Sport and Exercise on the Internet

Robert U. Newton Ph.D.

You would have to have been living in a cave for the past few years not to have some contact with the Internet. The media proliferates with news, good and bad, about the Internet and its integration with modern society. Love it, or hate it, it is here to stay and will undoubtedly have an increasing influence on our lives. What does it offer for the exercise and sport areas? Volumes, if you know where and how to look.

The Internet is considered by many to be a revolution, equal in significance to the invention of the printing press. The roots of the Internet go back to January 2, 1969, when a US Defence Department research agency started designing the technology that underlies the Internet today. Although the Internet grew rapidly through the next two decades it remained the domain of scientists, universities and a few of the large corporations. By 1992 there were around 15 million people in almost 70 countries using the Internet. It had turned into a global city, complete with public libraries, business offices, stores, art galleries, museums, and newspapers. There were places to chat, post messages, grab free computer files, ask questions, and meet people. It was great, but it was all text, a lot of text at that, and also a bit boring. Tim Berners-Lee, and fellow scientists at a high energy physics laboratory in Europe called CERN developed a way to easily exchange all sorts of media over the Internet - sound, text, pictures, even video. The World Wide Web (WWW) was born.

The Internet was still not quite hassle free until the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) developed a "web browser" which could consistently and elegantly display Web graphics, different styles and colours of text, and the basis of the Web, "hyperlinks". This was 1993, the turning point at which the Internet, through the medium of the Web, exploded in popularity and people from all walks of life started to connect and surf. As we approach the new millennium, the information available on the Web seems almost boundless. From the Mars mission to the Madonna music site, the amount of content on the Web is astounding and for those of us interested in exercise and sport, the resources available are nothing short of remarkable. Problem is how do we find it all?

A good place to start is the Australian Association of Exercise and Sport Science (AAESS) Web site as it has a large number of links to related web sites. To access, open the address http://www.aaess.com.au in your web browser.

1. Medline - This site provides free access to the Index Medicus Database for Health and Medical Research Papers. Medline is a very large catalogue of the contents of journals that cover fields such as health, medicine, physiology, biomechanics, and psychology among others. You can search on author names, words and phrases in the title and abstract. Medline will return you a list of the references that satisfy your search requirements many of which will have abstracts of the paper included. There is even the facility to order a full copy of the paper, though this has a cost attached.

2. Sport Information Resource Centre - Provides extensive information on sport as well as the ability to sign up for Sport Discus. Sport Discus is an electronic database that indexes publications in the sport and exercise fields. This site does however provide a vast array of links to sport related sites around the world and is a great place to start if you are searching for information on a particular sport.

3. American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) - The official web site for ACSM provides a lot of information about the association as well as policy statements, hot topics, conferences, and publications.

4. Biomechanics World Wide - A good starting place if your interest is biomechanics. There are links to equipment suppliers, reports of working parties, positions vacant, and biomechanics departments. Biomech-L is a discussion group dedicated to biomechanics and the archives of all the discussions since its inception can be searched and viewed.

5. The American Society of Exercise Physiologists - ASEP web site will be of interest to anyone working in exercise physiology. There are many resources at this site including an "on-line journal" called Journal of Exercise Physiology, which contains peer-reviewed scientific papers for you to view for free.

6. Altavista - A site at which you can search the entire WWW by specifying words or phrases. Altavista will return a list of all the web sites that contain some or all of those words. Altavista and sites like it are the front-ends to "search engines" which are computer programs designed to search a database of Web sites and return the results which match the criteria you specify. In general they will list them in order of relevance based on how often the words you entered are included in the web site.

7. DejaNews - Web site dedicated to finding and retrieving information contained in Internet Newsgroups. News is another application that uses the Internet in a similar way to email. People from all over the world post articles to particular newsgroups, something like a bulletin board. These articles can then be read by anyone connected to the Internet and replies posted back to the group. DejaNews allows you to search these millions of news article for any words you specify. DejaNews also has a specific sports area for finding related articles.

8. Web Wombat - Australian and New Zealand only search engine for web sites. If you want to find a site locally then this is the first one you should try.

9. Official Site of the 2000 Olympic Games - A very professional and informative web site dedicated to bringing you all the information for the 2000 Olympics.

10. Australian Sports Commission Website - Information on Australian sport with links to the AIS, national issues in Australian sport, and much more. Make sure you have a look at the "What's New and What's Hot" page for links to some great sites including SportNet, a national on-line network co-developed with Telstra. Also, visit the National Sport Information Centre, which offers many services for getting information about sport and exercise.

Good luck and have fun surfing the Web. With practice you will find the Internet a fantastic resource for exercise and sport.