ultrasound, Normatec Massage, self-massage, and foam rolling Restorative yoga Meditation and breathing Then you can put these tools and techniques to practice using two comprehensive recovery plans for both short- and long-distance training. This invaluable resource will enable you to maintain that hard-to-find balance between rigorous training and rest so that you can feel great and compete at your highest level.
All athletes, from Olympians to weekend warriors, must find the balance between training and recovery to maximize the benefits of workouts and reach optimal performance. For the longest time, coaches and training manuals have emphasized training. However, studies show that recovery is a crucial component of exercise training and it may even be the most important one. Good to go is the first definitive account of this new frontier in sports and exercise, from ice baths and cryogenic freezing chambers, to Usain Bolt's love of chicken nuggets and Tom Brady's recovery pyjamas. Full of eye-opening revelations, Aschwanden takes us on a jouney through the science and potions of sports recovery and debunks the junk to give a clear picture of what we should actually be doing to achieve peak performance.
In the tradition of Wild and H Is for Hawk, an Outside magazine writer tells her story—of fathers and daughters, grief and renewal, adventure and obsession, and the power of running to change your life. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY REAL SIMPLE I’m running to forget, and to remember. For more than a decade, Katie Arnold chased adventure around the world, reporting on extreme athletes who performed outlandish feats—walking high lines a thousand feet off the ground without a harness, or running one hundred miles through the night. She wrote her stories by living them, until eventually life on the thin edge of risk began to seem normal. After she married, Katie and her husband vowed to raise their daughters to be adventurous, too, in the mountains and canyons of New Mexico. But when her father died of cancer, she was forced to confront her own mortality. His death was cataclysmic, unleashing a perfect storm of grief and anxiety. She and her father, an enigmatic photographer for National Geographic, had always been kindred spirits. He introduced her to the outdoors and took her camping and on bicycle trips and down rivers, and taught her to find solace and courage in the natural world. And it was he who encouraged her to run her first race when she was seven years old. Now nearly paralyzed by fear and terrified she was dying, too, she turned to the thing that had always made her feel most alive: running. Over the course of three tumultuous years, she ran alone through the wilderness, logging longer and longer distances, first a 50-kilometer ultramarathon, then 50 miles, then 100 kilometers. She ran to heal her grief, to outpace her worry that she wouldn’t live to raise her own daughters. She ran to find strength in her weakness. She ran to remember and to forget. She ran to live. Ultrarunning tests the limits of human endurance over seemingly inhuman distances, and as she clocked miles across mesas and mountains, Katie learned to tolerate pain and discomfort, and face her fears of uncertainty, vulnerability, and even death itself. As she ran, she found herself peeling back the layers of her relationship with her father, discovering that much of what she thought she knew about him, and her own past, was wrong. Running Home is a memoir about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our world—the stories that hold us back, and the ones that set us free. Mesmerizing, transcendent, and deeply exhilarating, it is a book for anyone who has been knocked over by life, or feels the pull of something bigger and wilder within themselves. “A beautiful work of searching remembrance and searing honesty . . . Katie Arnold is as gifted on the page as she is on the trail. Running Home will soon join such classics as Born to Run and Ultramarathon Man as quintessential reading of the genre.”—Hampton Sides, author of On Desperate Ground and Ghost Soldiers
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deeply affecting coming-of-age memoir about family, love, loss, basketball—and life itself—by the beloved author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini During one unforgettable season as a Citadel cadet, Pat Conroy becomes part of a basketball team that is ultimately destined to fail. And yet for a military kid who grew up on the move, the Bulldogs provide a sanctuary from the cold, abrasive father who dominates his life—and a crucible for becoming his own man. With all the drama and incandescence of his bestselling fiction, Conroy re-creates his pivotal senior year as captain of the Citadel Bulldogs. He chronicles the highs and lows of that fateful 1966–67 season, his tough disciplinarian coach, the joys of winning, and the hard-won lessons of losing. Most of all, he recounts how a group of boys came together as a team, playing a sport that would become a metaphor for a man whose spirit could never be defeated. Praise for My Losing Season “A superb accomplishment, maybe the finest book Pat Conroy has written.”—The Washington Post Book World “A wonderfully rich memoir that you don’t have to be a sports fan to love.”—Houston Chronicle “A memoir with all the Conroy trademarks . . . Here’s ample proof that losers always tell the best stories.”—Newsweek “In My Losing Season, Conroy opens his arms wide to embrace his difficult past and almost everyone in it.”—New York Daily News “Haunting, bittersweet and as compelling as his bestselling fiction.”—Boston Herald
Billions of dollars are spent on stroke-related rehabilitation research and treatment techniques but most are not well communicated to the patient or caregiver. As a result, many stroke survivors are treated with outdated or ineffective therapies. Stronger After Stroke puts the power of recovery in the reader's hands by providing simple to follow instructions for reaching the highest possible level of healing. Written for stroke survivors, their caregivers, and loved ones, Stronger After Stroke presents a new and more effective treatment philosophy that is startling in its simplicity: stroke survivors recover by using the same learning techniques that anyone uses to master anything. Basic concepts are covered, including: Repetition of task-specific movements Proper scheduling of practice Challenges at each stage of recovery Setting goals and recognizing when they have been achieved The book covers the basic techniques that can catapult stroke survivors toward maximum recovery. Stronger After Stroke bridges the gap between stroke survivors and what they desperately need: easily understandable and scientifically accurate information on how to achieve optimal rehabilitation.
“Highlights the mental strategies elite athletes employ to get an edge on their competition.”—The New York Times With an all-new foreword: competition-tested cognitive strategies to help triumph over any obstacle If you ask research psychologist Noel Brick and bestselling fitness writer Scott Douglas, the “dumb jock” stereotype is way out of bounds. No world-class athlete succeeds without a strong mental game, including unique ways of analyzing situations, self-motivating, and even thinking about time. Cutting-edge discoveries (some by Dr. Brick himself) reveal how champions do it—and how we can, too. Brick and Douglas pair groundbreaking science with instructive moments across the sports realm to show how legendary athletes like marathoner Meb Keflezighi, World Cup champion soccer player Megan Rapinoe, and Olympian Michael Phelps stay on top of their game. Whether it’s sticking the landing at a job interview or racing your thesis to the finish line, Strong Minds is a slam-dunk approach for accomplishing anything. Publisher’s note: Strong Minds was previously published in hardcover as The Genius of Athletes.
A New York Times Most Anticipated Book of the Summer A taboo-busting romp through the shame, stink, and strange science of sweating. Sweating may be one of our weirdest biological functions, but it’s also one of our most vital and least understood. In The Joy of Sweat, Sarah Everts delves into its role in the body—and in human history. Why is sweat salty? Why do we sweat when stressed? Why do some people produce colorful sweat? And should you worry about Big Brother tracking the hundreds of molecules that leak out in your sweat—not just the stinky ones or alleged pheromones—but the ones that reveal secrets about your health and vices? Everts’s entertaining investigation takes readers around the world—from Moscow, where she participates in a dating event in which people sniff sweat in search of love, to New Jersey, where companies hire trained armpit sniffers to assess the efficacy of their anti-sweat products. In Finland, Everts explores the delights of the legendary smoke sauna and the purported health benefits of good sweat, while in the Netherlands she slips into the sauna theater scene, replete with costumes, special effects, and towel dancing. Along the way, Everts traces humanity’s long quest to control sweat, culminating in the multibillion-dollar industry for deodorants and antiperspirants. And she shows that while sweating can be annoying, our sophisticated temperature control strategy is one of humanity’s most powerful biological traits. Deeply researched and written with great zest, The Joy of Sweat is a fresh take on a gross but engrossing fact of human life.
