Innovations to Address RAEs

Interventions such as age-ordered shirt numbering and corrective adjustments that account for birthday in timed events such as sprinting, may be effective at mitigating relative age effects (RAEs). Learn more about current research and new innovations to address RAEs in the SIRCuit.

Athlete Perspective – Social Media

While social media can have many positive uses for athletes, from interacting with fans to providing value for sponsors, engagement can also pose risks to performance. In today’s blog, Olympic curler Lisa Weagle provides insight into the steps she and her teammates used leading up to Pyeongchang to control the impact of social media on…

Athlete Perspective: How to manage social media during competition

SIRC’s Athlete Perspective series provides insight and recommendations on key issues from an athlete’s perspective. The collection of blogs and SIRCuit articles profiles Canada’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes and taps into their lived experience. While social media can have many positive uses for athletes, such as interacting with fans, creating a brand, and providing value…

RAE Impacts

The “relative age effect” (RAE) advantages relatively older individuals in an age group while disadvantaging the relatively youngest. This age inequality can have significant impacts on sport and educational performance, and long-term health and wellbeing. Learn more in the SIRCuit.

Mental Health & Eating Disorders

When athletes are struggling with mental health, sometimes offhand comments from coaches and teammates can have negative consequences. In today’s video, produced by the Canadian Olympic Committee for Bell Let’s Talk Day, diver Francois Imbeau-Dulac shares his struggles with an eating disorder and his courage to ask for help.

Values As A Road Map

“Values-based sport” is an approach that helps to establish an optimal environment that encourages the growth and development of athletes through sport. Explore how to use values as a road map to creating welcoming, safe, athlete-centred environments in the SIRCuit.

We Need to Talk about Mental Health

Life as a high-level athlete has its ups and downs. There is success and failure, stress, pressure, endless doubts, injuries, days where you are surrounded by people and others where you are completely by yourself. It’s a train of emotions, one after the other, almost simultaneously. It can be too much to process. In the…

Psychological Load

Research points to the impact of psychological stressors on performance. Whether emotional stress or high cognitive processing demands, “psychological load” must be considered by coaches and trainers to achieve peak performance. Learn more in this SIRCuit article.

Winter 2019 SIRCuit

The Winter SIRCuit is now available! This edition is issue-packed, providing evidence-based and experience-informed insight through a variety of timely and topical articles: Increase your commitment to improving sport in Canada through an article on values-based sport. Contemplate the role of policy and practice in maintaining hazing culture, supporting the inclusion of transgendered athletes, and…

Balancing Psychological Load: New Perspectives on Recovery

Current views on recovery Recent research by Nash and Sproule (2018) asked coaches for their views on recovery in training. While recovery was widely understood as crucially important, results revealed that few coaches think about psychological and cognitive recovery with the same depth and importance as the physical aspects of recovery. One reason for the…