I presented an abstract at the  ACSM Annual Meeting for the first time this June. The morning of my poster session, as I walked through the giant room filled with research posters from labs all over the country (and even some international labs!), I was surprised to see a student already standing by my own. “I’ve been waiting for you,” they said. I hadn’t expected anyone to be even more excited than I was to talk about the project that I had been working on, but here they were. Throughout the rest of the poster session, I had the opportunity to speak with numerous students as well as some lab directors/PIs. What started out as something I had nervously anticipated for weeks turned into an enlightening and ultimately fun experience.

 

There are many benefits to presenting your research at a conference, one of the largest being the chance to connect with other researchers/clinicians within and outside of your discipline. When I started my PhD, I would hear my advisor and others in my lab talk about each paper we discussed with what seemed like an inherent familiarity with the authors and the work their lab was doing. I thought to myself, “how will I ever remember all of these details?” However, once I started attending conferences and meeting some of the individuals whose work I was reading, it suddenly became a lot easier. It’s an incredible opportunity to ask the questions you have or discuss your own research ideas with the scientists whose research formulated the basis for those ideas. Moreover, there are a ton of networking opportunities. During the poster session at the ACSM Annual Meeting, another student in my lab presented her research to a faculty member who was looking for a potential postdoctoral student.

Another critical component and huge benefit to presenting is gaining the skills to talk about your research to a variety of audiences. Being able to share your knowledge in a way that is both understandable and meaningful to a diverse group of scientists, clinicians and researchers as well as a lay audience is perhaps the most important skill for an impactful career in academia, research or industry. While you will put in a lot of work and maybe a little more stress than you’d like into preparing your presentation, the skills and opportunities (and maybe inspiration for your next project/dissertation!) that you gain as a result are worth it.

Want more information about presenting at the 2023 ACSM Annual Meeting in Denver, CO next year? Learn more here!

Emily F. Blake is a member of the ACSM Consumer Outreach Committee and a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research in the UMD Human Integrative Physiology Lab focuses on the role of sex hormones and reproductive aging in the relationship between inflammation and vascular function. When she isn’t in the lab, she likes to play soccer and hike with friends and hang out with her cats.

There is no doubt that childhood and adolescence are decisive periods to acquire healthy lifestyle behaviors, like being physically active and participating in a variety of sports. When youngsters acquire an active lifestyle, there is a greater probability they will maintain it throughout their lives. The Active Healthy Kids Global Alliance released the Global Matrix 4.0 on Oct. 24, 2022, which compared indicators of physical activity in children and adolescents from 57 countries on six continents. Globally, overall physical activity received a grade of “D,” indicating that we are succeeding with less than half of children and adolescents (27-33%). Thus, there is an urgent need to address strategies to increase physical activity levels in children and youth.

In general, children are more active than adults, and physical activity levels decline substantially during childhood and adolescence. This decrease in physical activity starts at very early ages (i.e., from the age of 5 years). Although boys of all ages spend more time being physically active than girls, they tend to have a similar declining trend in their physical activity. While the observed reduction in average levels of physical activity during childhood appears to be universal across populations, there is a general lack of understanding of the correlates associated with the decline.

In our study, published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise_®, we described longitudinal trends in physical activity in childhood and explored putative individual-level (fitness, BMI, motor coordination) and environmental-level (family socioeconomic status, school characteristics) correlates of these trends. The study was conducted among primary school children in Portugal and involved repeated measurements of children recruited into one of six overlapping age cohorts who were each followed for three years. Time spent in moderate to vigorous physical activity was assessed using accelerometers, and children were instructed to wear the devices for seven consecutive days at each measurement period.   

We found that both boys and girls experienced linear declines in moderate to vigorous physical activity with advancing age, and that boys were more active than girls at all ages. On average, boys engage in 17 more minutes of moderate to vigorous activity per day than girls. We also found that children who had higher musculoskeletal fitness or had a lower body mass index had a less steep decline in moderate to vigorous physical activity. However, contrary to our initial expectations, no significant link was found between family socioeconomic status and the physical activity decline. Yet, from the common environment (school characteristics), greater school playground dimensions predicted a steeper decline in physical activity.

The results of our study provide relevant information to be considered when designing and implementing strategies to attenuate declining levels of physical activity in childhood. We suggest that physical education and sports participation programs should emphasize the development of fundamental motor skills together with providing ample opportunities for fitness-enhancing physical activity. The finding that greater playground dimensions were associated with a steeper decline in physical activity is counterintuitive and requires further exploration. As with any observational study, it was impossible to control for the effects of unmeasured variables on the observed associations.  

Sara Pereira earned a Ph.D. in sports sciences and specializes in sport, genetics and motor behavior. She is an assistant professor at Lusófona University in Lisboa, Portugal, and invited professor in the faculty of sport at the University of Porto in Porto, Portugal. Her research focuses on youth growth, motor development and lifestyle behaviors. She relies on a holistic interpretation of human development to best understand the intertwined relationships between individual and environmental characteristics that shape growth, motor development and lifestyle behaviors.

Peter T. Katzmarzyk, Ph.D., is professor and associate executive director for population and public health sciences at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, where he holds the Marie Edana Corcoran Endowed Chair in Pediatric Obesity and Diabetes. His research program focuses on physical activity and obesity, with a special emphasis on pediatrics and ethnic health disparities. Dr. Katzmarzyk is an ACSM fellow, chair of the ACSM Evidence-based Practice Committee, member of the ACSM Board of Trustees and recipient of the ACSM Citation Award.

Viewpoints presented in SMB commentaries reflect opinions of the authors and do not necessarily represent ACSM positions or policies. Active Voice authors who have received financial or other considerations from a commercial entity associated with their topic must disclose such relationships at the time they accept an invitation to write for SMB.

So, you’ve had yourself a concussion. Or maybe a client or one of your athletes has. And now you’re wondering what exactly happened, medically speaking, and when you or your client will be healed up and able to get back in the swing of things.

Fortunately, ACSM’s Team Physician Consensus Conference (TPCC) has updated guidelines, published in Current Sports Medicine Reports, on this exact subject. Let’s explore:

First, we should define our terms. The TPCC guidelines focus on sport-related concussion, or “SRC,” so I’ll be considering that condition — rather than concussion more broadly — in this post. According to the experts, an SRC is actually a traumatic brain injury. It’s caused by physical forces affecting the brain, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly. So, a hefty bonk on the head could cause an SRC, but so could a blow to another part of the body with enough force behind it to also act on the head — say a quick directional change, like being on the receiving end of a particularly brutal or unlucky tackle in a football game.

But getting a diagnosis can be tricky. We don’t yet have reliable SRC biomarkers — though researchers are working on that — and the way physicians come to a conclusion about whether someone has had an SRC is by weighing a number of symptoms and factors, like neurological issues that develop suddenly and dissipate relatively quickly and a lack of other potential contributors like drugs, alcohol or spinal injury. Also note that you don’t have to have lost consciousness to have experienced an SRC, and your CT and MRI scans, if you get them, will likely look completely normal. Not exactly helpful.

But now your physician has ultimately diagnosed you with an SRC, and you’re wondering how long you’ll be experiencing symptoms, which up to this point might have consisted of headache, dizziness, confusion and feeling like you’re in a fog. You might also be anxious — understandably — and irritable, or you might be having trouble sleeping — or not sleeping. Lovely.

The good news is that the majority of adult athletes typically recover from SRC within two weeks. For children it can be a little longer, normally up to four weeks. If symptoms persist beyond that timeframe, you could say you’re experiencing “persisting symptoms after SRC,” which the TPCC physicians shorten to the initialism “PSaSRC.”

The reasons behind PSaSRC are complex, but some of the factors associated with a longer recovery include experiencing a higher number of initial symptoms, having a preexisting mood disorder such as anxiety or depression, or resting too long after the injury.

That last point is perhaps the most interesting. For some time, the conventional wisdom was to employ rather extreme rest, both physical and mental, after an SCR. And though there’s still value in spending the first 24-48 hours at rest to adequately heal and recover, whiling away more than a few days in bed or on the couch might actually be counterproductive. Speak with your doctor, of course, but the latest findings seem to indicate it’s best not to stay under strict rest for too long but instead, as the TPCC physicians put it, “gradually and progressively resume cognitive and physical activity.”

To sum things up: An SRC is a sport-related traumatic brain injury caused by direct or indirect forces on the head. SRCs can be difficult to diagnose, but if a physician determines you’ve experienced one, you can expect to be dealing with symptoms for about two weeks (four weeks for children). Any longer than that, and you’re — logically — experiencing persistent symptoms. Though there isn’t an easy way to determine who will have persistent symptoms and who won’t, a good proactive measure against them is to, with your doctor’s guidance, slowly return to activities of daily living rather than following the older model of strict rest, which may actually lengthen your recovery.

Good luck, and — cautiously and judiciously — get back out there.